[clue-tech] CLUE jabber server?

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 12-14 20:55, David L. Anselmi wrote:
> Jeff Cann wrote:
> >After last night's DTC presentation, I think it would be fun to setup a 
> >jabber service on the CLUE server.  Would CLUBies want to use it?
> 
> Nope, not at all.
> 
> Let's see... so it looks like an IM server.  And I guess that's 
> different than IRC.  I tried IRC once and it didn't seem terribly 
> useful.  I don't see that IM would be any better.
> 
> Now I know that I'm the Luddite in the group, and getting old fast.  So 
> can anyone give me a specific, detailed example of how IM (or IRC) make 
> your lives better?  Or is it just a "my friends use it so that's the 
> easy way to reach them" thing (s/friends/co-workers/).

I can tell you that once you have it, it's irritating when someone at work
does not use it. Maybe I'm a bit type A when it comes to things like that.
It's nice to be able to ping someone with a quick question or to see if they
are there for a phone call if in co-located office. I like the synchronous
aspect of the communication. Email is more asynchronous, even though some
people try to force things onto it like the out-of-office auto-reply that
really belongs in a more synchronous medium, IMHO. After using IM, email
is to IM what snail mail is to email.

At the last place I was at, it was actually highly recommended that all
people used AIM, and they maintained a buddy list of AIM to import on a
network drive.  

I will say that if I'm planning on diving into deep coding where I want
minimal interruptions, I'll log out. But then I'll also close Outlook, too,
and even unplug phone in some cases.

Of course, like anything else, it's a tool. It can be abused and can be a
big distraction. 


Now, for IRC: I will say this was great - again at the last place. We
conducted a few staff meetings this way. It was especially helpful since one
of our staff was deaf. If we met in person, we'd have to a) drop everything
else we were doing for 1+ hours and b) bring a way to communicate with her,
usually a computer and type out the key points of conversation. With IRC,
she could keep up. We hosted the IRC server in our LAN, so security was not
an issue. Extra bonus: no meeting notes to type up. Of course, when first
getting used to it, we did have some goofing off time booting others off
(first to join a channel was sysop in our set-up) the channel at random. 

If you host your own jabber server, you get IRC-like functionality, I think,
in that you can jump into "rooms". Of course, you can use the IRC transport,
IIRC. It's been since 2002 since I've used Jabber heavily, though.


-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at comcast.net  
Greasemonkey Amazon scripts for Colorado libraries: 
http://userscripts.org/people/2388
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