Furc With Pidgin! Options

[Letalis Sonus]

I recently found furcIM, a GAIM plugin to use furc's whisper system with GAIM, but it was discontinued and after 3 years it is everything but compatible with Pidgin 2.5.x (GAIM was renamed to Pidgin due to legal issues with AOL).

So I took the source code, updated the whole thing a lil' bit and now i'm able to present PFurc!
The features are similar: adding/removing buddies, working buddy list with online check, IMing furres via furc's whisper system and handling of AFK status.
Additionally PFurc is able to de/encode UTF-8 used by Pidgin, so you'll be able to write and read special characters beyond the basic ASCII ones without any problems.
The plugin comes with a modified default smiley theme for compatibility with Furc's smileys, select it in Pidgin's settings or let it replace the furcadian smileys with generic, readable smileys and emotes by ticking the box in the account options.
To appear in other colors than the default red when IMing with friends you can use your color code, but it requires a small workaround: The furre jumps into a nonstandard dream on login and will jump to the previous dream on (proper) logout.
If you want to have your buddy's portraits to show up as their avatar icon, install the Furnarchy2 module PortGrab. It will save the needed information for PFurc when you look at them in Furcadia.

The plugin is available for Windows as NSIS .exe Installer and for Linux as Debian package for Debian systems like Ubuntu, RPM package for Red Hat based systems like Mandriva, and source code as .tar.gz.

For help, feedback or bug reports you can also reach me via my alt "Debug-Furre" which is more often online than my main alt.

Website:
http://pfurc.berlios.de/

RSS feed for new releases:
https://developer.berlios.de/export/rss_bsn...?group_id=10546

[Artex]

Do keep in mind that pFurc is a project started by Ghost Tiger last year, which is an iPhone/iPod Touch Furcadia client. Keeping the same name for your pidgin plugin may cause confusion among the users and if pFurc is to become a trademark or become legally bound to Ayluro (their company), you will be forced to rename yours just as GAIM was forced to be renamed.

As for socket issues in Windows, it might not be related, but is still an option: the "End of Line" in Windows is indicated by two characters: \r\n (CRLF - Carriage Return / Line Feed) while in Linux, it's natively \n (Line Feed). Furcadia separates commands the Linux way - with \n and if for some reason, your Windows implementation was to use \r\n at the end of each line, the \r would be counted as part of the command, which is something you don't want. Make sure the end-of-line is represented correctly here.

HTH

[Letalis Sonus]

hm, didn't know about Ghost Tiger's iPod client, everything Google spies out is my BerliOS page and in this forum it is more often referred as "iFurc" (which would fit better imo). if there will be any problems i'll rename it.

i have already tested if the problem has to do with the End of Line character, it didn't seemed to be the problem but i'll take a closer look at it again, thanks for the hint.

[Ghost Tiger]

"pFurc" is just an internal nickname we use to distinguish Furcadia for iPhone from Furcadia for Windows. It's not an official term we'll be using (nor is iFurc), and there are no plans to trademark either term. They're just nicknames. While I can't speak for DEP as they own a trademark for the term "Furcadia", Ayluro certainly doesn't care if you call your project "pFurc."

[Letalis Sonus]

k, thanks for clearing things up

i have found the problem, if i understand it correctly it was caused by the socket stuff because on UNIX systems you can use functions like read() and write() for sockets which is not possible on windows. now it is able to log in, but it crashes after parsing a few incoming packets from the furc server...

[Artex]

Winsock has the same functions, except they're called recv() and send(), they're treated differently than common file descriptors. Of course, I'm not sure how relevant it is in relation to Pidgin, but common C apps go that way..

[Letalis Sonus]

found the crash problem, glib itself was causing some troubles, after i replaced all sprintf(), malloc() and free() functions with the "improved" glib equivalents it worked.

i have now added the Windows port and fixed a small bug with pipes in names when doing the online check

[Ghost Tiger]

recv() and send() are available on UNIX as well. Winsock's functionality is based on BSD sockets, which are what most UNIX variants use. You should be able to adapt existing UNIX networking code for Windows with minimal effort, so long as it is coded correctly.

[Travis Nojo]

Pidgin keeps crashing still, and it was suspossibly fixed this update. Any clue to why it does this? I tried re-installing pidgin and pfurc, but still no avail.

[Letalis Sonus]

wow, now that's strange, it is indeed still crashing, but it works just fine with Wine...

EDiT: ok, i have found out where the evil piece of code is, now i just need to find a small workaround

Done! it shouldn't crash anymore, it happened if there are no buddies on the furc acc, no wonder i didn't noticed it with Linux or Wine...

[Travis Nojo]

wow, now that's strange, it is indeed still crashing, but it works just fine with Wine...

EDiT: ok, i have found out where the evil piece of code is, now i just need to find a small workaround

Done! it shouldn't crash anymore, it happened if there are no buddies on the furc acc, no wonder i didn't noticed it with Linux or Wine...

Thank you, works wonderfully, great job! I've been waiting for this to update for a long time. Looking forward to updates :P

[Letalis Sonus]

okay, v0.1.2 is out!
besides a bugfix concerning the HTML entity parsing it will now automatically replace all spaces in your username or other buddy's names with pipes.
a new feature of this version is the support of Furc's smileys, you can either use an extended and furc compatible version of the default theme that i bundled with it or you can let it replace all Furcadian smileys like #SA with generic smileys and emotes like ':)' and ':snicker:'

planned for v0.1.3: selecting of species, colors and gender

[Scurry]

ok, i downloaded pfurc-0.1.2-src.tar.gz, and when i run the ./configure command, it returns this
configure: error: cannot find install-sh or install.sh in "." "./.." "./../.."
i'm still new to linux, got a clue what i'm doing wrong?

[Letalis Sonus]

you didn't do anything wrong, it's my mistake (again...)
i didn't noticed that there were some files missing because i did an unlucky choice where to put the files, those few missing files were already available in the upper folder on my disk by another program's source code.
i have added the few files and replaced the archive, it should work now.

i never had to mess with autoconf etc before, sorry for the troubles

you'll need the development files of Pidgin to compile the plugin, just in case you didn't know. on Debian systems the packet should be called something like pidgin-dev, not sure about Red Hat based systems. if you're using a 32bit Debian system like Ubuntu you should try the Debian packet first.

[Letalis Sonus]

i'm done with the new version!
now it is possible to use color code, but that requires the furre to jump into another nonstandard dream to be invisible. as the furre will still appear in the list of present furres of the dream i added an option for changing the map ID (optional). this ID can have a value of 0-94, you can get the ID of the current dream with the `which command. during the logout the furre will be sent to the previous dream.
i have added 2 comboboxes so that you can overwrite the gender and species of the color code, but sadly i ran into a bug of the libpurple general portability issues (will be fixed with next release) and this feature is only available for Linux, on Windows you have to change it manually via the color code.

as i've succeeded in getting the status handling to work (desc changes if you go AFK, an optional away message will be attached) i did a small version jump to 0.2.0

i changed the build environment of the precompiled binaries to v2.2.1 to avoid further incompatibilities and added an RPM package for Red Hat based systems (converted with alien, tested with Mandriva)

[Letalis Sonus]

bump for v0.2.1
to quote the change log:

v0.2.1
- bugfix: UTF-8 characters with 4 bytes can cause segfaults
- added: comboboxes for gender and species for Windows
- added: Pounce's mass online check (optional, switchable on the fly)
- added: 60s timeout check (hopefully reduces freezes when server goes down)
- improved normalizing of names
- the smiley option is now switchable on the fly
- several code cleanups

as many have noticed the Pounce server isn't very reliable, yet, but as the classical check method can take ages to check all buddies if there are many buddies in the list you might prefer using it.
i'll take a look into what of the new features can be added for the next version like e.g. buddy-side AFK handling. that stuff hasn't been documented anywhere, yet, so i'll have to do some research on myself.

[Artex]

What do you need to know exactly about that? Maybe I can provide some info on that from past personal experience.

[Letalis Sonus]

nevermind, as it seems the afk info is encoded in the '<' command which bounds the whole thing to the current map, therefore i won't be able to use it. but who knows, maybe the Pounce server will be expanded with an afk status with the next furc update?

[Letalis Sonus]

0.2.2 is finished!
besides lots of bugfixes there are 3 things worth mentioning: 1. working offline messages for buddies in your list 2. the color settings were moved to a separate option window (-> "Edit Appearance"), you need to re-enter your color code and 3. 64bit binaries for Linux as i switched to an AMD64 system.
i've got the feeling that i messed something up, but it seems to work just fine... nevermind

v0.2.2
- bugfix: some chars appear screwed in Pounce because Pounce does not support
numeric XML entites; use aliases if possible
- bugfix: Pidgin automatically escapes some chars, like '&' to "&amp;" which
is not supported by Furc
- bugifx: Pidgin crashes when logging out and in again
- bugfix: check socket before sending "goback" at logout when workaround is
used (hopefully reduces freezes when server goes down)
- bugfix: names are not normalized when IMing a buddy who is not in the list
- added: offline messages
- color settings were moved to a separate window ("Edit Appearance") to free
room in the account config window for new features

i'm taking part in a local MUN next week, and as the people of the Tech Staff have the fewest to do i've got plenty of time to program on my laptop. the next version might come with a huge surprise, let's see how things work out...

[Artex]

It doesn't mean Linux will only have 64bit executables now, does it?