A courious reader will ask me how are various open source programs developments going and if I've done anything new recently. Don't believe such couriosity, dear friends, because a one who's really interested is usually subscribed to an appropriate mailing list, and updates his local version from CVS daily. This is exactly what a really courious reader does. Anyway, a small report on my recent programming activities goes below.

The recent version of centericq appeared to be very stable. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised with latest comments on it at freshmeat. Check out this and this ones. Though it's always nice to hear such words.

One guy decided to translate centericq into Dutch. What do you think he's done? He translated all the messages right inside the C++ source, so I was shocked a little :) In case you still don't know how GNU programs localization is usually done, please consult the documentation which can be accessed just with typing "info gettext" in the command line. Also there is an online version in HTML format here.

The situation with the article about centericq for the "Hacker" magazine became clearer. Its chief editor Sergey Pokrovsky told me it wasn't actual anymore since the program description had been published in the recent issue within the review of ICQ client software for Linux. Good people had scanned it for me and sent with e-mail. Well, you can imagine the situation with Russian magazines in Romania :) Unfortunatelly the guys from the magazine didn't find it a good idea to talk with the author to find out about new features and to ask which version was the recent. So we have the article covering centericq 3.35.22 which is really old. I would even say it's a historical one. It hasn't got support for Yahoo! and MSN protocols and the version of ICQ protocol it uses is too old and broken. But in general I liked the review, for it's written really well. Now my centericq article automatically goes to the "Publications" section with the "unpublished" note. But if any kind of an edition is interested, I can propose an updated version covering the new supported protocols along with the external actions feature which is already implemented, and the next version will have it for sure. The feature is nice for you can use it to setup the elizatalk bot to make fun with your friends. And the next version if planned to be released next week, hopefully.

Since we're already talking about new features in centericq, I'll tell about one more useful thingie implemented recently. Though libicq2000 had been having support for sending SMSes, it wasn't really complete. The point is that Mirabilis provides two ways of sending SMSes: through their server and using e-mail gateways of mobile operators. The list of the ones supported this way can be found here. The mechanism itself looks the following way: if through-server delivery fails, but an appropriate gateway exists, then the icq server replies with two e-mail addresses, "from" and "to" respectively. The client now has to send the SMS as an e-mail message with the "from" and "to" substituted. Libicq2000 used to ignore such replies since there was no mechanism to send e-mails. But got involved into this issue yours sincerely volunteered to fill the gap. As a result I wrote a C++ class which implements SMTP protocol. The class also meets the library ideology perfectly. Frankly speaking, recently it became more complicated so it wouldn't be that clear without a help of its author, Barnaby Gray. Anyhow, everyone who's interested in the feature should really enjoy the next version of centericq.