Now… I know I’m a bit obsessed by this arguments but I was quite unhappy with ImVT. Having become aware of the work to reach a minimal stable state with ImVT I realized I don’t have enough time. I’d like to write a library that handles only issues terminal related (interpret signals, escape/control sequences, …) allowing you to avoid to use a GUI (Gnome VTE forces you to have a gui for your terminal emulator) and to work with a simplified interface to push input and read processed output in some friendly way (markup? XML/HTML?). I’d like to but… now I can’t (and I don’t know if I were able to!).
So the idea I’ve done this new plugin, less versatile but a little bit more robust and far far away easier to write! The final result is a kind of telnet via IM. If you’re unsatisfied with ImVT take a look to ImRA and please leave a feedback!

a small variant of the first method to detect invisible buddies in Google Talk.


The first method consisted in starting a chat with the buddy we assumed invisible. If we got the message “mybuddy@gmail.com is offline and can’t receive messages right now.” then the buddy was offline but if didn’t appear any message then we could determine that our buddy was really invisible.


Now this bug has been fixed by Google but…


Let’s try to invite the invisible buddy in a group chat and see what happens…


In Pidgin this is quite easy: right click on the offline (invisible) buddy and click on “Start a chat”. This will start a group chat if the buddy is invisible.


Obviously this bug will have a short life and the method it’s not stealth (and difficult to apply to all buddies but not impossible) but for now…