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This weekend I’ve been finding out about the power of Gobby. Gobby is one of those things that ticks all the buzzword boxes (collaborative, distributed, real-time, cross-platform) but I’ve never been in a situation where I needed to use it. Until this weekend.

I’d installed and played with Gobby before, but only sufficient to show that it worked and only over my LAN. This weekend I wanted to write some documents from scratch with some friends. We could have used a wiki to do this – I love wikis – but they only cope with one person editing a page at a time. If more than one person does edit a page, there’s a conflict which usually means resolving it manually. Also, at this point in time we wanted to keep the documentation private.

Having apt-got Gobby, I ran it. I was going to host the session, so I hit the “Create session” button. I had an option to change my username, colour (changed made by each user are show in a different colour) or the port number, but the only thing I needed to do was enter a password for the session.

Because I wanted people to connect to this session from the Internet, I had to forward the port from my firewall to the system running the Gobby session. One thing that might be cool is if there was a server version that could host sessions without needing a GUI and would automatically save documents every so often. However, I can totally understand why they have written the software in the way they have – everyone’s client can also host a session so no further software is needed.

Joining a session is just as easy as creating one – click the “Join Session” button, specify a host (and port if different from the default) and you are prompted for a password when you connect, assuming one has been set for the session.

Once in, there is a simple three pane view. The main pane is the text editor. The text editor supports all the standard features; tabs, copy, paste, a range of syntax highlighting, line numbers. At the bottom of the screen is a simple IRC-like chat system. This allows users to talk about the documents they are editing without having to comment the document itself. The right-hand panel shows the users that are currently connected to the system and the colours that represent their edits. Users “subscribe” to any of the available documents in order to see the changes being made. I guess not subscribing to irrelevant documents saves on bandwidth.

So having created a session with literally two mouse clicks and forwarded the port on my firewall, I then just let my friends know the password and they too connected. Edits in a document are shown in near real-time, with multiple users able to edit the same document at the same time – their typing appears simultaneously in different places. If a user types really fast then changes can start to be buffered, but this wasn’t really an issue. The only time this could affect things is if someone pasted a load of text in. We did have a moment of confusion when someone deleted a line that someone else was still editing, but apart from that there were no problems.

Each user can save documents to their own storage space, and anyone can create a new document within the session. New documents appear as a new tab, ready for people to subscribe to.

Gobby has just reached version 0.3.0rc3, although we were using the versions in Debian Etch and Ubuntu Breezy: 0.2.2. Gobby is also cross-platform, with Windows and Mac ports available. They also have some pretty screenshots. There is an iritating bug in the version in Etch at the moment where, for a handful of people, it crashes when reading its own config file. This has been fixed upstream though.

Update: Alan Pope informs me that there is a server version of Gobby (as I suggested above) called Sobby. It’s a new development, available in source code form only at the moment – it’s not packaged in Debian or Ubuntu yet.

My LUG Radio t-shirt from nerd.ws arrived a few weeks ago now, but here’s a picture of me in it anyway:

It’s survived a few washes without any apparent damage to the logo so all seems good. I’ve made two further suggestions for T-shirts to sparkes so far:

It *is* a wiki

with the monospace font and asterisks being important and, in light of the Gatso deployment along motorways and major A-roads, the topical:

Terrorists use B-roads

I recently made a tweak to bashpodder and mailed it back to linc. He at least thought enough of it to add it to the user contributions page. The tweak changes bashpodder to work in a feed based directory structure, rather than a date based one. What irritated me about the standard method was that it created empty directories when there were no new releases in your feeds and that it didn’t collate released for each program in the same place. So I have to have an idea of when the program was released in order to find the release I want to listen to.

I understand that the empty directories thing was fixed by other user contributed patches, but the directory structure still niggled, so I tweaked away. The resulting script is a whole 4 lines shorter than the proper version too! I also understand that podcasting is essentially ephemeral and that most people are just generally expected to want “new sounds” to listen to. Listening to old stuff again isn’t interesting for most people, but I enjoy doing so during my lunch breaks. Even with my patch I can still check the log to find if new releases have been downloaded. (I generally know this anyway, given the feeds to which I subscribe. My MP3 player is too small just to copy stuff onto willy-nilly. Only 128MB )

Oh, and the Chris Moyles podcast is sampled at a 56kbps bitrate and my MP3 player won’t play that back. So I have to convert it via LAME in order to play it. lame --mp3input -b 64 seems to do the trick.

I’ve also found out, care of Neil “blueGremlin” Ferguson that you can capture streaming Real Media files for later play back using mplayer -dumpfile outputfilename.rm -dumpstream rtsp://host/file.rm. This is especially useful if you have people wanting to use these files, for example in education, but a corporate firewall blocks the RTSP protocol. It does mean doing the dumping from outside of work, which isn’t exactly good for the work/life balance.

You may remember some time ago that I set up http://rattle.tonywhitmore.co.uk using virtual hosting under Apache. At the time I said more virtual hosts would be forthcoming, and I’ve finally got round to doing it.

So there are now http://blog.tonywhitmore.co.uk, http://wiki.tonywhitmore.co.uk and http://webcam.tonywhitmore.co.uk. These are now all linked in from the navigation bar at the top. At the same time I’ve added a redirect in from the old static front page to this blog, so this is now effectively the front page of the site. It seemed to make more sense than having a static page linking to the blog and I would have done it sooner. However the “www” site is hosted by my ISP whilst the other subdomains are all hosted at home. However, the ISP space doesn’t support any scripting languages so I had to find a way to either embed the blog contents on that page or redirect. In the end, an .htaccess with a couple of RedirectMatches has done the job. Some of the older static content is still within the “www” tree, such as the project pages (now linked from the navigation bar at the top), mainly so that people who arrive here via search engines can still find the content. It doesn’t change very much so it might as well stay where it is for now.