This week I’ve had a bunch of problems I haven’t finished solving. So instead of writing a handful of walkthroughs, I thought I’d write about all these issues.

For years now I’ve wanted to set up my own chat server so you can message me at [email protected] instead of through Google, Facebook or any of the other IM services. Recently I also found a great looking framework for accessing your XMPP server from a website called Speeqe, and I’d like to give that a try as well. Since I just got a hand-me-down desktop machine, I thought I’d also try my hand at OpenSolaris. It has a futuristic package management system called IPS, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any XMPP server available through the official Sun package repositories or any of the community managed repos. So while IPS is the the most modern package system for OpenSolaris and I’d like to use it exclusively, that doesn’t seem like an option.

The options I haven’t tried are to build from the official source, use old SVR4 packages, or use a weird source based system called a consolidation. Sun maintains one consolidation called Sun Freeware which contains the trusty ejabberd. But unlike the source based package management systems I’ve used, you don’t get the option of just installing the package you want plus dependencies. So at some point I’m going to have to build a ridiculous number of projects just to get the one I want. I’ll give this vaguely official way a shot first before I try anything else.

I’m also trying to get back up to speed with the Open Stack standards I love playing with. So I put some time into updating my webfinger toolkit to work with what’s live at google right now. I’ve got it working, but I discovered a little nit about how XML namespaces handle unprefixed attributes that surprise. I’m investigating further, but it worries me for the compatibility of XRD parsing implementations. But once I get that clarified, I’ll be starting on a prototype of a XRD provisioning service.

While I was getting that webfinger project working, it occurred to me that I should be testing my code against Ruby 1.9 by now so I can post my projects in Is It Ruby 1.9?. So I gave multiruby a try, then played with rvm, but couldn’t convince 1.9 to install rubygems. Ruby says it’s got issues finding the _rb_Digest_MD5_Finish symbol in digest/md5.bundle, but it may as well be speaking Hungarian for all that means to me. After giving up, I installed the macports ruby19 package and it works flawlessly. I did manage to run nm on the bundle in both the broken and the working installs but the symbol tables look the same. One lead I haven’t followed up on is that rvm is using ruby-1.9.1-p378 while macports uses ruby-1.9.1-p376. At some point I’ll be comparing the build process used by rvm to the macport to see if I can divine anything else.