This new Guinness ad is simply breathtaking. Enjoy it.

Living outside the US feels unfavorable when it comes to movie release dates, availability of international TV programs and more often than not new gadgets and software releases.

When amazon announced the international availability of it’s much acclaimed ebook reader platform, the amazon kindle, I immediately ordered one.

A couple of weeks later I’m deeply satisfied with the entire experience, from purchasing, via delivery, through setup and everyday use. The buying process, as expected when purchasing from the world’s largest online retailer, worked seamlessly. A couple of days later the kindle shipped.

First surprise: The kindle came fully pre-configured. Absolutely zero setup required. I didn’t even have to link it to my amazon account as all has been done for me back in the States. I literally had to unpack and switch it on and could immediately start reading. So even though amazon ships thousands of devices each day, they take the extra investment of setting up their customers account prior to sending the devices out. This is simply fantastic!

Second surprise: The kindle comes with built-in, international wireless connectivity. It does not leverage local WLANs, instead amazon has contracted with mobile carriers world-wide to allow the kindle to sync almost everywhere. No extra contract required. No SIM-card required. It just works.

Whether you’re in an area with 3G mobile network coverage or just EDGE, the kindle syncs seamlessly. When I went from Germany to The Netherlands for eComm Europe, I was almost expecting the syncing to stop working. But it didn’t. I had to do nothing, the kindle just received my daily newspaper while I stayed there as it does every night back in Germany.

I love to get the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, the “Handelsblatt” and “Wirtschaftswoche”, popular German daily newspapers and magazines, even before they are available in print.

But the kindle really plays out its strength for me when it comes to instantaneously getting books that I urgently need.

For example I recently did a series of blog posts for what’s now become my home blog on Google Wave. I’m also working on integrating real-time message exchange into my new startup’s platform. Therefore I needed to deep dive into the XMPP protocol. I could have searched the web for scattered parts of the complete picture each and everywhere. I would have done so in the past.

With the kindle it took three mouse clicks and O’Reilly’s XMPP: The Definitive Guide was ready to be read.

It’s difficult to describe but it’s just such an ultra-pleasent overall experience. Go to the amazon kindle store. Enter your search terms. Click the “Buy now with 1-Click” button and seconds later see the little sync wheel spin on your kindle.

I have, since then, purchased some 30 books. Fiction, non-fiction, business literature and stuff I always wanted to read but never wanted to wait some 10 days for international delivery.

Personally, I prefer the reading experience on my kindle over reading a traditional book.

It’s outstanding ink display doesn’t tire your eyes, you can put it on a flat surface and the pages never shut. It also always has the exact same weight even if you’re reading a 1000+ page book!

For technical publications full text search and bookmarks are just invaluable features.

Last but not least I love to have all my books with me while I’m traveling without having to carry an additional bag.

If you’re into English books, you seriously might want to consider giving amazon kindle a try.

Ever since Google presented Wave – a collaboration and communication platform – to the world during Google I/O 2009, the Internet has been a buzz with all things Google Wave.

As with every new technology, controversial use case discussions quickly dominated the technology and geek blogosphere.

Google Wave is constantly evolving. Before we start: To stay in touch I kindly ask you to follow me on Twitter (@24z).

One of the key aspects of Google Wave is its federation architecture. Much as email is distributed across hundreds of thousands of distributed servers, implementing standards as POP3, SMTP and IMAP, Google Wave servers are designed from the ground up to support federation, too.

Not only does this allow third parties, including open source initiatives, to come up with their very own implementation of Google Wave servers, it also facilitates (corporate) security, scalability, innovation and, I’m sure sometime soon, hosted offerings.

Given that federation is such a key aspect of Google Wave, it comes as no surprise, that a recent article I’ve published over at The Next Web unveiling Google’s plans to open their developer sandbox environment, quickly ended up on Techmeme’s front page.

This blog post covers my journey in getting federation between my server and the Google Wave developer sandbox to work.

It’s been a tough ride.

I’m by far not an expert on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, yet, and without the tremendous amount of support from the wave-protocol discussion group, I’d likely have failed big time.

Many aspects of Wave federation are still very beta – some folks on the wave-protocol list suggested they are even pre-alpha – so details of my findings are guessings and assumptions. Feel free to correct me where I’m wrong.

I anyway hope, this contributes a bit to the passionate Google Wave scene and hope to hear back from you.

What does “federating to sandbox works” mean?

When Google introduced Wave, invites where given to the 4000+ Google I/O attendees and in a second roll-out phase to more developers. Those invites allowed users to use the Google Wave infrastructure at http://www.wavesandbox.com. Usernames for this so called Wave sandbox environment are <your alias here>@wavesandbox.com.

Later this year a second environment, the Google Wave preview, invited 100.000+ additional accounts. This environment is at http://www.googlewave.com and users are <your alias here>@googlewave.com.

The Wave sandbox and the preview environment are two totally separate infrastructures with no bridge between the two. As of this writing, you can federate with sandbox only. googlewave.com has not been opened for federation, yet.

Successfully setting up federation at the time of this writing means, that you

• run your own Google Wave server, very likely based on the FedOne reference implementation provided as open source by Google
• run the command line client included in Google’s open source package
• have your FedOne server connect securely to the Wave sandbox environment
• are able to create Waves either via the GWT based web user interface for the Wave sandbox or through the command line client for your own server, add a participant from the respective other environment  and see these Waves on both ends
• see live typing (character-by-character) when modifying a Wave on Wave sandbox

A typical sessions will look like this, click the image to enlarge:

(Note: The image has been assembled in Photoshop to show you both, the GWT based Wave sandbox client and the FedOne command line client. The session, however, is a real-world federated session.)

Required reading before you start

Though you very likely read all of the below more than once, I’d like to point you to my list of required reading for the sake of completeness:

• The federation announcement on the Google Wave Developer Blog
• Instructions how to install your own copy of the FedOne Google Prototype Wave Server (Part I)
• Instructions how to configure FedOne for federation (Part II)
• Everything about obtaining and configuring certificates
• Optional: The console client how-to

I highly encourage to print out all of the above and thoroughly go through it while you’re away from the distractions of your desktop. You will likely revisit the documents time and again anyway, but it helped me a lot to take a break and give them 100% of my attention.

You should also revisit the pages frequently, as they constantly undergo changes influenced by community feedback. As an example the wiki article on certificates has been enhanced while I’ve been working on this post, making many aspects more clear as in the initial version.

My setup

Theoretically federation should work on Windows and any flavor of Unix/Linux, including Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). I got it working on:

• a Rackspace provided cloud server with the hostname wave
• running Debian 5.0 (run cat /etc/debian_version if you’re unsure)
• using DynDNS Zone Level Services
• with certificates created by using the free StartSSL service

Part I: Installing the basics,  getting FedOne up and running

The installation instructions provided by Google are actually quite accurate. I had no trouble getting this part done. I added two steps which have not been on Google’s wiki page though: Turning off Openfire’s pubsub service and the group chat features.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• As described in “My Setup” above I’ve used a cloud server to set up federation. Most cloud servers come with a static IP address. To get federation working it seems essential that you’ve got access to a DNS server in order to set up the correct records that point to your server. I’ll go into more details later. For now it’s only important that you’ve got at least a domain pointing to your server. In my case it’s wave24z.com and the DNS A record points straight to my cloud servers IP. Wherever you read wave24z.com in the following paragraphs, you’ve got to substitute with your own domain name.
• ssh into your server as root
  ssh root@wave24z.com
• Verify that the host is named wave by submitting
  hostname
• Verify that you’re running Debian 5.0 by submitting
  cat /etc/debian_version
• To update the package list, run
  apt-get update
• There has been quite some discussion on the wave-protocol list whether Sun’s Java SDK or the Open Java SDK should be used. Some group members pointed out potential incompatibility issues with certificates issued by CAcert and Sun’s Java SDK. I do not use CAcert and cannot personally confirm this. As Google recommends using Sun’s Java SDK go ahead and install it by running 
  apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-fonts
• Confirm that you’re running at least Java 1.6.0_12 by running
  java -version
• If another version of Java is active, switch to the 1.6.0_12 one by running
  update-alternatives –config java
• Install Mercurial SCM, the source code control management tool required to grab FedOne later
  apt-get install mercurial
• Install Apache Ant, the build tool required to build the wave-protocol bits later
  apt-get install ant
• To simplify troubleshooting later, I recommend to install dnsutils, which will give you the dig command
  apt-get install dnsutils
• Grab a copy of Openfire, Ignite Realtime’s free XMPP server by running
  wget  http://www.igniterealtime.org/downloadServlet?filename=openfire/openfire_3.6.4_all.deb
• Install Openfire
  sudo dpkg -i openfire_3.6.4_all.deb
• Next launch the web based Openfire installer by opening http://<yourdomain>:9090 in your favorite browser (I’m using Safari 4.0.3)
• The wizard guides you through all the required steps. Keep with the defaults. That said:
  – for Server Settings > Domain enter your domain name, in my case wave24z.com, keep the Admin Console and Secure Admin Console ports (9090 and 9091 respectively)
  - for Database Settings select Embedded Database
  - for Profile Settings keep Default
  - for Administrator Account enter your email address and select a password
• Once the wizard has completed setting up Openfire, you have to restart the Openfire server. If you forget to do so, you will not be able to log in. On the command line run
  sudo /etc/init.d/openfire restart
• Point your browser to http://<yourdomain>:9090 and log in. For the username use admin and not your email address. Enter the password you’ve chosen during setup. Trying to log in with your email address as the username will fail. (This turned me nuts, so I thought I emphasize it here. The initial version of Google’s wiki did not have the bold note on using admin instead of your email address.. .)
• Once logged in, you’ve got to modify some settings:
  – In Server Settings > External Components > Service Enabled select Enabled keep 5275 for Port and enter a Default shared secret. This can be an arbitrary string.
  – Further down in Allowed to Connect select Whitelist in Subdomain enter wave and in Shared secret enter another arbitrary string. I’ve used the exact same secret for both (Default shared secret and Shared secret for the subdomain), but I’m not sure whether this is required.
  – In Server Settings > Security Settings > Server Connection Security select Custom and make sure that Available is active for Server Dialback and Optional is selected for TLS method. Also check Accept self-signed certificates. Hit Save Settings. Note: The radio button might jump back to Optional. Don’t worry. This is ok.
  – In Server Settings > Compression Settings > Server Compression Policy select Available.
  – In Server Settings > File Transfer Settings select Disabled.
  – In Server Settings > Registration & Login select Disabled for the top three options, Inband Account Registration, Change Password and Anonymous Login.
  - In Server Settings > Logs enable debug logging by selecting Enabled on the Debug tab.
  – In Users/Groups > Users create a new user. Give it a simple one-word username. I chose ralf. I’m not 100% sure whether creating a user is required to have federation working. It’s just what I did and I thought I let you know.
  - In Server Manager > System Properties scroll to the bottom, enter xmpp.pubsub.enabled into the Property Name field and false for the Property Value field. Hit Save Property. This turns off Openfire’s pubusb service which is known to interfere with how FedOne discovers XMPP items.
  - In Group Chat / Group Chat Settings delete the conference domain.
• Next grab the wave-protocol source code, which includes the FedOne Prototype Wave server and the command line client
  hg clone https://wave-protocol.googlecode.com/hg/ wave-protocol
• Build the project
  cd wave-protocol
  ant
• The build should take approx. 45 seconds. If you’re seeing some warnings while building that’s okay. If the build fails stating something about compliance and Java version, make sure that your system is using the version of Java installed at the very beginning. If not, change it via
  update-alternatives –config java
  and making the appropriate selection.

  
  

  apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-fontsCongratulations! You’ve successfully mastered the first part.

You might also want to modify your /etc/hosts file and add wave.wave24z.com to it. I’m not sure whether it’s required, but I did so and it works just fine. Here’s my hosts file:

127.0.0.1	localhost localhost.localdomain
174.143.152.55	wave
174.143.152.55	wave.wave24z.com

Congratulations! You’ve successfully mastered the first part.

These instructions are actually more complex than the process itself. The entire setup only takes between 10 – 15 minutes of your time, depending mostly on the bandwidth for downloading the bits and your server’s processing power.

Part II: Domain Name System (DNS) setup

The federation wiki article goes into a great amount of detail as to how important the correct DNS setup is and why it matters. While theoretically FedOne should fall back to alternative mechanisms if the lookups defined by the XMPP standard fail, I could not get federation to work without setting up the correct SRV records.

The exact way to set up DNS records depends much on the system you’re using. I’ve decided to use DynDNS for all my DNS needs long time ago and am pretty happy with it. It’s reliable, propagates fast and by taking away DNS services from my cloud servers, I have a clear line for separation of concern which makes troubleshooting a lot easier.

This is what I’ve configured via DynDNS Zone Level Services:

Please note that I’ve created A records – these are “regular” DNS records as they get created when you’re registering a domain with your service provider – not only for the main domain but also for the subdomains wave.wave24z.com and pubsub.wave24z.com. I’m not sure whether the pubsub subdomain is a requirement.  It’s not mentioned in Google’s wiki. I just recognized error message in FedOne’s console log pointing to problems finding pubsub.wave24z.com so I thought it might not hurt. Turning Openfire’s pubsub services off as indicated above, should render adding the pubsub subdomain obsolete.

The MX records are there to allow emails to be send to addresses @wave24z.com. DynDNS offers mail forwarding for each domain operated via their dynamic DNS servers, so I don’t have to run an SMTP daemon on my cloud server. The steps required on your side might vary.

You should at least make sure that you can receive email at webmaster@<yourdomain>. This address is used by StartSSL to verify you’re the owner of your domain, when we’re going to create certificates later.

The last two entries are the SRV records which allow other Wave servers to discover the address and port FedOne is running on. Please note that I’ve configured them for both, the main wave24z.com and for the subdomain wave.wave24z.com. Essentially these records tell XMPP servers looking for the XMPP services running on _xmpp-server._tcp.wave24z.com that the service is available on port 5269 at wave24z.com.

Once you’ve configured DNS settings and let them propagate, you should verify that they resolve correctly by submitting

dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.wave24z.com

and

dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.wave.wave24z.com

on the command line. If everything is fine, you should see something similar to:

You might want to make sure that you can ping wavesandbox.com from your host. Should you try to

dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.wavesandbox.com

and don’t get a result, don’t worry, this is intended by design! The process is as follows:

• FedOne initiates disco request for wavesandbox.com
• Openfire tries to look up the SRV record for _xmpp-server._tcp.wavesandbox.com and fails, as we do when trying to dig it
• Openfire falls back to the A record for wavesandbox.com, which succeeds, but the server there listening on the standard port (5269) fails the disco request, thus printing a <remote-server-not-found xmlns=”urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas”/> to the console
• FedOne falls back to the JabberID wave.wavesandbox.com and initiates another disco request
• Openfire looks up the SRV record for _xmpp-server._tcp.wave.wavesandbox.com and should succeed, thus initiating the connection
• XMPP server dialback negotiation starts (this will soon  be TLS) and the connection should succeed
• FedOne starts talking to wave.wavesandbox.com

(Thanks to Google’s Jochen Bekmann for clarifying this part.)

So running

dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.wave.wavesandbox.com

on your server should return a similar result to the one I’m getting on mine:

Once you’ve mastered DNS configuration, the next step is to create certificates and modify FedOne’s configuration files.

Part III: Welcome in certificate hell

Next to the correct DNS setup, certificates seem to be the second most important part of getting federation to work. Shortly after the announcement to open up the sandbox environment, the instructions given on the certificate wiki page have not been all that clear and the wave-protocol list suggest that many of us had severe problems getting the correct certificate setup done.

It has been revised since and now is way better and more precise. While I encourage you to first read through the instructions there, I highlight some of my findings and hope it helps.

Besides the sandbox environment Google has been operating two other environments for developers to test connections before: initech-corp.com and acmewave.com. You will not be able to ping initech-corp.com nor acmewave.com.

However, doing a

dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.initech-corp.com or a dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.acmewave.com

will reveal they do exist! The FedOne source code currently available in the repository comes with the initech-corp.com Wave server set up as a default ping target, so don’t worry when you see your FedOne server trying to contact initech-corp.com in your server logs. We’ll come to that later.

As to the certificates it is important to understand that

• initech-corp.com accepts self-signed certificates,
• acmewave.com only accepts CA-issued certificates,
• wavesandbox.com only accepts CA-issued certificates

We are planning to federate with the sandbox environment, so next we are going to create CA-issued certificates. Here is how:

Change to your wave-protocol directory and create the make-csr.sh script:

#!/bin/bash                                                                       

NAME=$1

if [ "$NAME" == '' ]
then
  echo "$0 " 1>&2
  exit 1
fi
openssl genrsa 2048 | openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -nocrypt -out $NAME.key
openssl req -new -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key $NAME.key -out $NAME.csr

StartSSL, the free service I’ve used to create my certificates does not accept 1024 bit long signing requests, so I’ve slightly changed the script provided by Google to generate a 2048 bit CSR.

Make the script executable:

chmod +x make-csr.sh

and run it as

./make-csr.sh wave24z.com

Now, leave everything blank (hitting Enter all the time) except the Common Name. For the common name provide wave.<yourdomain>. Make sure you’re entering the wave subdomain and not just your main domain!

Next head over to StartSSL. Their website looks and feels a bit 1980-ish and it did not work for me in Safari. I ended up using Firefox 3.5.4 which worked just fine.

On the StartSSL website

• select Sign-up and sign up
• StartSSL installs a certificate into your browser, so if you subsequently visit their website, you can log back in by clicking Authenticate
• select Validation Wizard > Domain Name Validation
• enter your domain name, for me this was wave24z
• StartSSL is going to send a verification code to you via email in order to make sure, that you’re the owner of the domain. That’s why you do need to have access to emails sent to postmaster/hostmaster/webmaster or dns-admin at your domain. Select the appropriate option, hit Continue and wait for the verification code to show up in your inbox
• paste the verification code into the text field and finish the process

Once you’re domain has been verified continue and create the certificate:

• select Certificate Wizard
• chose XMPP (Jabber) SSL/TLS Certificate
  During my first attempts I’ve chosen Web Server SSL/TLS Certificate and while I’m not exactly aware of the differences between the both options, only the XMPP certificate worked for me.
• skip the Generate Private Key step by hitting Skip. You will instead use the Certificate Signing Request created before.
• go back to your wave server console, print out the contents of the CSR
  cat wave24z.com.csr
  and paste them into the text field at StartSSL
• for the subdomain enter wave
• wait until StartSSL sends you an email confirming that your certificate is ready
• Go to Tool Box > Retrieve Certificate and grab your certificate

Next we’ve got to install the certificate for FedOne:

• on the FedOne console create a new file wave24z.com.crt and paste the contents of the certificate into it
• make sure that the key file (wave24z.com.key) exists. This has been created when we ran make-csr.sh.
• download the class 1 StartSSL certificate from http://www.startssl.com/certs/
  The file you’re looking for as of this writing is sub.class1.server.ca.pem (direct link)
• Upload the file to the wave-protocol directory or create an empty file and paste the contents of the downloaded pem file into it

Once you’ve done all of these steps you should have the following files inside your wave-protocol directory:

• wave24z.com.key
• wave24z.com.crt
• wave24z.com.csr
• sub.class1.server.ca.pem

This is a perfect moment to make a backup of these files.

Though StartSSL has a Tool Box option that states Revocation Request you always almost receive an email stating that they are not going to revoke your certificate and thus not letting you create a new one. So in case you lose your key file and have to set up a new server, you’re doomed. Go ahead, and backup the CSR, your key file and your certificate now!

Next we’ve got to configure FedOne to use the certificates:

• Make a copy of run-config.sh.example via
  cp run-config.sh.example run-config.sh
• Open run-config.sh with your favorite editor, I’m using nano
  nano run-config.sh
• Comment out “# echo “You must configure the run-config.sh script” ; exit 1″ by putting a # in front of it
• Set WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME to your domain
• Set WAVE_SERVER_HOSTNAME to your domain
• Set XMPP_SERVER_SECRET to the secret you’ve configured during Openfire setup
• Set CERTIFICATE_FILENAME_LIST to
  CERTIFICATE_FILENAME_LIST=${WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME}.crt,sub.class1.server.ca.pem
  Make sure  you changed “.cert” to “.crt“, you add  ”,sub.class1.server.ca.pem” file and there is no blank between the comma and the file name!
• Set WAVESERVER_DISABLE_SIGNER_VERIFICATION to false

Please follow these instructions with much attention to detail, as they are super important. Here is a full copy of my run-config.sh with the shared secret blanked out for obvious reasons:

#!/bin/bash

# Configuration for the FedOne run scripts.
#
# Copy this file to run-config.sh and configure the variables there.
# Please see http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/Installation for
# instructions on how to configure the flags.
#

# Remove this line after configuring
# echo "You must configure the run-config.sh script" ; exit 1

### Variables common to the server, clients, and agents
###

# Domain name of the wave server
WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME=wave24z.com

# Host name and port the wave server's client frontend listens on
WAVE_SERVER_HOSTNAME=wave24z.com
WAVE_SERVER_PORT=9876

# The version of FedOne, extracted from the build.properties file
FEDONE_VERSION=`grep ^fedone.version= build.properties | cut -f2 -d=`

### Server-specific variables
###

# These will probably need to be changed
XMPP_SERVER_SECRET=***********
PRIVATE_KEY_FILENAME=${WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME}.key
CERTIFICATE_FILENAME_LIST=${WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME}.crt,sub.class1.server.ca.pem

# These should be okay to leave alone
CERTIFICATE_DOMAIN_NAME=$WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME
XMPP_SERVER_HOSTNAME=$WAVE_SERVER_DOMAIN_NAME
XMPP_SERVER_PORT=5275

# Set XMPP_SERVER_IP to localhost if the XMPP and FedOne servers are
# running on the same host
XMPP_SERVER_IP=$XMPP_SERVER_HOSTNAME

# Set true to disable the verification of signed deltas
WAVESERVER_DISABLE_VERIFICATION=false

# Set true to disable the verification of signers (certificates)
WAVESERVER_DISABLE_SIGNER_VERIFICATION=false

In a nutshell this will make FedOne look for the wave24z.com.key, wave24z.com.crt and sub.class1.server.ca.pem files.

The final step is to install the StartSSL intermediate certificate into the Java keystore. Do so by submitting:

keytool -importcert -storetype jks -keystore /etc/java-6-sun/security/cacerts -file sub.class1.server.ca.pem

If prompted for a password, use changeit. (Without the trailing dot.)

You now might want to take a quick look at the CAcert.org related remarks at the end of this article.

Part IV: Running FedOne

We are ready to fire up FedOne and try federation!

Go ahead and start FedOne via

./run-server.sh

If everything went fine, you should see no Java error messages and the server should start up. Note: You might see “remote server not found” errors. Those are okay. Also log messages like

INFO: key for this error is org.xmpp.packet.IQ:component.wave24z.com:<some number>

are fine and do not point to an error.

Here’s my full start up log for you to compare:

wave:~/wave-protocol# ./run-server.sh
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:46 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.waveserver.WaveServerImpl
INFO: Wave Server configured to host local domains: [wave24z.com]
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:46 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.ServerMain$RpcInetSocketAddressFactory
INFO: Starting client frontend on host: wave24z.com port: 9876
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent initialize
INFO: initializing with JID: wave.wave24z.com
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent start
INFO: connected to XMPP server with JID: wave.wave24z.com
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.XmppDisco sendDiscoItemsGet
INFO: Trying to discover remote server: initech-corp.com
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processPacket
INFO: received XMPP packet:

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processIqPacket
INFO: key for this error is org.xmpp.packet.IQ:component.wave24z.com:963-41
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent sendPacket
INFO: sent XMPP packet: 

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent sendPacket
INFO: sent XMPP packet: 

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent sendPacket
INFO: key for this error is org.xmpp.packet.IQ:initech-corp.com:7759-0
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.ServerMain run
INFO: Starting server
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processPacket
INFO: received XMPP packet:

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processIqPacket
INFO: key for this error is org.xmpp.packet.IQ:initech-corp.com:7759-0
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent sendPacket
INFO: sent XMPP packet: 

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent sendPacket
INFO: key for this error is org.xmpp.packet.IQ:wave.initech-corp.com:8906-1
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processPacket
INFO: received XMPP packet:

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processIqPacket
INFO: key for this error is org.xmpp.packet.IQ:wave.initech-corp.com:8906-1
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.XmppDisco$DiscoItemIterator run
INFO: Discovered remote JID: wave.initech-corp.com for initech-corp.com
Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent transmitDummyMessage
INFO: sending ping message:

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent sendPacket
INFO: sent XMPP packet: 

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processPacket
INFO: received XMPP packet:

Nov 5, 2009 12:28:47 PM org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone.federation.xmpp.WaveXmppComponent processMessageReceipt
INFO: got ping response from initech-corp.com

Part V: Running the console client and waving along

You’re close to federating your first Wave!

• Open a new terminal window and ssh into your server as root.
• Change to the wave-protocol directory.
• Fire up the console client
  ./run-client-console.sh <username>
  providing the username you’ve configured in Openfire. For me this is ./run-client-console.sh ralf.
• Create a new Wave and open it
  /new
  /open 0
• Add a sandbox participant
  /add <name>@wavesandbox.com
  For me this would be /add 24z@wavesandbox.com
• Type in your messages and have fun waving along!

That’s it! We’re done! Your very own Wave server is federating with Google’s sandbox environment. We’ve come a long way!

Final remarks and hints

Openfire Session monitor

Openfire’s web based admin tool provides a convenient way to monitor component and server sessions. If federation is successful, you should see something similar to this in Sessions > Server Sessions:

If you click on one of the sessions Openfire indicates packets sent and received. You should see those numbers increase when exchanging blips with your federation partner.

The ping server setting in run-server.sh

The value set for –xmpp_server_ping in run-server.sh has no impact on the servers you can potentially federate with. It’s really just meant to configure which server FedOne should automatically start to ping after startup. No matter what you’ve configured there, it’s the /add command submitted via the console client which invokes the connection to whatever your federation partner should be.

So it’s perfectly fine to have the default ping server (–xmpp_server_ping=”initech-corp.com) configured in run-server.sh and add participants from wavesandbox.com and other FedOne servers.

CAcert certificates

I have not been successful using certificates issued by CAcert. Discussions on the wave-protocol Google Group suggest that it is doable, but I gave up trying and went over to StartSSL. According to posts from Google’s Dirk Balfanz on the official wave-protocol list suggest, that CAcert.org issued certificates should not be expected to work, as wavesandbox.com only understands StartSSL certificates for the moment.

CAcert would be the better option as they allow you to revoke at any time and create new certificates. In case you’ve been successful, please let us know in the comments.

Latency

While federating with the sandbox environment I’ve experienced quite some latency. As Google points out federation is still in a very early stage. Thinks will remain a bit shaky for the time being. Once your server logs indicate that you’ve successfully connected to wavesandbox.com and you start typing on both ends, you might not see the result immediately.

Stay patient. I’ve experienced times where it took some 5-10 seconds until blips showed up on the other end.

You’ll also occasionally run into this funny state when things get out of sync:

Testing

If you’d like to join the discussion, we’ve create a public Wave over at the consumer preview environment (you need to be a Wave member @googlewave.com to join).

Do a search for

• with:public “Google Wave Federation Testing”

to find it and feel free to join!

Finally, here are contact options, should you require a federation partner:

• Sandbox environment: 24z@wavesandbox.com
• Preview environment: ralf.rottmann@googlewave.com
• My own FedOne environment: ralf@wave24z.com

I’ve also created logins to the server running at wave24z.com which allow you to use the command line client to test federation:

• ssh public@wave24z.com

The password is wavepower and public2, public3, public4 and public5 should work, too. As wave24z.com is my personal playground, the server might be down occasionally.

Last but not least, you might want to follow me on twitter, as I’m continuing to publish my progress and findings there:

• http://twitter.com/24z @24z

Final words

You might ask why I’m looking into this, after all, it’s pretty new, pretty beta and pretty controversial.

Well, I recently co-founded GrandCentrix, a company that offers a cloud platform that makes it easy to monetize massively scaling mobile services. Part of the GrandCentrix platform is to dramatically simplify integration into third party services, like carrier payment gateways, social network APIs and geo location services.

With major corporations starting to announce their Google Wave support, we believe it’ll ultimately bring a competitive advantage for our customers, if they can easily incorporate Wave as a communication channel for their mobile services.

That’s why. :-)

Thanks for staying with me for such a loooooong blog post and don’t forget to share your experience with Google Wave federation in the comments!

My loyal readers have noticed that my updates here at 24100.net slowed down a bit over the last couple of months. My last post is well over a month old. Here’s why:

1. Twitter kills the blogger star

There’s no doubt that we are headed to the real-time web. More capable  mobile devices, a general trend towards mobility and the rise of social networks are rapidly adding new ways to communicate and stay connected to our lives. As in my professional life I’m dealing with communication technologies since more than a decade, it’s quite natural for me to try out all the latest and greatest.

I’m broadcasting brief updates via Twitter and no longer expand them into full blog posts. Twitter is a great tool to find topics of interest and to keep a loyal audience updated. My Twitter stream tends to focus on smartphone related stuff (think “Apple”), Google Wave hints, social media and mobile strategy related content and occasional personal updates.

I highly encourage you to sign up for a Twitter account should you not have one, yet. In case for some weird reason you don’t want to “join the hype” (it’s not a hype anyway, it’s technology evolution), my Twitter updates get replicated to 24100.net and following my timeline can be done without being signed up, as all updates are public.

Without your own Twitter account there is, however, no backchannel, and I like to hear from my readers.

2. The Next Web

The second reason for less update on 24100.net is my increasing editorial work for The Next Web.

The Next Web (TNW) is a leading technology blog driven predominantly out of Europe. We recently grew TNW into a global network, covering local content in many countries, but its roots are in Europe.

Initially I cross-posted many articles but quickly noticed, that 99% of my readers here at 24100.net are also subscribed to The Next Web anyway. In an attempt to not spam their RSS readers, I decided to stop cross-posting. Not only is The Next Web a fantastic opportunity to share my opinion and get in touch with many think-alikes, it’s also a great team and a major source for inspiration.

Here’s what some of the industries most acclaimed internet influentials say about our blog:

Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon): 
“What sets the TheNextWeb apart is a focus on the internet as a key driver for a global market. Their international view is unique, making their blogs a must read and their conferences a must attend for professionals like me who do business around the globe.”

Robert Scoble (tech evangelist):
“I read thousands of news sources for tech industry information and the Next Web is on my short list of ‘must read’.”

What’s next?

I’m not planning to take the 24100.net blog down but instead contemplate various ideas towards giving 24100.net a new content focus. I’ve not yet come to a final conclusion and am currently discussing my early ideas with some close friends. If everything works out fine, I’m going to announce the changes in January 2010.

Stay tuned and let me hear back what you think. Use the real-time web as blog comments are so not Web 2.0 anymore. :-)

Over at the increasingly famous The Next Web blog, I’ve covered my first weeks without Entourage 2008 and why I ultimately switched back to Microsoft Entourage. If you’re an Apple prosumer, I’d love to get your feedback and tips. In case you’ve got a solution for any of the issues I’m mentioning, please don’t keep it as a secret, post it here!

Should you prefer a direct dialog, DM me (@24z) at twitter.

Preface: I love to get in touch with my readers. Are you on Twitter? Follow me @24z please!

If you happen to be a The Next Web subscriber, you might have stumbled across my How-to-get-Snow-Leopard-early article. I’ve been running Snow Leopard for a while and the speed improvements on my MacBook Pro (one of the latest unibody models) alone are a reason to upgrade every one of my iMacs within the next two days.

While 99% of my software library has always been working fine for all previous updates, I regularly ran into severe issues with Vodafone’s Mobile Connect hard- and software. As far as I am concerned Vodafone Germany never managed to get out a software update in time. In fact, I occasionally had to wait for 8-12 weeks until I could use my UMTS modem on a new operating system. For a corporation which claims to always be at the edge of technology it’s a shame.

And again, my Vodafone Mobile Connect card did not work on Snow Leopard. It started with obscure error message during install and ended with the device not being found.

Twitter tipster @svhennig pointed me to the solution:

The Austrian A1 website offers a version of the “Mac OS Dashboard Software” which works absolutely perfect on Snow Leopard. Though the system requirements state “Leopard 10.5.0 – 10.5.6″ I can confirm Version 3.04.01.00 (14,6 MB) is fully working on 10A432 with Vodafone Germany. This is the direct download link. (Version 3.04.06.00 seems to be available, too. I did not try it. In case you’ve been successful, please leave a comment.)

Thanks to Sven sharing the link. Hope it helps others, too.

If you’d like to get more random thoughts about Snow Leopard, iPhone Development and everything else from me, start following me on Twitter.

Today marks an important day in the short history of social networks or – as you might prefer to call it – the real-time web: Facebook announced the definitive agreement to acquire FriendFeed. As the FriendFeed founders have put it, they’ve accepted Facebook’s friend request.

While the internet is a buzz about these breaking news, it’s sad news for me.

A quick glimpse at FriendFeed right after the announcement it appears to me, that the majority of FriendFeeders seem to dislike the idea of being forced to become Facebook users for what FriendFeed delivered to them, as well; some have even started to cancel their accounts.

It’s very likely only a matter of time until Facebook kills FriendFeed as a product, slightly “adjusts” content ownership policies and starts using the FriendFeed history for behavioral analysis and “targeted” ads. We’ve all seen this before.

To me it reemphasizes the need for a community owned, community driven, non-commercial platform. This might sound stupid, but it has worked before with programming and scripting languages, version control solutions and even entire operating systems. There’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t work for stuff that forms the real-time web.

Having sold my own company, which did enterprise communication solutions, to Alcatel in 2008, I can very much understand the founders motivation to agree to the deal. But this only strengthens my point: At a certain time any founder will be offered enough money, to agree to the deal of his lifetime. And even if they claim not to, we might see Twitter being acquired in the near future, too.

Ultimately the only solution might be, to ask Linus Torvalds to do us one more favor and kick off a real-time web platform, that let’s us build a social network that can stand commercial interests and ask the Gates Foundation to fund it. If Linda and Bill don’t come to our rescue, we might ask users to voluntarily donate in favor of guaranteed privacy.

I’d love to see how that “business model” would work out.

I’ve recently release an emergency pharmacy finder for German iPhone owners [iTunes link].

In Germany 2.000 of a total number of 21.500 pharmacies are on emergency duty each day, available for 24 hours. The problem the app solves is how to quickly find the nearest available pharmacy on duty in case of an emergency.

Other location based apps, like “Telefonbuch”, “Around Me” or “Meine Stadt” provide users with the nearest pharmacy, too. However, they don’t take into account whether the drugstore is open or closed. In case of an emergency you might very well end up standing in front of closed doors, using one of these to find the nearest pharmacy.

The app, which has been conceptualized and designed by aperto move and developed for the iPhone via my personal holding acceleract GmbH, has experienced tremendous acceptance by iPhone users across Germany.

I’m very happy to report that today it entered the top #1 position in Apple’s “Highlights” section.

This drives the application to the default front page of the mobile and the desktop iTunes App Store and I’m eager to find out how this might impact application deployment.

Given that more sources claim that the App Store is only about games these days, it’s good to find out that an application which delivers true value can still make it into top positions within days. (”Apotheken” ranks #3 in “Utilities” and  #29 #20 #8 #7 in “Top Paid Apps”.)

Numerous iPhone Developers have asked via Twitter, why we’ve not chosen to go the EUR 0,79 route.

The rationale is simple: For once I personally very much dislike the trend to offer your app almost for free, just to get into the charts. Nobody can produce a quality iPhone application and give it away for nothing AND feel happy with it.

Second: Maintaining and updating the list of pharmacies which are on duty for every single day is a manual and time consuming task. We believe, it’s in fact really worth a one-time fee of EUR 2,39 – maybe even more.

Last but not least: I never really understood the pricing debate itself at all. The iPhone is not the best value-for-money cellphone you can get if you focus solely on hardware specs, yet we all love it and happily pay for it. We frequently pay more than 3 Euros for two glasses of diet coke. Why do we even think that purchasing an app which took a fair amount of time in design, development, testing and support should cost less than two drinks? :-)

With that said, I’d like to thank all customers for supporting “Apotheken”, the great amount of feedback and positive reviews and hope to stay in touch!

A few years ago you would have seen stuff like this in Hollywood movies only. Well, it’ll be available soon. iPhone OS 3.1 is expected to be released in September.

I’m really excited by the new opportunities this opens up for the iPhone developer community and playing with these 3.1 Beta 2 APIs is just so addictive!

Have you ever been in urgent need for a pharmacy that’s open 24 hours to get a drug? iPhone and iPod touch owners in Germany don’t have to worry anymore: Apotheken – the German word for pharmacy – is now available via the iTunes App Store. Grab your copy here! [link opens iTunes]

While the App Store has lots of applications that give you a list of pharmacies around you, Apotheken is unique in that it provides you with those drugstores only that are on emergency service and open at the time of your request. It’s the only official solution of the German Pharmacys’ Umbrella Organization (ABDA).

Each day the ABDA updates the list of roughly 2000 of the 21.500 drugstores in Germany which are on duty 24 hours. This exclusive data is available only from the ABDA – and now at your fingertips wherever you are.

The application has been integrated into ABDA’s backend services and makes use of the latest Google Maps features that have been introduced with iPhone OS 3.0. It requires just two touches two get directions to the nearest pharmacy which is available now. Apotheken can either locate you automatically or you can manually enter an address, which will then be used for the search.

The concept and screen design has been done by apertomove GmbH for the ABDA. apertomove asked acceleract GmbH to develop Apotheken for the iPhone.

With so many gimmicks with limited use in the App Store these days, I hope this application will add value for you and helps you being prepared if it comes to the worst.