evilrouters.net

I’m not a big fan of Instant Messaging, but since so many people that I know are, I decided to set it up again. Okay, so really Lindsey wanted to use it, but then I got an idea…

I already have an account on Google, and they offer an IM service which they call Google Talk. It’s based on the (open) XMPP standard and you can use any standards-compliant “Jabber” client with it. I already use Psi at work on our internal IM system (also Jabber) so I’m familiar with it.

Anyways, long story short, I’m using Psi to connect to Google Talk, and also using a gateway on msn.cs.princeton.edu to manage a contact into the MSN Messenger IM network for me. Since Google Talk uses SSL, this gives the added benefit of having everything between my client and the Google servers encrypted with SSL (this is good for me, for reasons I won’t go into here), which is good enough for me.

Regardless, I can now be reached via Instant Messenger in two ways:

• -Jabber ID: jlgaddis at gmail.com (I think), and
• -MSN: jeremy at linuxwiz.net