Getting Microblog-Purple to Work

Microblog-purple is an open source plug-in for Pidgin and other Libpurple-based IM clients. It enables accessing Twitter feeds through an IM client. If you're trying to compile and install microblog-purple from source and are having trouble getting it to work, you may need to change the permissions of a few of the installed files.

In my case, I had troubles getting microblog-purple working from source in Pidgin on Fedora Linux.It was necessary to change the permissions of the following files from 750 to 755, giving read and execute permission to other users:

• /usr/lib/purple-2/libidentica.so
• /usr/lib/purple-2/libtwitter.so
• /usr/lib/purple-2/twitgin.so

This I figured out by reading the screen output from running make install, locating the files, and comparing the files’ permissions to those of a file corresponding to a known working Pidgin plug-in.

The microblog-purple plug-in, listed as Twitgin, showed up in Pidgin’s plug-in list once the aforementioned permissions were changed. Making sure it was checked in the list, I then set up access to my Twitter account by adding it through the Manage Accounts dialog as if it were an IM account. After that, it was up and running.

Mouse Bug Fix for Vulcan 3D Chess

Standard chess programs are easy to find, but 3D chess programs á la Star Trek are comparatively rare. As far as I've been able to find, there's Parmen by Doug Keenan for Windows, and there's Vulcan by Mauro Persano for Linux and probably anywhere else X11 or SDL can be used*.

Parmen would have been the easiest to install and is purportedly the more mature of the two, but I really wanted a 3D chess game to play on one of my Linux machines, so I tried Vulcan first. Compilation and install went fine after installing the necessary packages and adding -Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib/tls to LDFLAGS in the Makefile to pick up one library file the compiler couldn't find.  It seemed to work...when it would recognize mouse events. Unfortunately, the length of time and number of clicks it took to get it to respond made it too awkward to use.

Disappointed, I turned to Parmen. Installation was the usual Windows simplicity: just download and run ParmenSetup exe. All looked good upon running the installed program until about the second or third move, whereat Parmen crashed. Trying again a couple more times and trying it on a different machine yielded the same results. Admittedly, the two XP SP3 machines I tried it on were both fairly low end, so you may have a better experience.

Frustrated, I turned back to Vulcan and the promise of open source software. A lot of experimenting and research helped to isolate the problem primarily to a single line of code. With that line removed... It worked! And it didn't crash!

It's just speculation, but I'm thinking the bug may have arisen due to changes in X11 which occurred since Vulcan's last update, particularly somewhere in X11R7.4 (X server 1.5.1) through X11R7.6 (X server 1.9). Regardless of the cause, I've put up a free patch to fix the bug and improve Vulcan's response to mouse events at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vulcan-mbpatch/. (UPDATE: As of 9/10/2012, this patch may now be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vulcanchessmods/files/cricital_patches/mouse_bug/.)

If you know of any other Star Trek style 3D chess program, please post a comment and let us all know about it.

* Mac OS X for Unix Geeks by Jepson & Rothman (O'Reilly, 2003) has a whole chapter on installing and using X11 on a Mac OS X system!