Surreal, Troubling News

So, first things first -- a confession. I've modified the previous two blog entries out of embarrassment. The trees in question aren't plum. They're cherry. They don't look like any cherry tree I've ever seen and they do look like the millions of plum trees I've seen, but it turns out they're a special cherry from Japan given to the university as a gift some time ago. Mea culpa.

Now the surreal news.

One of my old students from 九江 (Jiujiang) asked me if I could help her with interpreting a phrase from a paper. The phrase was about ruling out the kitchen as the source of a fire and other speculation about where the fire could have started. This, to put it mildly, had me both curious and worried.

The phrase was out of context, so she sent me a PDF with the full context. It was a report from a fire department in New Zealand reporting on a fire that had gutted a home with two people upstairs studying. Two Chinese students. One of whom was reported hospitalised. The verdict of the investigation? Origin of fire: "suspicious". In short there was nothing where they identified the fire starting that could have started the fire.

The fire spread through the ground floor of the home rapidly, trapping the two girls, my student one of them, upstairs. They had to escape by jumping out a second-story window. All their belongings were destroyed and my student wound up in hospital for two months with a broken ankle, knee, spine and three ribs. The landlord of the place? Vanished. She was asking me, I think, to confirm that someone didn't try to kill her and her room-mate. This was not confirmation that I could give, having seen the part where it said "police investigation" on the document.

So now she's in China wondering how to proceed. I told her to get her government involved so that the police get cranky at the international interference. This way whoever set that fire will suffer greatly at the hands of police when he's caught and arrested. International incidents tend to make for a lot of paperwork, after all. I also suggested she immediately contact the insurance company listed in the fire department's paper and make a claim stat.

See? My students don't even have to be in China to get into weird, alarming difficulties.

In other news, my AIM address is also no longer in use. Not that anybody contacted me that way ever.

I Use Jabber

I have a lot of Instant Messenger IDs, but the one I am slowly pushing people toward is Jabber (a.k.a. XMPP). The problem, you see, is that the various Instant Messenger networks don't play well with each other. MSN talks to MSN only -- and to a few others who do a lot of work to reverse-engineer MSN's protocols with unreliable results. AIM and ICQ use the same protocol, but as far as I can tell don't interoperate. AIM just licenses ICQ's technology but an ICQ number can't talk to an AIM user. (I may be wrong on this specific one.) Others? They're locked out again unless they've reverse-engineered the protocol, again with unreliable results. The same extends to Gadu-Gadu, QQ, YIM and the whole sorry pack.

Jabber/XMPP solves this problem by being an open standard. Anybody can run a Jabber server and Jabber servers can talk to other Jabber servers if so desired. This means that a company can own its own IM server for internal communications (without paying the horrendous licence fees some of the commercial properties demand) while still connecting to the outside world and other Jabber servers. Indeed there are even bridges that allow you to connect Jabber to MSN, AIM, ICQ, etc.

But that's not why I want to use Jabber.

I want to use Jabber because it doesn't tie me in to Unka Bill or his monopolist cronies. It allows me to use whichever client software I feel comfortable with on any platform I'm comfortable with (where MSN only legally allows you to use Microsoft's client software on Windows, for example) and it allows me to use whichever Jabber provider -- free or paid -- I choose to use. (Currently I choose GoogleTalk.)

So if you want to Instant Message me? Use one of the ones on the sidebar of my blog. But pay attention to that "preferred" option. Because slowly, but surely, that list is going to shrink. But a Jabber/XMPP account will always be there.

Edited to add:

If you want to make the switch to Jabber, it's pretty easy:

1. You need an account. The easiest way to get a reliable one is to sign up for GoogleTalk. If you're more adventurous, try out the various other public servers available.
2. You need client software. GoogleTalk allows you to use a web page for chat, but this is not convenient for most purposes. (It's a boon for people who travel, though!) Instead I recommend Pandion as an easy-to-use setup. Even my mother could install and use Pandion with only a little remote hand-holding on my end! If you don't run Windows or if you want to try something other than Pandion, there are a lot of clients to choose from. (This is one of the benefits of using open standards.)