Free twisted software for linux

BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists: (1) it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard buddy lists; (2) it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others; (3) it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform; (4) it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readiily available. But BuddySpace is about more than just messaging, as we explain below.

One of the key factors that led to the widespread popularity of Instant Messaging applications from 1997 onwards (including ICQ, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Odigo, and Jabber messengers) was the concept of pushed presence: the automatic notification of the appearance of friends and colleagues online.

However, Instant Messaging (IM) is just one of many possible presence-related and presence-dependent applications. For example, presence-enabled applications can facilitate safety-tracking of children by mobile phone, support for emergency services, blind-date radar, group teleconference management, multiplayer games, and anything involving the collaboration of individuals separated in space and time.

Why phone a contact only to receive an engaged tone or pre-recorded message, when the telephone network already knows what state your contact is in, and could indicate this directly on your contact list? All of these concepts embody varying degrees of what we refer to as enhanced presence management.

The concept of presence has matured in recent years to move away from the simple notion of online/offline/away, towards a rich blend of attributes that can be used to characterise an individuals physical and/or spatial location, work trajectory, time frame of reference, mental mood, goals, and even intentions! Our challenge is how best to characterise presence, how to make it easy to manage and easy to visualise, and how to remain consistent with the users own expectations, work habits, and existing patterns of Instant Messaging and other communication tool usage.

BuddySpace generalizes the concept of Buddy List (popularised by Instant Messaging tools such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger) to provide multiple views of collaborative workgroups according to users needs and tastes. Our aim has been to provide a personal dashboard or radar screen so that one can observe the availability and interaction state of colleagues worldwide in a manner that exhibits the following desirable properties:

* immediate: real-time updates need to be pushed instantly to users rather than pulled in by request -- the push approach helps keep updates more palpable and informative
* peripheral and therefore non-intrusive: users lead busy lives, and dislike being bombarded with yet more information, so we aim to keep awareness of colleagues available in a compact manner that can be noticed peripherally
* customisable: some people prefer simple or hierarchical lists, some prefer visual maps, some prefer status lights, and so on; some prefer a Windows look-and-feel, some a Mac-- we need to cater for diverse user preferences and capabilities
* scaleable: we have to provide ways to indicate the presence of potentially enormous numbers of people, even given that these numbers will be filtered down for personal use -- researchers inhabit workspaces with many hundreds of colleagues around the globe; the Open University has well over 150,000 students online; large peer-spaces like music swapping communities have many millions of users connected simultaneously
* interoperable: with several hundred million users of the Big Four (AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo!), it is crucial that any approach allow interopebility with systems to which our users already subscribe; this is one of the many reasons we built BuddySpace entirely on top of Jabber (www.jabber.org), which provides gateways to the Big Four products.
* cross-platform: we need to service a community not only on Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac desktop and notebook configurations, but also on PDAs and mobile phones -- we therefore develop entirely in Java
* XML-literate: for future intelligent applications, communication transport needs to be about more than just string-transmission; another we adopted Jabber is that it is based entirely on a generic XML transport architecture, ideally suited for this purpose.
* open source: for the research community to join us and to gain leverage via our research output, we have ensured that BuddySpace is open source, available on SourceForge.
* clean: BuddySpace adheres rigorously to the Jabber specification, which means that it interoperates with other Jabber clients and servers without danger of the rogue behaviour that non-standard implementations inadvertently allow (e.g. the semantics of users inhabiting multiple groups is undefined in some clients, and can cause crashes).
* extendable: BuddySpace deploys a plug-in architecture which means that additions, such as new visualizations, and new concepts such as gaming interfaces, are readily achievable

BuddySpace fulfills all the above criteria, and provides a compelling user interface that can be highly compact, yet provide users with an important feel-good factor, akin to seeing nearby office lights turned on when entering ones office building at night. By studying the semantics of presence, we can also augment the existing impoverished presence states in a principles manner, providing capabilities that are more representative of the way real users work. Forthcoming capabilities will include automatic location updates via mobile devices, and the use of semantic matchmaking via intelligent profile handling, in order to help users quickly find and filter colleagues of particular interest.

Twisted Words library provides implementations of a handful of IM protocols, including IRC, MSNP8, OSCAR, TOC, and Jabber.

Twisted Words provides two separate high-level end-user features:

a multiprotocol instant messaging server
a multiprotocol instant messaging client

These are both still in the early stages of development and are not expected to work flawlessly in all configurations, however each is quite usable for a limited set of functionality. A Twisted Words server can be created with just a couple commands:

$ mktap words --irc-port 6667 --pb-port 8787 --passwd password_file --group somegroup
$ twistd -f words.tap

The Twisted Words client is named im and is usable as an IRC client, and possibly an AIM client (depending on the phase of the moon).

Low Level Functionality:

Twisted Words also includes:

Low-level protocol implementations of OSCAR (AIM and ICQ), IRC, MSN, TOC (AIM).
Jabber libraries.

Prototypes of chat server and client frameworks built on top of the protocols.

Twisted Conch project is an SSHv2 implementation written in Python. SSH is a protocol designed to allow remote access to shells and commands, but it is generic enough to allow everything from TCP forwarding to generic filesystem access.
Since conch is written in Python, it interfaces well with other Python projects, such as Imagination. Conch also includes a implementations of the telnet and vt102 protocols, as well as support for rudamentary line editing behaviors.
A new implementation of Twisteds Manhole application is also included, featuring server-side input history and interactive syntax coloring.
Conch is available under the MIT Free Software licence.
Enhancements:
- The in-memory terminal emulators "expect" functionality now supports timeouts.
- The SSH server and client are now approximately five times faster for bulk-data transfers.

Twisted Storage is an application that will take your data and manage it for you, just like a file system. But Twisted Storage goes way beyond what a normal file system does.
What types of "objects" are stored in Twisted Storage : just regular files. The data stored in the system is expected to be fixed content, meaning it doesnt change at all. If you read the data back, change it, and store it, it is considered a different file. There are plenty of examples of fixed content data : emails you received, movies or mp3 files you made or own, documents you wrote, etc. In fact it is estimated that 80% of the data you have on your computer is fixed, reference data.
Your Twisted Storage system can start out small - a single computer with a few disk drives. When you need more storage you can add more disk drives and more computers. But it has been designed to store petabytes worth of data without requiring any special hardware. For example storing a petabyte worth of data, using the biggest disk drives available today (500 GB), would require 2000 disk drives. To overcome the need of special hardware, Twisted Storage is a scalable, distributed system using ordinary commodity computers. Even so that petabyte of data would require 500 computers networked together and that requires special handling.
Twisted Storage has a few features you wont find in any file system. For example once a file is added to the Twisted Storage repository it can be written in multiple locations simultaneously. The system has been designed to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley Act: when an object is added to the repository you can no longer delete it and the integrity of the contents are guaranteed. In addition any access to the object is recorded.
Main features:
Scalable to thousands of servers and multiple petabytes of data.
- Regardless of how much data you want to store,Twisted Storage is designed to handle it. The system can grow from one computer and a few disks to hundreds of systems and thousands of disk drivers.
Automatic data recovery without human intervention.
- Twisted Storage doesnt require backup/restore software or procedures. All data written to the system is recorded in multiple locations.
No special disaster recover procedures.
- So long as you have your systems in physically different locations and you have instructed the software to write the multiple copies to those systems, you have no-hassle disaster recover. If one of the sites goes down, the system will retrieve any data from the other systems. Additionally, once the disaster site is up and running, the system will automatically restore the data to the it.
Simplified configuration.
- To ease management of the system, you can change any one systems configuration and have it ripple through out the system.

Automanic is an vehicular deathmatch game.

Automanic is a vehicular deathmatch game, hopefully becoming the best of Twisted Metal, Interstate 76, the Burnout Games, and Carmageddeon, focussing on cross-country carnage. It uses Crystal Space, CEL, and ODE.

Pynfo is an IRC bot written in Python and the Twisted framework. Among its features are network bridging/relaying, basic "infobot" capabilities, googling, 3 access tiers, and a shorter-link function. Pynfo is easily extensible and fully disk-persisten

It supports basic fact definition (with persistence between runs), searching of Google and Freshmeat. As a network relay, it can "bridge" channels on multiple networks - that is, pass messages between them. It also has a plugin interface, allowing users to easily define new commands.

Itaka is an on-demand screen capture server.
Itaka is an on-demand screen capture server for Windows, Mac Os X and Linux. It is developed in Python, PyGTK and the Twisted Framework. It prominently features a polished easy to use interface, with a robust backend server.
Main features:
- Acts as an on-demand server (requests to your computer by a users web browser display an image of your screen to the user)
- Notification for the client, on the desktop and with style using Libnotify.
- Very polished GUI drawing elements from Mac OS X. Sample
- Multiple platform support (currently Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and any other plattform with Python/Twisted/GTK support)