Re: [tlug] yahoo messenger

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 02:47:33PM +0500, A. Sajjad Zaidi wrote:

>Lately, I've heard of a project called Gyach which makes voice messaging
>with Yahoo possible, though haven't tried it yet. Volunteers? It's
>available somewhere on Sourceforge/Freshmeat.

I"d heard of it.  Gyach Enhanced, a fork of the original, is the one that
does voice.  I haven't yet tried it, mostly because of sentiments like this
sprinkled (well, appearing at least twice) throughout the web page:

DO NOT EMAIL ME WITH QUESTIONS OR REQUESTS FOR TECH SUPPORT ABOUT THIS PROGRAM!
YOU WILL ONLY RECEIVE AUTOMATED REPONSES! NO EXCEPTIONS. NO TECHNICAL SUPPORT
IS BEING PROVIDED AND I'M NOT ANSWERING QUESTIONS FROM THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

Which I think could be reasonably translated as "Got a bug report?  Well,
you can take it and tell it to somebody who cares, and that's not me."
I don't know what kind of chip she's got on her shoulder, but it doesn't
exactly make me want to use her software.  There is at least one fairly
good OS and one fairly good MTA that many people decline to use solely
because of the authors' personalities, so I guess Phrozen Smoke AKA
Erica Andrews, author of Gyach Enhanced, wants to emulate their success,
or something :-p

It's not like I expect the author of any Free Software to provide
official tech support unless I am pushing money in his/her direction,
but when somebody is essentially saying "This works on my computer,
I don't care if it works on yours, has bugs, whatever, don't even email
me about things that don't work because you won't even get a response"
it gives a strong enough negative impression of both the author and the
probably quality of the work that I'm not exactly going to stampede over
to download it.

The original Gyach (no voice) is available here:

http://www4.infi.net/~cpinkham/gyach/

Gyach Enhanced (voice, but seemingly plenty of attitude, too) is
available here:

http://phpaint.sourceforge.net/pyvoicechat/index_gyache.html

An (I believe) earlier effort by the same author is PY! Voice:

http://phpaint.sourceforge.net/pyvoicechat/index.html

It's a YM client written in Python.  I suspect, but don't know, that
Gyach Enhanced incorporates PY! Voice code to get the voice features.

The True Speech codec that Yahoo uses is proprietary and patented, so
the voice support is probably achieved by reverse engineering the protocol,
so I guess we'd have to try it and see how well it works.  Yahoo licenses
True Speech from DSP, and I hope DSP won't start sending C and D letters
out to people who implement compatible solutions.

Anyway, those are the voice solutions that are out there for Yahoo on 
Linux.  Like Sajjad said, any volunteers?  If you're a Python hacker,
this is your big chance :-)

Jonathan
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