Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Getting GAIM to play along with Hebrew

Although I enjoy using GAIM, it has several issues - most notably a very poor UI experience, which is being worked on in the 2.0 betas (which are perfectly usable, by the way). The second most obvious problem I've been having is to get GAIM to receive Hebrew messages from buddies on ICQ. This issue can be easily fixed by accessing the ICQ account properties and changing the Encoding field:

The default encoding is ISO Western (ISO-8859-1); to get Hebrew properly just disable the account, change the encoding to Windows Hebrew (Windows-1255) and re-enable it. Although not technically correct, ISO Visual Hebrew (ISO-8859-8) seems to work too.

I'm not sure if the Western encoding is indeed the default - I've been importing my account settings since GAIM 1.3 or so - but I'll look into it and file the appropriate bug report (encoding should be set to what is appropriate according to the current locale, at least in Windows).

Software
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 1:34:14 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    Comments [3]  |  Related posts:
PicasaWebDownloader updated
Getting Google Chrome to behave
Finding the ultimate file synchronization tool
This is so damn cool
Delver in Israeli journalism
Delver launches!
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 11:44:11 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
Duh :) Unix also has a concept of current locale's charset, accessible by calling nl_langinfo(CODESET). On modern Linux distros, though, it'll typically return UTF-8 which puts you back at square one.

The real anticipated feature, BTW, should be to have GAIM declare the ICQ UTF-8 and RTF capabilities: if both sides of an ICQ conversation declare those capabilities, both sides may assume either the charset is UTF-8 or the entire message is RTF (with non-Latin-1 characters represented with the \u... RTF syntax). If both are present, RTF takes precedence over UTF-8.
Ilya
Thursday, April 20, 2006 12:46:42 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
I have NO idea what Ilya wrote above, but why don't you use trill or Miranda?
Yoav F
Thursday, April 20, 2006 10:55:06 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
Trillian is commercial, meaning I can't use it at work without getting a license for it. Furthermore it's become major bloatware -- even with GAIM's shortcomings, portability plugins it still takes about half as much time to start up as Trillian.

Miranda just sucks :-)
Tomer Gabel | tomerAT NOSPAMtomergabel dot com
Name
E-mail
Home page

Comment (Some html is allowed: a@href@title, b, blockquote@cite, em, i, strike, strong, sub, super, u) where the @ means "attribute." For example, you can use <a href="" title=""> or <blockquote cite="Scott">.  

Live Comment Preview