This week was another week of fine progress for the plug-in. I was able to fix some glaring issues with my conference chat code. I was also able to add support for Yahoo! JAPAN accounts.
Unfortunately, my mentor and I are faced with another issue: character encoding. While testing the Yahoo! JAPAN version of my plug-in, I used Google Translate to convert English text, such as the simple “hello”, into Japanese. When I sent and received these messages using my plug-in and the Pidgin client, the text became garbled during the encoding/decoding process. I am still investigating how encoding should work in my plug-in, and what character sets I will be dealing with. My findings currently point to UTF-8 and SHIFT_JIS (a Japanese character set).
Despite that challenge, I am making fine progress, especially with the great amount of help my mentor Patrick provides when I get stuck. My hope is that by the end of next week, my plug-in will have all of the required features implemented, and will be ready for its first round of user testing.