[PLUG] ICQ?

[patrick.n.fitzgerald.1]

I've been a Java ICQ user for a while now. It has some notable flaws. A
partial list:

-Sometimes it just randomly decides to disconnect me. No idea why, but it
happens at any time, whether I'm using it actively or not. 
-The chat module doesn't work. Not at all. Never.
-Just starting the danged thing takes 12 megs of ram. And on top of that,
despite java's best attempts at garbage collection, it still manages to
have a memory leak. If I leave it running for more than 2 hours, it takes
up around 16 megs. 
-It's slow. Even on my K6-300 with 64 megs of ram, it crawls. This
deficiency is most likely because of Java, which is a pretty slow platform
for just about everything.
-I've never been able to run it on any platform except Linux.
-The sound support doesn't work well at all. It only plays a little "blip"
out the soundcard. 

I tried Gtk-ICQ, but it never got past an endless stream of warnings and
error messages. I tried licq, zicq, picq, and micq. All of those are
nowhere near production quality code yet. And the console-only icq clients
are, in general, really confusing. So in general, I use JavaICQ, not
because I like it, but because it seems to work better than the others. 
My major quandry with most of the free clients is that they come with no
documentation and expect you to figure out that in order to add someone to
the contact list, you have to go twiddle bits in a hidden file somewhere
off in a .?icq directory.

Personally, I'm waiting for the perl Net::ICQ module to reach functional
status, and then I'll start coding myself a nice little Perl/Tk wrapper
for it. But, again, it's not ready yet. So off to struggle with Java ICQ. 

Patrick N. Fitzgerald (#17399645)


--
"There's a place for those who love their poetry,
 It's just across from the room that says 'Pro's Only'" -tmbg

--
This message is from the Purdue Linux Users' Group (PLUG) mailing list.
Send mail server commands to <plug-request@csociety.purdue.edu>.