ReJoyce Dublin for today is the 100th Bloomsday, celebrating James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses.

Ulysses is a vast novel: Project Gutenberg has it in various formats for downloads, although the BBC's Cheat's guide may be more palatable for many people. I've been reading Ulysses on and off for about ten years now, ever since I took it on holiday to Greece - I can read a paperback in 2-4 hours, so a hefty tome or a suitcase full of books were the options, I chose Ulysses.

Ulysses brings back happy memories of sitting on a sunny hotel balcony with my feet up, sipping ouzo, reading and being entertained. Molly Bloom's finish to the book sums it up for me: "Yes".

The only sad point in the proceedings being the continued copywrong nonsense by the Joyce estate. One can only hope the new edition sorts the situation out for good.

Most of this has been sitting in my backlog for too long, but given that Jabber Journal #18 came out yesterday and mentioned some of them, here's a chance to pop some goodies off the stack.

First off Jabber IRC integration, the journal goes into more depth, but I've found the irc.jabber.org.uk IRC transport most useful. Simply try to join a Jabber groupchat with say #mobitopia%irc.freenode.net as the room name (pick a channel, any channel), and Bob's your uncle, easy integration, nice!

Stuck behind a firewall? Jabber80 run a Jabber server on port 80 (and 443), ideal for those moments when you just can't use the standard Jabber ports, indirectly it's yet another way to use IRC from behind the firewall too.

Kiwi Java hero and king of the curry, Talios has joined the elite and become a member of the Jabber Software Foundation. He let me have a tinker with his Jabber SMS transport recently, very easy to use and something I'd have killed for in the days before my phone had a Jabber client.

Psi 0.9.2 comes out, my preferred desktop client just keeps getting better.

In other (old) Jabber news - Jabber Inc and EBS announce joint solution: EBS are the big hitters in the foreign exchange trading world, and many of their solutions are XML based, so it's a natural fit. Nice to see Jabberbeing validated in this way. AOL opens ICQ interface, but does anyone care any more? Too little and too late, if they wanted to announce something smart they should have thought about migrating to and supporting Jabber.