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At work we need to do some ldap work and it so happens we run Python 2.4. Unfortunately the only pre-compiled package I've found for Windows is for Python 2.5. I've tried all morning compiling python-ldap for Windows but that requires so much tweaking that I've gone slightly mad. Hence my request to the good Python community, would anyone have python-ldap for Python 2.4 on Windows (not cygwin by the way)?

Update: Well as an anonymous commenter showed me, the eggs for Python 2.4 linked from the python-ldap download page are indeed okay to work with. I had simply missed the DLLs package. I can only wish I could blame on being Friday.

There has been quite a lot of discussions around the use of XMPP in a web context and how to blend HTTP and XMPP protocols for a better social network experience.

I've been working on implementing XMPP for a while now on my spare time and even though it's been a much slower effort I would have liked, I've been able to have a fantastic fun with it. Most recently I've started integrating XMPP PubSub along with AtomPub using my AtomPub implementation, amplee.

The idea is to use amplee as an AtomPub library from within XMPP PubSub handlers. For instance I map AtomPub collections to PubSub nodes . When an atom entry is published to a node and that the client receives an acknowledgment of that publication, the handler uses amplee to store the entry in the AtomPub collection as well, respecting of course the RFC specification. Similarly if an item is deleted, the handler uses amplee to remove the entry from the collection. This works both ways, we can also run an AtomPub web service which issues the right XMPP stanzas according to the operation carried. So a POST on a collection would publish the atom entry to the XMPP server. The web service would obviously expose the Atom feed of the collection.

This is just a stub, but the idea here is to associate both protocols so that they cooperate to expand the audience of your network. It'd be easy to consider allowing people commenting to a blog entry using their XMPP client. You blog entry would for instance advert the XMPP service and node name where to publish items. The user could then subscribe to than node and publish items.

That's one reason why I had written amplee as an AtomPub library that could work outside of the HTTP protocol. RFC 5023 defines the protocol using HTTP but the root idea behind it works well in the context of XMPP and maybe AtomPub is the protocol that will rule them all.