We went to the Checkerberry Inn, or more accurately, their Citrus restaurant, recently. I’m reluctant to write about it, the owner said they’re closing the Inn and Citrus at the end of the year. But since it’s only March, here goes.

Checkerberry Inn is as about in the middle of nowhere as you can get in northeastern Indiana. More or less 60 minutes from both Fort Wayne and South Bend.

The decor is an eclectic mish-mash, ranging from hideous to elegant. Try to ignore it.

The food more than makes up for the decor. Steaks, seafood, desserts, appetizers, salads, and sides, all excellent. Their wine list, while not huge, has many nice selections and reasonable prices.

Service was first rate. Despite being a busy Friday night, the owner, one waitress, and one bus boy kept the service right on the beat.

Citrus is more than worth the drive from Fort Wayne. If you’re entertaining guests from out of the area the drive through Amish country will be a treat for them.

Just go before the end of 2006.

I’ve been working this week building a Jabber client into our system.  I’m using the Iris XMPP libraries and the Wildfire server.  I’m ambivalent about open source software at best, but I have to say that Jabber rocks my tiny world.

If you think Jabber is instant messaging, you’re missing the point.  Go to your local library and browse through DJ Adams book Programming Jabber.

I’ve been writing networking software for 20 years now, and Jabber’s as good as I’ve seen.  Wildfire is great.  Iris works really well, but I wish somebody would write some API documentation.  I know, I know, it’s open source, I like it, I use it, I should contribute and write some docs…

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about the jabberd binaries for Windows, either jabberd 1.4 or jabberd 2.  Neither worked on my system.