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May 14, 2006

Sharing "seen" data between IRC bots

I'm on a number of IRC channels each (theoretically) devoted to some kind of topic or other. There's a lot of overlap between them in terms of membership, and some of them also share utility bots, even occasionally across different networks. However, it's not perfect. Two channels I'm on are #london.pm (the channel for the London Perl Mongers) and #perl (AKA "THE #perl"), both part of irc.perl.org, and which have a high crossover percentage with each other for obvious reasons.

It's common practice to find out when someone was last around by asking one of the bots "seen Somebody?" - the bot will then respond something like "Somebody was last seen on #perl 3 days, 7 hours, 52 minutes ago saying 'You what?'" This, however, is limited to a per-channel basis for the two bots. If Somebody was in #perl three days ago but hasn't been in #london.pm for six months, then dipsy and purl are going to give conflicting answers to that question when asked.

#london.pm's main bot is dipsy, while #perl's is purl. Both were originally based on infobot code (which now appears to be often referred to as "the venerable infobot", which should tell you a lot), but have seen a lot of modification and custom hacks. (dipsy eventually got a total rewrite, and it's been proposed for purl for a long time although nothing's ever happened.)

Ideally speaking, there should be some sort of infobot data format which bots could send to each other, perhaps with a safety measure in the form of a secret key which would never actually be transmitted - in pseudocode key := salt( secret + msg ).

Posted by hex at 11:48 AM |

May 8, 2006

If only I spoke Hovito

< bjoern_> you dare posting RSS .91 on #swhack ??
< bjoern_> you should upgrade to RSS 1.1 ASAP!
< thelsdj> i prefer rss 3.4
< thelsdj> i found the specification in dave winer's 
           trashcan
< bjoern_> what were you looking for in the trashcan?
< thelsdj> i believe i was looking for the mythical 
           opml spec that makes it useful
< EarleMartin> oh, he keeps that in the room on the 
               other side of the pit, with the floor tiles 
               that launch blowdarts out of the walls
< EarleMartin> throw me the spec, I throw you the whip!!
< thelsdj> yea but supposedly you can just go in through 
           the backdoor that says 'stay out'
< EarleMartin> dammit, who keeps leaving that open

Posted by hex at 1:45 AM |