‘Til All Are One

Freedom is the right of all sentient beings

May 17, 2008

IRC on the run

Filed under: Communications, Software, syndication-floss — Sridhar Dhanapalan @ 11:34 am
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

Those who remember my ancient quest for the perfect IRC solution might be interested in these posts by Aaron Toponce explaining how to couple a remote irssi session with GUI notification. I’m still quite happy with my current Bip + Xchat combination, but I’ve always lusted after the 1337ness of irssi. Icecap looks intriguing, but my first instinct tells me that their solution is over-engineered.

Note: If you see duplicated words in the above post, I am aware of them. Wordpress is doing something funny and I can’t figure out what it is. When I get the time I’ll upgrade to 2.5.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Symbian S60v3 (works on my Nokia N95)

January 5, 2007

Single IRC login from multiple locations

Filed under: Communications, Software, syndication-floss — Sridhar Dhanapalan @ 3:16 pm
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

Lucas Nussbaum has posed an eerily familiar question: what is the best way to maintain a single and constant IRC presence, accessible from multiple locations? After some experimentation with different solutions (including Irssi + Irssi-Proxy), I finally settled upon a combination of Bip IRC Proxy, an SSH tunnel and my favourite GUI IRC client. I was planning to write a guide, but I came across an excellent one which explains the whole process. Managing the SSH tunnel is easy with gSTM.

Now I can use the same nick from multiple sites at once. It is completely transparent to other people, so it doesn’t matter where in the world I am provided that I have an Internet connection with an SSH and IRC client. I am not forced to use a particular IRC client, and I don’t have to give up a GUI. I can even stay logged in at both home and work at the same time.

My primary feature request would be for Bip to have the capability to set myself as Away when I have no IRC clients connected. At present, it only provides the option to change my nick in this circumstance, which is too heavy-handed and pollutes the channel with announcements.

September 3, 2006

Maintaining a constant IRC presence

Filed under: Communications, Software, syndication-floss — Sridhar Dhanapalan @ 1:58 pm
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

The following is an e-mail that I posted to the SLUG mailing list:

Subject: [SLUG] Maintaining a constant IRC presence
Date: Sunday 03 September 2006 13:07
From: Sridhar Dhanapalan
To: SLUG list

I am in a situation that I’m sure a lot of SLUG members are in. I am a
prolific user of IRC, using it from one of three machines depending on where
I am. I have three main problems:

  (1) maintaining a single and constant online presence
  (2) maintaining easily accessible chat logs, even when not at the machine
  (3) being notified of messages that suit specific criteria

I currently use Xchat, which means that I am logged in at least two places at
once. Being a fat client, it can beep when I have a message. If I leave it
connected, it keeps logs (I only need the last 1000 lines or so). I can’t do
this with my laptop, though (I need to disconnect when travelling). Also, it
forces me to have a separate login for each machine (and hence each Xchat
session) connected.

Issues (1) and (3) can be addressed by something like irssi-proxy[1], since it
would allow me to use local clients with a single login. I could ssh into a
single system running irssi, which would alleviate both (1) and (2).

I understand that there are plug-ins for irssi that perform a notification
service or run commands on certain cues. If irssi was running locally, I
could do all kinds of things with such a feature. If running remotely,
however, I believe that I am limited to notifications inside the irssi window
itself. This would force me to manually check the window on a frequent basis,
which will either become annoying or be forgotten. I would like to have
audio/visual cues to let me know that my attention is required.

[1] http://www.garion.org/irssi/irssi-proxy.php

The content on this site is © Copyright 2002-2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan. Unless otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.
Creative Commons BY-SA Licence
Powered by Linux and Free Software