'Til All Are One

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)

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.

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/​i​r​s​s​i​/​i​r​s​s​i​-​p​r​o​x​y​.​php