I've moved into the dorm at RIT and am starting to get settled. After getting all of my registrations and stuff taken care of, I took a walk around the tunnel system that connects all of the dorms. It was kinda creepy; above ground, there's a loosely organized chaos caused by other students moving into the dorms, but underground the world has an eerie silence. I saw only five people when I walked the tunnels from the Nathaniel Rochester Hall (hereby known as the NRH) all the way down to a place called the Northeast Technical Assistance Center (NETAC).

Not quite sure what they do there, but it looked like the offices of a homeland security governed department. According to the website, they provide services for the deaf and hard of hearing. That's cool. RIT has a larger population of deaf students than most schools, making it quickly apparent to me that I need to learn sign language. It seems like I'm missing all of the best jokes :p

So for now I'm just hanging out in the dorm, meeting people as they appear in the hallways. I'll take pictures soon. Until then, you'll have to take my word for it.

Peace.

As you may have noticed, somebody posted a request to create an IRC channel for digg the other day. I checked it out on freenode and found that someone had made an extremely annoying bot to read the RSS feed. It would flood the channel once every hour with a copy of the current feed. Not cool.

I decided that I wanted to write a bot that allows users to search an archived copy of the feed dating back a few weeks. I had two reasons for this: The search on digg.com is terrible and in a usability context, most people will only use such a thing on IRC when they are having a conversation about an old article and want a link without having to switch to a browser.

It was around two in the morning so I wasn't up to writing an efficient bot, just a working one. I decided that Perl would be the right tool for the job. After a few hours of hacking away at the Net::IRC library, I had something resembling a working script.

The bot is divided into two scripts, slurp and shovel. Slurp reads the RSS feed and throws any new articles in a MySQL database. Shovel is the actual IRC bot that just sits in a channel and waits for somebody to type !slurp <phrase>. Once every hour, on the hour, a cron job fires off slurp and retrieves the feeds from digg, slashdot, and wired. I wrote slurp in a fairly modular fashion, so adding another feed is just a matter of changing the command line arguments.

There is currently no system in place to remove old entries from the database. I figure that I'll just see how long it lasts before I need to start expiring stuff.

I am currently running shovelbot in the ##digg channel on freenode and in #digg on efnet. I'm not sure how long shovelbot will last on efnet because I have been k-lined for 72 hours without a reason. I don't really care because tomorrow I'm moving to RIT where I'll have a nice new class B IP for every one of my boxes.

Anyway, I'll be posting a writeup of Shovel and Slurp in the code section as soon as I get some free time. With orientation coming up this week, I'm not sure how much free time I'll have. Perhaps I'll hang out at Java Wally's for a while and work on it.

Peace.

Google Talk

has been released! It's really just a nice little Jabber client with a voice chat extension, but nonetheless... This rocks! It's about time somebody push AOL out of the instant messenger market. On Google's developer page for Talk, there is mention of SIP capability coming soon. In other words: Free VoIP for everyone!

In all of their plotting and planning over Google Talk, they left out one major feature... A Mac OSX client! Currently any Jabber compatible messenger can connect and use text chat, but voice chat is completely unsupported. How about some help from the Gaim developers? Or Adium? Or Apple!?

Peace.

Ok, so here's the scoop... I built a new site with drupal and it was cool, but generic and didn't allow me to add arbitrary content with an easy url... It ended up being /node/21/view or something. So I built a new site and new layout and left the blog part out. At this point, two things happened... I realized that the blog adds a great deal of content to the site and I also missed my blog a bit... I like to have a place to just write down my thoughts and ideas.

So, I've re-implemented the blog within the new site. I think it looks really good. Feel free to leave comments and let me know what pieces still aren't working. The new site I built had a few modifications to my little framework and I've had to modify some things in the blog code to get it all working smoothly.