POE::Component::IRC version 6.00 has just been released on CPAN. I’ve neglected to blog about PoCo::IRC since I started contributing to it, but since a new major release has been rolled out[1], now would be a good time. Also, as it turns out, next May will be the tenth anniversary of the project’s first release.
For the uninitiated, POE::Component::IRC is an event-driven IRC client library built on top of POE. People mostly use it to write bots. Some have made that even easier by creating a simpler interface suited to that task (see Bot::BasicBot).
I became involved in the project about 14 months ago, fixing bugs and adding features. There’ve been about 50 releases during that time, so there’s something for everybody. Following is a list of the most prominent ones.
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I released POE::Component::IRC::Plugin::MegaHAL the other day, a POE::Component::IRC plugin for the esteemed and humorous conversation simulator known as MegaHAL. This makes it very easy to add a MegaHAL brain to an IRC bot. I wrote one and fed him IRC logs of a channel that I frequent, then let him loose online (he’s a “he” because the IRC logs primarily include ramblings from male users). Some examples of his brilliance follow.
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I much prefer reading things in well typeset paperback books than on computer screens. The subject of Perl is no exception. I’ve got quite a few Perl books. Some reviews are in order. I haven’t actually written a book review in many years, so they won’t be very “in-depth”, though.
Oh, and by the way, this, too, is a Perl blog.
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A while ago, I wrote an IRC logger for POE::Component::IRC, which is an IRC client module for Perl. The main challenge I faced was the issue of character encodings. Since IRC is ripe with clients that use different encodings, messages must be reliably decoded before they are written to a file.
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While messing with my Linux console recently, I stumbled upon the console_codes(4) man page. Apparently there are Linux-specific escape codes to redefine the color palette. Awesome! I’ve always preferred the “Tango” terminal palette that recently became the default in gnome-terminal. Now I can use it outside of X.
Everybody likes screenshots: before and after.
Update: Apparently PuTTY supports these escapes as well.
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I am a fan of pretty, easy-to-remember URLs (see your address bar). WordPress, the software this blog runs on, allows for such things, but it requires you to make use of so-called rewrite rules on the web server end.
For Apache users, those rules are supplied with WordPress, and it can even set them up for you automatically in some cases. I, however, use lighttpd, not Apache. WordPress does not come with rewrite rules for lighttpd, so I turned to Google. I don’t remember exactly how it transpired, but I recall most of the example rules I found being broken in one way or another, so I fixed some of them up and came up with ones that work perfectly (as far as I know). I hope they can be useful to others, so here goes.
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Just trying out the syntax highlighter plugin.
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| #!/usr/bin/env perl
print "Oh hi\n"; |
So. A blog. I’ve been meaning to set one up for quite a while. You know, to get some peer review of this mess that I call my thoughts. We’ll see what happens.
