literal thoughts

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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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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