Sedating irssi’s nick highlight for microblogging messages //at 17:13 //by abe

My favourite IRC client is irssi. I like it so much that I even use it for all my instant messaging needs. The gateway of choice between irssi and mostly Jabber is Bitlbee.

I also microblog on identi.ca, a free (free as in AGPL) microblogging service based on laconi.ca. In comparsion to the non-free and proprietary Twitter microblogging, identi.ca has all the features which Twitter turned off already again.

For me the most important feature of Twitter was tweeting via XMPP (aka Jabber). Since Twitter turned off that feature, Twitter increasingly fast became unimportant for me. Identi.ca still has this feature and cultivates it further. So usually don’t visit the identi.ca website that often anymore but get the microblogging stream of my friends via XMPP and Bitlbee directly into my irssi.

Although this is very convenient, it has one big disadvantage: In comparison to an IRC channel, not only notices directed to me personally but every incoming notice beeps, because Bitlbee sends them either as /MSG or prepends my nick name. For normal IRC communication /MSG should beep, and you can’t make exceptions for that so easily in irssi.

I asked on #bitlbee (OFTC) and on #irssi (IRCNet). On #irssi funnily the first answer was “I tried that yesterday, no success” from Shrike. — So I’m not alone, although Shrike uses Jaiku and not identi.ca. Then I had the idea to get Bitlbee to not prepend my nick name for all those identi.ca notices which go into the &bitlbee channel — but I didn’t find a way to configure this in Bitlbee. But Shrike found a way to do this with already existing irssi plugins:

The trigger.pl plugin (available e.g. in Debian’s irssi-scripts package or on scripts.irssi.org) can add triggers which replace parts of the message. So the following three lines helped me to reduce the noise microblogging causes in my irssi:

/script load trigger
/trigger add -publics -masks 'identica!update@identi.ca' -channels '&bitlbee' -regexp "^XTaran: " -replace ''
/trigger save

And on the command line I just needed a symlink to automatically start the trigger plugin on irssi startup:

ln -vis /usr/share/irssi/scripts/trigger.pl ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/

So now again only the important messages beep. :-)

Today is ircbot-day //at 18:33 //by abe

Today is ircbot-day. Let’s worship all those ircbots who serve us with information, announce new stories or submissions, keep an eye on our servers, annoy dkg, mirabile and others ;-), or just turn someone’s head.

So today I think of

• jabba — for announcing every Symlink story, announcing any Symlink submission to the Symlink editors and for bothering anyone who says “re” on #symlink or #lugs. ;-)
• gaby — for never letting an eye from any of the ETHZ Departement of Physics’ computers and for probably being the most sexy chatteress on #lugs. ;-)
• MelOne — for always knowing what we said on #symlink.
• blogbot — for remembering all our blogs and a little backlog on #blosxom
• captu (aka Copyra Pasta) — for helping us to not paste a lot of waste into #lugs.
• blutbot — for I just can’t remember what he did and what he could do. Maybe I also don’t want to know.
• And of course also a thanks to all these NickServs, ChanServs, MemoServs and StatServs out there in the net for their ubiquitous services.

Thanks to all of you not war-making ircbots for existing. Without you, IRC would be less funny. ;-)

Pisg User Manager released with pisg 0.67 //at 02:01 //by abe

With the release of pisg 0.67 this Thursday also the Pisg User Manager (PUM) I started has been released and become part of the pisg distribution. (See also Credits and Changelog.)

The days of addalias are counted — pum is coming //at 02:01 //by abe

Although it’s quite a while ago that I wrote version 3.0 (the initial version) of pum — the pisg user manager — and that it’s even longer ago that Myon and I decided that the current pisg user editing -ehm- web frontend called addalias needs to be rewritten from scratch or replaced, only now pum seems to get ready for the pisg community:

Myon asked me yesterday, if I could send him and Azoff a copy. So I did. When I today asked for feedback, Myon pointed me to Azoff’s WebCVS and I was quite surprised (positively) that someone continued my work on pum, added new pisg features and raised the version number to 3.1.

So today Azoff and me worked further on pum, me mostly fixing some of my own old bugs and typos. I’m sure, we’ll have a publishable version quite soon. So the days of addalias are counted…

ii: irc improved — or just ircii without “irc”? //at 02:01 //by abe

On #debian.de nion pointed me to a new, ingeniously sick project of him: ii or irc improved, an IRC client with a radically new concept: Input is a FIFO, output is directly into the logfiles organised in a irc/$SERVERNAME/$CHANNELNAME directory hierachy. You just irc by reading the logs and piping to some FIFO.

He immediately took my only half serious comment that he could use loco for nick highlighting.

Looking further through his blog, I mentioned, he was experimenting with IRC clients not only since ii. He was trying WeeChat instead of irssi.