So, the past few nights I've been working on a little IRC bot which can do various things. I'm using the PircBot framework and so far, it's really been easy to create some cool stuff.
The framework is all event-driven so in my Bot class, I can override the methods will deal with receiving messages, private message, people joining, etc. So far, the bot can do a Google search using the APIs and some little things like telling the time and giving the status on various things.
One fairly interesting thing I'm doing in it is having a sort of TODO list management over IRC. You can tell the bot to add certain things to your list and it will keep track of them. Currently, it's just a big HashMap which writes itself out to a file when the bot is disconnected. On connection, it reads that file and repopulates itself so there is very primitive persistence.
Right now, I have some hard-coded stuff in there but I'm hoping to clean that up tonight or tomorrow and release the code, just to see if anyone is interested.
For whatever reason, bots are on my mind right now. I'm hoping to work on an AIM one next.
There are many reasons to envy Scoble. He's working at a company which changes the world. He has an amazing amount of contacts involved in the computer industry. He writes what he feels even if it has gotten him into trouble.
But, there is one thing which I feel really bad for him. This:
Ahh, complicated family life. Every two weeks we fly down to the valley to see my son and hang out with friends and family.
I find it hard to be away from my two for the week a month I'm up in the Bay. Luckily, I work from home so that makes up for lots of time.
Looks like Brent is adding support for accessing RSS feeds via https URLs. That's going to be quite useful for me personally.
Diego has an interesting take on the WASTE announcement and subsequent disappearance yesterday.
Just as with Gnutella, Nullsoft released something that AOL pulled out but not before the code got into the wild. Heh. I think now I understand why the name. I can imagine the nullsoft guys with this thing working and AOL totally oblivious to it, maybe even letting it go to...yes, exactly. :)
Salon looks at the Coors Light twins (You'll need to go through the day pass process). The premise could be something interesting but this just doesn't do the job. Here's a snippet:
From my research I learned that men find real-life relationships are hard enough. All those post-coital responsibilities -- holding, talking, breakfast, phone calls, talking, commitments, talking, anniversaries and valentines, plus all that talking -- can really stress a guy out. So the less they have to act like decent human beings in their fantasies, the better. Even the most universal of male fantasies -- having two women at once -- turns nightmarish when interrupted by thoughts of emotional obligations. (Does this mean I have to call both of them the next day?) Their fantasies are about what could happen in a world free from the rules of wives and girlfriends (and, obviously, the rules of attraction) and from the reality that two identical women are biological twins. Even if they are really, really hot.
And by research, she means asking a few of her male friends about their thoughts. Bleh...
Mark Morford reminds us of all the positive signs in the world right now.
No, this isn't a post about sitting at the table with my boy today. Instead, it's a new documentary about the good doctor, Hunter S. Thompson. The premiere is going to be in Vegas and it will mark the first time Thompson will stay overnight in Vegas since he wrote Fear and Loathing...
David at GreenCine Daily takes a look at a new movie, Gone, which deals with the aftermath of the Rapture. From the post, I would assume that David and I have a similar upbringing.
Through this post, I found Long Pauses which is another blog I'll be keeping track of. I really should get these out my bookmakrs and put them up somewhere so I can point to them for others.
AkwaIRC is an OS X native IRC client. I tried it out for a few minutes and it really seems overwhelming in terms of icons and things on the screen. I don't think I could use it fulltime though I might give it another chance tomorrow.
One of the older sites still using Manila, Cogworks always has some cool stuff to read about and lust after. Some examples:
Greg Costik has made available a game he created last year but didn't get any interest from publishers. Look here to get the cards and rules in PDF format instead of .doc.
Basically the game involves having players take roles as VC's, invest and then try to take the company public.
KoKoRo is a farily new P2P / mobile gadgets blog based in Japan. It's done by the creator of jnutella. Lots of interesting things to see.
There are many times I wish I could spend some time over in Japan, at least for a little bit.
Something for later: 2002 P2P Conference in Japan with some free PDF's available for download.
Nullsoft has released WASTE, both an application and protocol, which allows secure distributed communication between a small number of trusted groups of users.
Unfortunately, it's only available on Windows now but it is released under the GPL so the source is there for porting.
Liz at mamamusings has put together a summer social software reading list. I've read one book, Emergence, on the list but I wouldn't be surprised if I picked up a few more on the list in the next few months.
We watched XXX tonight. It wasn't bad for an action adventure. It did seem to drag a bit but overall, an enjoyable flick to watch.
Today, I found a cool, new (to me at least) blog, The Millions. It's a blog about books, being done by a writer here in LA who also works in a bookstore. Talk about my dream life!
I've already found at least 5 new books I want to get after reading many of the posts. It's too bad there isn't a RSS feed. I think I need to put together a personal bookmark section for sites such as this which I can't follow via NetNewsWire.
C. Max Magee also has a baseball blog that has just started. His name is familiar and I finally figured out from where. He wrote an essay in Filthy.
Great article about All Consuming and how all of the data is aggregated and sorted through.
There is lots of info available and all it takes is an idea which brings it all together to build something incredible.
Joshua looks at the downside of having peers and bosses read your blog. Currently, I'm one of only a couple bloggers at work. I purposefully don't write too much about work for my own reasons so I wouldn't be too worried if more folks from work read this.
Looks like another python-based cms / blogging tool. Here's the announcement. It's brought to you from the creators of Cornerhost, a hosting provider for many blogs.
Well, that was ugly. The Ducks looked like they hadn't played in a while and the Devils were their usual machine-like self.
The Ducks have lots of room for improvement and hopefully they can start showing it on Thursday.
Joi Ito has finished a bot which checks his Technorati cosmos every 10 minutes for new incoming links. Sounds pretty cool. I don't think it would be to difficult to do in Java as well.
Leonard has posted roundup's of games and software. Forget checking out the latest on freshmeat, let Leonard do the work.
Phillip gives a rundown on the various modules which deal with dates and times in Python.
I personally use the mxDateTime module. It has really helped out quite a bit.
Brent has posted a cool looking screenshot for a new way to display info in NetNewsWire.
Cool film blog put together by the folks at GreenCine. They advertise themselves as an alternative to NetFlix, focusing on hard-to-find DVD's instead of the mass-market ones. I found this via Kottke's links...
Steve released a little app called Jabber2Google. It allows you to add a Jabber bot to your friends list and give Google a query.
Through this, I found out about Smack, yet another Java Jabber framework.
Too... much... stuff... to... investigate.... Must... call... for... help...
I went and saw X2 tonight and it was really good. Definitely better than the first one and I liked the first one a lot. It set up a third movie quite well and I'm sure they will have one.
Mena's post is awesome! I'm thinking that hanging out with the Trott's would be quite cool.
I went to college at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. It's a small, religious (obviously!) school in between the Gold Coast and Cabrini Green. If you know Chicago, it's right on the corner of Chicago and LaSalle. Needless to say things were interesting there and I didn't actually finish or graduate but that's a post for another day.
Since my major was Theology, I am still fairly sensitive to discussions involving it even though my personal beliefs aren't the same as they were back then. In reading many of the reviews of Reloaded, I've noticed that many of the authors write of Neo's Christlike qualities which I can see and don't think it is too much of a stretch.
Unfortunately, one thing which has been done numerous times is calling the last book of the Bible, Revelations. It has always been a pet peeve of mine since many church-goers do the same thing. The book is Revelation. It's singular, not plural. There was only one given to John, not multiples.
Yay!! Gregg is back! Check out this incredible post on the greatness of the White Stripes.
I found a couple of sites today with lots of good stuff on the intersection of popular culture and life, PopPolitics and PopMatters. These sites might not be new to you but they are to me and finding cool new sites in 2003 always feels good.
A list of the Critical and Academic writings on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
I found the following essay, The Monsters Next Door, which is quite a piece of writing. It's a dialogue between a father and son with Buffy as the common ground for communication. While the whole thing is great, the last paragraphs really gave some great info for both parents and kids on communication. I realize my kids are only 4 and 2 but that doesn't mean I am not already fearful of becoming my parents.
Jon Madisons has released the latest version of JaimBizzle, an AIM bot framework built on top of Jaimlib. Definitely another thing to check out.
Aaron requests comments about his idea for a Web-based journal of interesting software and developments. Think of it as CodeCon on the Web.
i think this could really be cool. As I mentioned in my email to Aaron, you can only learn so much about development through mailing lists and blogs. Sometimes a more formal look at an app makes all the difference.
New MacDevCenter article on using Java and regex to parse and transform an .ics file. Human-readable formats are always a good thing.
Scoble gets a refresher course on using powerful tools to get a job done. He also talks about beginning to use the browser less. With an aggregator and a weblog publishing app, the general pages I have open in my browser are for documentation rather than surfing various sites. That's a powerful change especially for those who have argued that web apps will become the standard.
I think what has happened instead is that developers have included the Web in their apps instead of trying to make their apps work perfectly on the Web. To me, that's something better.
To say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) is a metaphor of my marriage would be wrong but to say that the show hasn't had an impact on it would also be wrong. Cathy and I were married in December of '96 and Buffy premiered in March of '97. We started watching it from that first episode and never looked back.
To me, it was a show that had great dialogue, good action and generally interesting story arcs. I've always been a sucker for long-term arcs in a story. That's probably why I've liked shows such as Twin Peaks and The X-Files.
Anyway, Buffy became an appointment for us to watch each week. No matter how tough of a day we had, on Tuesday night at 8pm, we watched Buffy. Even after Julia was born, we'd watch Buffy at 8. We began to worry about what we were going to do once Julia got to two but luckily I won a Tivo and tragedy was overted.
Now, we generally don't watch it at 8 but we do still watch it together. I realize it sounds bad to make time to watch a television show together but with two small children, we'll take what we can get.
The finale last night was good, perhaps not the great one that many wanted but it still was satisfying. Not all storylines could be dealt with and not all questions could be answered in one hour. Personally, I'm just happy they didn't kill Buffy AGAIN. And the show ended on a positive note of empowerment for young girls everywhere. And to me, the father of a daughter, that's a good thing.
I purposefully didn't read any of the articles yesterday about the end of the show in fear of spoilers. I wanted to go into the finale spoiler-free. I tried to keep a list of the articles but couldn't so I was very happy to see TV Tattle having a great list of articles and final thoughts.
Also, check out Aaron's experience of taking nearly eleven years of televsion (3 shows, Buffy, Angel and Firefly) and watching them in three months.
Cool looking tutorials combining Cocao and OpenGL. This would give you the necessary tools to build a relatively cool game for OS X.
Interesting look at Reloaded as well as a comprehensive look at other movies which used a combination of theology and science fiction.
Mr. Lizard writes about censorship thru the lens of what happened to comics back in the 50's. I think he wrote this earlier this year but I just found it today.
It seems you only need a glass of orange juice, two glasses of milk and forty-seven pints of Guinness a day to get everything you need. Found thanks to joe
Excellent essay about many of the philosophical ideas inside the first two movies. Warning, there are spoilers here.
The fact that The One comes from the machine world is a brilliant way to write around the fact that Keanu Reeves can't act.
I've been more interested in the ideas behind the Matrix the last few days. Perhaps it has something to do with reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy last week.
Leonard points to Pyblagg, a cool looking aggregator of Python-related weblogs. Definitely something to keep my eye on.
But it is a public declaration of something that I've been feeling for a while: I like hacking in Objective-C more than I like hacking in Java.
I expect that this presentation will amuse some people and annoy others.
Another interview with Brent gives us a little more background on Papa as well as a picture. Of course, Brent also talks about the greatest app in the world.
One of the things I chuckled at last night during Reloaded was when Trinity jumped on the motorcycle with the KeyMaker. It was funny because the bike was a Ducati which we named our re-worked build system last summer. We were looking for names and one of our programmers sugggested it as he rides motorcycles.
Everytime, I start to think about looking into Cocoon again, I generally read something like Russell's post. It seems that you either love it or hate it. There doesn't seem to be much room in between.
I remember building a web app prototype a few years ago using the pre-pipeline version of Cocoon. It worked really well and the combination of xml/xslt really did the job for what was wanted. Unfortunately, the prototype never made it live and next time I looked at Cocoon, the pipelines had been introduced.
I went and saw it tonight. I thought it was really well done. I'll have more to say on it eventually but check out Matrix Essays in the meantime.
Charles lays down the law when it comes to starting an Open Source project. Basically they boil down to having something which actually works (even if it isn't fully functional) and having instructions on how to get things running.
Jericho almost follows these guidelines but I need to get more docs out there as well as commit the code I'm using to actually post this to a MovableType blog.
While cruising Eric's site, I came across a link to Karl's post about some cool IRC bots including an aggregatorbot. He also pointed to PircBot which looks like something to waste some minutes on.
We use IRC at work and it would seem that having a bot or two that could either answer FAQ's or do little tasks would be a great time-saver.
Jeremy looks at the seemingly mini-bubble happening in Silicon Valley. While CollabNet isn't in the Valley, it is interesting to see how things might be getting better.
Just go read Sam's excuse. It's basically mine as well. Both kids were sick last week which generally means that none of us have slept very well. I am hoping to sneak in a viewing tonight after everyone goes to bed. We'll see how that goes.
I finished Steven Johnson's Emergence the other day. I really enjoyed it. The idea of a global brain has fascinated me. My first exposure to this was back in the mid-90's when I read Kevin Kelly's Out of Control. Instead of ant, he looked at the world of bee's to show this idea.
I think I'm going to try and find my copy and read it on vacation later this summer. Next up though is Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy.
There's only a couple more season finales that I really care about, mainly Buffy so I thought I'd give a little rundown of what I thought about the ones I watched.
Man, after writing all that down, I know see how much television Tivo allows me to watch.
Buzz over at Sci-Fi Hi-Fi has some complaints directed at Apple. All are good but these stuck out to me:
I must have missed the big post by Ev on the history of the Blogger API and it's relationship to the MetaWeblog API.
Some very interesting comments especially as it relates to the future.
