I help out now and then with little bits of code for BMotion, the main coder is JamesOff. It is a wonderful set of scripts for AI on eggdrops. Sometimes bmotion can just spark. Check this conversation I had, both NoTopic and MonicaOff are running bmotion.
(@ NoTopic) Uh oh, it's mark.
(+ znx) listen nt .. im tired of your shit
( *) znx kicks the crap out of nt
( *) NoTopic passes it on to james
(+ znx) um
(+ znx) :[
(@MonicaOff) cheer up mak
(@MonicaOff) *hugs*
(+ znx) aww
(+ znx) i love you mon
( *) znx hugs
(@MonicaOff) Hehe, want to go out on a date someplace? 
(+ znx) sure!
(+ znx) where would you like to go mon?
(@MonicaOff) Amsterdam.
(+ znx) ooo
( *) znx books the flights
(+ JamesOff) sounds nice 
(@ NoTopic) oh categorically abyss what do you think, talking ass?
(+ znx) your just annoyed im not taking you nt
( *) znx shows nt the flight tickets
(@ NoTopic) ooooh, impressive!
(+ znx) !!
( *) NoTopic steals the flight tickets and runs off
(@ NoTopic) ALL MINE NOW^@~#%~£~$$~*£$$$
(+ znx) W T F
( *) NoTopic sells the flight tickets on ebay
(+ znx) NOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooo
( *) znx sulks at nt
(@ NoTopic) what
Of course sometimes bmotion is just plain evil!
Whilst the amount of trolls on IRC can be annoying, every so often one turns up that can leave you laughing and questioning if it really was a troll at all:
(>) bugaboo (53e43825@webchat.mibbit.com) #php
(bugaboo) Ahaha! Tables > CSS!
(bugaboo) Wait, wrong troll.
( *) bugaboo flips the pages to P
(bugaboo) Oh yes! Python > PHP!
( *) bugaboo waits for someone to care.
( *) bugaboo loses patience
( *) bugaboo checks Advanced Topics
(bugaboo) PHP uses inconsistent function names, blah blah, design,
blah blah, boring... oh... "is bad at recursion depth"...
Wait, what the hell is recursion.
(bugaboo) Arrghhh I fail again!
( *) bugaboo vanishes in a puff of smoke
(<) bugaboo (53e43825@webchat.mibbit.com) () #php
Haha, super !
Most terminals these days have the ability to click on a URL and then it opens in your browser. Needless to say some terminals aren’t as simple to setup as others. I commonly use URxvt and initially didn’t think that it was possible to do. However URxvt has a rather nice Perl plug-in which expands its range of abilities. So to setup, edit or create ~/.Xdefaults and add these lines to it:
urxvt*urlLauncher: firefox
urxvt*matcher.button: 1
urxvt*perl-ext-common: default,matcher,searchable-scrollback
urxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]
Now you need to make this work:
# xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults
You may need to add this command to ~/.xinitrc or whatever startup script that your desktop uses. Most systems should automatically load it when your X starts.
Whilst I chose to use firefox as the browser you can set it to any other browser, indeed if you are using Gnome a trick to use the default browser is:
urxvt*urlLauncher: gnome-open
This is actually rather handy because you can click on a variety of links not just web ones and it will open the correct tool for those links. Thanks to Nion’s blog I found out that you can colour the URLs too! Finally to those that wish to be mouseless, how about Bart’s blog for an awesome example of the abilities of URxvt!
I have been a part of a IRC network called Void Networks (VoidNet for short!). It isn’t on a par with the big four and probably never will be but that isn’t what small IRC networks are for. Ultimately smaller networks can provide things that the larger ones can. They can be responsive to their userbase due to the fact that it is smaller, requests can normally be fufilled. They can be more stable, I know that this sounds strange when you compare the networks that some of the IRCd’s that EFNet et al sit on but smaller networks hopefully aren’t the target for large scale DDOS or other such activities. A final thing that they are useful for is giving people a leg up into the world of the Oper. Few people understand what it is that Opers do, I’m sure most still think that they are just glorified channel management.
I put together an automated relationship map not to long ago. It is pretty good if I say so myself, you can check it out for yourself. The map is generated by a simple python IRC bot, which joins and then uses graphviz to produce the images. I will need to do a short piece on how I put the bot together, its amazingly simple really. I also put together a Geomap, this is basically another method of seeing not only how the servers are linked but where in the world those servers actually are. One final thing I did was produce a bot (again in python) which collects the statistics for our stats pages.
The server I run is now aptly named irc.znx.no (used to be irc.trance.net but no longer!). You can connect via SSL because we are all using the latest ratbox IRCd (another howto I should finish up).