It’s almost over. Time flies even faster as we get closer to the end of 2010, and apparently there’s a lot to summarize despite we’re not in the finish line yet!

This has been a particularly difficult year for me in a more personal sense, and I’ve faced some trials I won’t speak about and then some, but I’ve also learned new things in the road — things that may be of greater use to me in the future. There’s really a lot that could be said about this year but I’ll restrict it to computer stuff to avoid boring the audience too much bore the audience as much as possible.

Freenode's staff and a group of users have been busy testing ircd-seven, the ircd which will eventually replace the aging collection of ugly hacks known as hyperion-ircd. So far it seems I've been the only one who's found and reported bugs in channel management code (account bans + forwarding, in particular), which is a pity; we need more testers!

Occasionally, the server instances get restarted and some people complain.

I think I cannot complain, because I just got my own 10 seconds of fame. It's a pity that I didn't have a better one-liner or a larger audience for the occasion!

<@shadowmaster> eh.

(And if you don't use freenode or IRC at all, you won't understand any of this.

<+shadowmaster> ... I have acl, cs_info, and ns_info aliases on irssi.
<+shadowmaster> for some reason I tend to type ns_info when I want cs_info (for /msg ChanServ INFO)
<+shadowmaster> maybe I should just write a script for the /info command that decides which one is the correct service for me.

So here's a quick 5-minutes hack to patch my incompetence. This little irssi script introduces the /AINFO command for querying freenode's services (which are from the Atheme package) for information on a nickname or channel. I don't need to check whether I am querying the correct service anymore. Yays.

• atheme-info.pl (1.4 KB)

The installation procedure is the same as with any other irssi scripts.

Some time ago I was searching for a legendary irssi script that would allow me to use commands like /1, /2, etc. to switch to the respective window numbers without having to type the complete /window command. Although I didn't succeed in my search, one of the freenode staffers gave me a little command to populate the command aliases list with some adequate (99) entries.

That's very nice except that the config file becomes a bit larger.

I was bored last night so I decided to reinvent the wheel and write such a script that doesn't require any client configuration changes to bind the same aliases automagically on startup. I am pretty sure it already existed, but since I couldn't find it...

• window-cmd.pl (1.4 KB)

The installation procedure is the same as with any other irssi scripts.