151–160 of 178 posts
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I'm sorry to say this, but all issues you describe are instances of PEBKAC.
Can you suggest a client which: 1) handles ssh tunnels for me after being configured 2) Automatically handles notifications that I'm being talked to 3) Can retrieve chatlogs from when I'm offline 4) Handles afking automatically 5) Encrypts chats between people for the mac? It would be really useful.
It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time. Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.
Having written an IRC client and several bots, I actually like the simplicity of the protocol.
The idiosyncracies that you have to get into when you want to write a proper client for humans, and what you actually have to worry about if your aim is just writing tools that use IRC (internal deployment bots, or whatnot) are miles apart. The vast majority of users will only be interested in the second.
Just follow the RFCs for the features that you need, and ignore everything else.
Anyway, IRC is plainly simple if you look at it's competition. I can use IRC with netcat without any significant effort; there are not a lot of other things I can say that about.
It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time. Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.
Having written an IRC client and several bots, I actually like the simplicity of the protocol.
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Can you suggest a client which: 1) handles ssh tunnels for me after being configured 2) Automatically handles notifications that I'm being talked to 3) Can retrieve chatlogs from when I'm offline 4) Handles afking automatically 5) Encrypts chats between people for the mac? It would be really useful.
1-4) Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line). 5) Use PGP/GPG and email if you don't trust your IRC server. If you do, just use SSL. Since this is presumably an internal server, why wouldn't you trust it? There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one…
Which doesn't resolve issue 1 (since the server is not available outside of 127.0.0.1 on the ssh host), or issue 3 since it can't see what happened when I was offline (though the bouncer idea is a good one, if fundamentally flawed in that it requires its own full time connection to the IRC server). My computer travels with me, and can not maintain a full time connection to the internet.
> There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).
Why? Not everyone in the company needs access to client data. Why would I not want encryption options? The marketing folks don't need to know the internal hostnames of a client. The sales folks don't need a copy of customer chats while troubleshooting an issue.
> not sure why you would want one
Seems like a trip into OS holy war territory that I have no desire to get into.
I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us. IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed comp…
If you need secure IRC, use SILC.
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I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message. Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.
Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.
The best way to access hipchat that I've seen so far was just a jabber client - xmpp seems to be the backend of their service.
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1-4) Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line). 5) Use PGP/GPG and email if you don't trust your IRC server. If you do, just use SSL. Since this is presumably an internal server, why wouldn't you trust it? There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one…
> Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line). Which doesn't resolve issue 1 (since the server is not available outside of 127.0.0.1 on the ssh host), or issue 3 since it can't see what happened when I was offline (though the bouncer idea is a good one, if fundamentally flawed in that it requires its own f…
You can only access this IRC server from the machine it is running on... but anyone in the company has highly priveleged access to it? But you can't run a client on the machine itself? And why would you be running a BNC locally? Who the hell set this system up, and do they run your mail system like this too?
There are so many PEBKACs here they are hard to count.
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Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.
The web client is a bit "special" though - after a day or two of running it with 4+ channels open the history will build up and jquery functions will start freezing the interaction. Flash/AIR client is much better, but... it's Flash/AIR (copy/paste issues, different set of fonts, message notifications not clear). The best way to access hipchat that I've seen so far was just a jabber client - xmpp seems to be the back…
And my coworkers really love the web client. And some use xmpp. Many of us regularly use the iOS app. I guess that's one of the strength's of hipchat, the variety of access methods that all feel basically first-class. (and one person on our team even uses the SMS integration.)
I hope IRC isn't dead, I'm hoping to productize my replacement for cia.vc ( http://elfga.com/notify ) for startups
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Hey dude! You reviewed an mIRC script I wrote around 1997. It was called DynDNS and it was for updating your IP address with dyn.ml.org, that old service that would give dial up users with changing IP addresses a static DNS CNAME. You liked it and gave it a positive review, and at 15, that was really huge for me and kept me hungry to keep coding. So, thanks!
Wow, quite a testimony. Thank you! Is this it? http://www.hawkee.com/view.php?file_id=205