<grifferz> unixmen.com is a bit of an odd name isn’t it
<taras> i thought it was going to be unix fanfic
<grifferz> maybe you could write and post some there
<taras> Torvalds cupped Stallman’s bristly sack in his delicate Finnish hand
<taras> “Let’s see if you’ve ‘Hurd’ of this position,” he whispered
<grifferz> 50 Shades of grep
The other day I had a strop about someone carrying on a Twitter conversation in IRC, since I didn’t have a Twitter account and had no idea what people were talking about. It was at that point that I floated the idea of gating the channel members’ tweets into the channel so I would still only have to look at IRC to follow what was going on. To me not really any more anoying or intrusive than announcing our blog posts, which the planet bot already does.
People were generally in favour of it, so I had a look around for libraries. I quickly found the very handy Net::Twitter Perl module and bolted on the Twitter bits to an existing quote bot skeleton.
The result is Twitfolk. It currently lives in #bitfolk on irc.bitfolk.com. The source is in SVN at https://svn.bitfolk.com/repos/twitfolk/.
PS. I am not a very good Perl programmer but it seems to work.
Following an extremely ill-advised and abusive April Fools “joke” by Rob Levin, who basically runs freenode, I have decided that I cannot support a network that condones such behaviour.
My main problem with the “prank” is that it completely disrupted the help channel of another network for a long period of time. In fact the disruption still continues. I don’t think that the people participating in it would see the funny side if it happened to their channels.
The only channel I regularly visited on freenode was #lugradio so this is perhaps not a big deal, but unfortunately by being on the network it does imply a certain level of agreement with its policies.
By the way, it wasn’t even April 1st in most of the world when Levin initiated his “joke”.