After a short research I descided to use sopel.

Setting up sopel was a pleasure, actually. I executed

pip3.4 install sopel --user
sopel

to install sopel and start it. It then starts an interactive configuration walkthrough and you can configure all the parts.

I then edited the config by hand to exclude most of the available modules:

[core]
enable = help,calc,countdown,isup,tell,uptime,meetbot,clock

and then started it as daemon via sopel -d. That's it? Yes, that's it!

tags: #chat #irc #network #open source #software #tools

Here is why I love mailinglists

I get a lot mail. About 1k mails per day, whereas most of them are mailinglists. Actually, the most of them are from the linux kernel mailinglist and I automatically drop them into a folder where I do not look at that often. But when I need to, I can.

But that's not the point of this post, actually. This post is about why I love mailinglists and think mailinglists are a better way of communication compared to, for example, the IRC chat.

When writing in IRC, you have to type quickly, depending on how many people are in the room and talking at this moment. You can hold discussions with several other people, but as soon as several people talk at the same moment but about different topics, things get nasty. That's not the case on a mailing list.

A discussion often starts with a question, a suggestion or maybe an announcement. Then, people comment on it, the discussion beginns. Because mails are persistent in a way chats will never be, one can talk his time to formulate a response. Discussions are seperated in subthreads, which is way more convenient than talking in IRC, getting from one point to another but never beeing focused on the discussion as one discussion but a chain of.

Also, on mailing lists one can focus on single points others make in their statements by quoting them in a really convenient manner. One can remove parts of the statements of others when replying, which forces everyone to focus on the actual points and not the stuff around it, which may be relevant, but often is not. When people talk over a mailinglist, you can read that afterwards to get a clue what is going on. I often search mailinglists for solutions of my problems rather than wikis or something, where problems are generalized and often do not match with my actual problems.

And, of course, if a mailinglist is open, one can post to it without beeing subscribed, which is really a good thing if you want to solve a problem which occours once but never again. Example: I try to configure my mail client at the moment, my offlineimap configuration, actually. I had several issues (related to eachother, of course), so I posted on the mailinglist for offlineimap, where people help me. After the problem is solved (it is not by now...) I will forget this mailinglist again, as I'm not subscribed to it. I don't care afterwards about offlineimap, because it should just work for me and that's it.

So, these are my points why mailinglists are a great tool for getting problems solved, doing discussions and the like. Please note that I do not think the IRC should be abandoned in favour of mailinglists. I love writing with people in IRC, too. But for solving problems, mailinglists are way better for me.

tags: #mail #mailinglists #social #irc #chat

irc_dump.sh (the repo) / ircdump (the script-call) is a short shell script which dumps your text in all joined irc channels you previously joined. It uses ii as irc tool.

If you want to paste something, you just invoke it:

ircdump I like trains

and it dumps the text directly into all available IRC channels. Of course, you must do some setup right before!

You have to use ii to create/join the appropriate channels. You should create them at /tmp/ircdump or set the appropriate path right in the script. Once you connected to a server and joined the appropriate channels, the script does everything else for you. Note that it doesn't paste to the server channel, just to the channels you joined.

Use it with care! You will paste to _all IRC channels you joined with ii.

People gonna hate you!

Update: There is now a repo at my github account which contains utils when dealing with ii: irctools.sh.

tags: #programming #chat #irc #shell