Sunday, October 24, 2010

Tea and IRC: Autumn again.

I'm sitting on a couch, with cushions and a blanket, wrapped in pajamas with my favorite black sweater, thick burgundy over-the-knee socks, and long grey arm warmers. I have a mug of PG Tips and some peanut butter toast. It's about 8 pm and in an hour, some of us are going to play handball. (We played until 3am last night, against the big Art Museum wall; I still had on most of my pirate clothes from the scavenger hunt.) Autumn life is slow, full and slumbersome.

In the last two days, I've found two things at Digital Ops that I'd thought long lost: my favorite fountain pen, an Ohto Tasche with Noodler's Nightshade ink, and my camera. While I've missed photographing most of this gorgeous October, I intend to make up for that starting tonight. Ann Arbor's October is the best month anywhere. Here is my soundtrack.

I've managed to spend a lot of my time this autumn outside, and as the light dies, I'm staying out of the hackerspace more to savor its last golden dregs. We've been hashing out bylaws for the organization, and figuring out where we want to head for the future. In the meantime, I'm learning to program IRC bots in Python.

This deeper exploration of IRC, or chatrooms-plus, is my latest attempt at getting presence logging up for the 'space. I tried with QR codes, but my hilariously convoluted scheme was thwarted when I couldn't find free webhosting that still lets you just type HTML in a box and have done with it. Things have come a long way since 9th grade, I guess; everybody has fancy templates and drag-and-drop GUI-based widget tomfoolery.

I've been learning Python from Nate, and stealing bot code from Nima and Noam. My current setup includes:
• My old iBook, plugged in at home - a moody server full of caprice, which at random begins holding down the comma, m, or space key. It's great to be able to use this computer for something, as it's taken a couple of flying leaps and now has to be opened with a shoehorn.
• Traumbot - my first functional bot, built from Nima's Prozacbot. When it's active in your channel, it appears as another user. If you type "!present", it will note that you are present at AHA!, appending your username, the date, and the time to a tab-delimited text file stored in my Dropbox. I can open up this file in Excel and see columns "user", "daet", and "tiem" with the relevant information. My next task is to rewrite Traumbot to make it sleeker and more extensible. Traumbot can also record people's fetishes (work-safe).

Traumbot is really "Traumbot ibn ibnGruem"... for a while, I named all the test bots according to the one they branched off of - hence, Merlinbot ibn Prozac, Grumbot ibn Merlin, [Presencebot] ibn Gruem, then this one. If you'd like to drop in and watch the testing, check out #merlinpanic on irc.freenode.net (a popular IRC server network).

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Ignite!

Right now (or very soon), I'm presenting at the fourth Ignite (Ann Arbor). I'm probably nervous, so if you see this, please shout "FACE!" at me. It'll make me laugh, and that is always good. If you're not here, text me when you see me come on the live stream linked above! If lots of people do this, you may be able to see me twitch with shock :D

I've got the Ataritar with me onstage; it's the shiny black guitar-thing that isn't a guitar. (If you want details, scroll down!) The Angry Amp is also up here. I've also got the jankiest plug console that was ever janked together the night before a presentation, because I need to plug the Ataritar, a piezo, and my iPod into the Amp at different points. Grunge-tastic!

Should you wish to explore the diagrams later, you can download a PDF of my presentation here (I believe this dropbox will expire in 30 days).

And if you enjoyed this talk, you should heed my words and come to All Hands Active, the hackerspace located in Digital Ops on Liberty. Several of our own have given Ignite talks in the past, including (Matt) Oishi, Xander Honkala, Bilal Ghalib, and Anthony Oliver. You'll also be able to meet Pokey, whose tongue and ears can be seen in the presentation. Awesome people; awesome times.