Fitting the battle of life

It’s been too long since I messed about with geekery, but it’s revision time again, so my powers of procrastination have just received a massive boost from the gods of timewasting.

Anyway, long story short, I hang about on IRC from time to time. I used to a lot more than I do now, which I put down to a combination of having a girlfriend (not that she stops me, per se – I just have less time on my own!), and actually being busy and working. You’re most likely to find me in ##photography, but occasionally #ubuntu-uk too.

When I’m at college, I am usually unable to connect to IRC – the traffic seems to be blocked, which is interesting given that bittorrent traffic isn’t, for instance. I don’t know why it’s blocked and can’t be bothered to ask, but I have finally set up a way around it.

This involves port forwarding on my router – sending traffic on port 22 to my Ubuntu machine. From college I log into that machine via SSH, and then running irssi with screen. Easy, but required that tiny bit of setup that I couldn’t previously be bothered to engage in.

Go go gadget geekery. Just don’t tell my girlfriend I’m not revising.

[ps - it's always good to remember that Macs don't play by the rules. You can't Alt+number to change windows within irssi - it's Esc+number, instead. For more irssi/screen tips, check this fantastic article.]

Following on from a previous post on this, I have worked out the easiest way to get this sorted. The instructions I had found didn’t work because I couldn’t figure out how to get the command ‘wd’ to simply run the script wd.pl wherever I’d saved it, and in the end it was a lot simpler for me to do the following:

Save the wd.pl script from here into ~/.irssi/scripts/

Create an alias for it in irssi by typing: /alias twit /exec ~/.irssi/scripts/wd.pl $*
It would probably be a good idea to /save as well.
This means you can run the script (with arguments) by typing /twit.

/twit will now display your friends’ latest updates.
/twit -sv Updating status from irssi! will change your status to “Updating status from irssi!”

Really not as difficult as I’d thought; I was just getting myself all confuddled.

[Update: You can't use brackets in updates unless you put the update into quote marks, like /twit -sv "Yay :)" - cheers to mgdm!]

Well, having read this blog post this morning, I wondered why on earth I should have yet another window open to update my twitter status. Twitux is all very fine and dandy, but so many more mouse-clicks away than I wanted. At times like these, Google is our friend.

There is are two relevant pages, this one which describes how to use a script from this site (to view updates and update your own status) in irssi. However, just downloading the wd script doesn’t work: it depends on a couple of packages I didn’t have. A little apt-cache searching reveals the following two packages with which it did indeed work:

libjson-perl
libdatetime-format-strptime-perl
(You’ll also need libwww-perl, but I already did)

Installing both of those let me run the wd script, showing my friend’s updates. At the moment for testing purposes I have the script in my ~/.irssi/scripts/ folder, and run it using /script load, but want now to be able to run it as /exec wd to follow the instructions on the first site. Hmm, guess that’ll mean moving it somewhere and creating an alias in the terminal?

(I will continue this once I get back from a booze run for a house party tonight!)

Well, I’ve blogged before about my growing love of the command line. I’ve now been coerced persuaded by certain members of #ubuntu-uk to move to the command line for IRC as well; I now use irssi as my irc client, and just about getting used to its quirky ‘window’ thing. As I understand it, it’s going to be lighter on resources as it’s not a dedicated gui like xchat was.

I must admit, sometimes in moments of insanity I use w3m as well. Only for jokes. Honest. Facebook doesn’t like it, so I actually don’t use it other than for sheer geek points when I want to show off.

Next, you’ll catch me installing the server edition of Ubuntu and writing essays in vim.