Inspirated

A match made in heaven.

Using IRC in a reliable way has turned out to be kind of a challenge for me in the past couple of months. I had my cellphone connected 24/7 to the IRC channels I needed to idle in. Unfortunately, I don’t live in a 3G country so any voice-calls interrupted the whole thing.

I also wanted to use my laptop for IRC-ing whenever I was at home. But the inconsistent internet connection didn’t make thing any easier. There was always this lingering fear of missing important messages during one of the disconnections. I couldn’t foresee a solution which would fix all of the mentioned issues until someone recommended using Irssi along with GNU Screen.

This not only fixed every little issue I had ever had with IRC but also made full utilization of my love for all things command-line. In summary: I now have this “permanent” IRC session running at an SSH server in Lithuania. Whenever I feel like it, I can “attach” my laptop or my mobile and start using Irssi. If I receive any voice-calls, the IRC session still continues to work and I can “reattach” later on. Simply put, the session continues running even when I’m not attached to it through either device and at any time of the day I can simply connect to it and resume working through that day’s IRC activity.

Here’s a screenshot that shows me connected to the #gsoc channel on Freenode first on my laptop and then on my E71 using the same screen session:

PuTTY for Symbian is used for SSH-ing on the Nokia phone. If I ever rank top 5 situations where CLI absolutely pwns GUI in terms of efficiency and usage, this nifty setup is definitely going to make the list.

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant-messaging client which I use for all my MSN/Google Talk/IRC communication. Apart from offering adept support for all of these protocols (and plenty others as well), Pidgin also provides decent logging support. However, I’m not at all interested in having my daily MSN conversations recorded. On the other hand, I prefer having my previous IRC chats with me for reference. Right now, Pidgin does not support any options in the Preferences which would allow me to selectively turn on logging based on the protocols I’m using. If I turn it on for chat windows, it also starts producing logs for every MSN chat I participate in.

Most of the people wouldn’t/don’t see any issue with this behavior. For those who do want to keep a history of their conversations only for particular protocols, here’s a quick workaround for doing it:

• Check the appropriate options under the “Logging” tab in Preferences window.
• Have a few chats the likes of which you’d prefer being logged.
• Go to the directory containing Pidgin logs (default is ~/.purple/logs):

  [user@host ~]$ cd ~/.purple/logs/

  [user@host ~]$ cd ~/.purple/logs/

• See whether the protocols you want to be logged have a directory named for them:

  [user@host logs]$ ls

  [user@host logs]$ ls

  irc msn

• Remove the protocols you do not want to have logs for (in my case, MSN):

  [user@host logs]$ rm -rf msn

  [user@host logs]$ rm -rf msn

• Change directory permissions to stop new protocols from getting logged:

  [user@host logs]$ chmod 500 .

  [user@host logs]$ chmod 500 .

And you’re done. Now, whenever you start a conversation in a protocol which does not have a respective directory in ~/.purple/logs, you’ll see a “Logging failed” error message in the conversation window. For other (allowed) protocols, logging will work as expected. To turn off selective logging, reset directory permissions with:

[user@host ~]$ chmod 600 ~/.purple/logs/

It is also possible to apply the same workaround on contacts. For example … :

• [user@host ~]$ cd ~/.purple/logs/msn/ [user@host msn]$ ls

  [user@host ~]$ cd ~/.purple/logs/msn/ [user@host msn]$ ls

  bestbuddy@live.com ignorantmoron@live.com

• [user@host msn]$ rm -rf ignorantmoron@live.com

  [user@host msn]$ rm -rf ignorantmoron@live.com

• [user@host msn]$ chmod 500 .

  [user@host msn]$ chmod 500 .

… will disable logging for all MSN contacts including ignorantmoron@live.com, but will record everything communicated with bestbuddy@live.com. Like the previous example, you just have to reset directory permissions to re-enable nondiscriminatory logging:

[user@host ~]$ chmod 600 ~/.purple/logs/msn/

<Aerdan> that's essentially what SoC is doing, tbh; offering students a 500 bribe to contribute.
<nenolod> 500?
<nenolod> no
<nenolod> it's 4500
<Aerdan> ah, the joys of Conspire
<Aerdan> that was $4500 before Conspire ate it. :D
<krkhan> how does conspire eat 000
<krkhan> oh :P