After seven weeks, the wait is finally over; UcfIrc is finally here! Ucf's new chat widget is, in the words of Kerm, "A blatant Sax clone" (Or something like that; I've lost my irc logs). This bot forwards messages from irc://irc.afternet.org/#casiocalc to the widget on Ucf.

Features:

• It uses JSON to transmit messages
  
• It uses a robust and extensible 3-part architecture
  
• It looks snazzy

For more information on implementation, take a look at this topic on Ucf, and this planning document.

Todo

• Clickable URLs Done
  
• Resizeable widget
  
• Notifications of forum events Done
  
• Modules for the bot

Screenshots:

The chat widget:


The same view in irc:


Credits

• Forty-Two did the Irc Bot
  
• 2072 did both the php bit and the javascript frontend

(And ffisch helped me get in contact with 2072, and added some comments along the way)

Interesting, and nice work!

As a sidenote, maybe I need to share my stuff over at UCF as well, to get an even larger audience for my games/utilities for the Prizm.

Feel free to pop in any time. We're anticipating an even larger audience now that we have the chat widget. I think that it will help get inactive members talking in the community again, as well.

I need to go there again more. I stopped in late 2010 when I discovered the majority of the users active at the time seemed to have a strong stance against calculator gaming (like on the TI-Nspire Google group) and many other people did, too, but this seems to have been resolved in the last year or so with the new moderators (and probably the fact guests can no longer post).

I signed up there in October 2004, but I only have like 105 posts.

Update:

After not working on this for several months, I've decided to release the source of the bot code. I've run into a couple of problems with uploading it to google code.

I need several files to not be uploaded into the repo at google (they contain IDE-specific settings, and a secret salt that the bot uses to sign stuff). However, when I remove them from hg with hg remove, the IDE (Netbeans) refuses to acknowledge that they exist. (Which is a big problem when I need to edit files and the IDE doesn't know what the src directory is).

On a different note, it has gotten a substantial visual upgrade, along with the rest of the site.

Default theme: (I have no idea how the dashed lines got in there)


Perseus theme: (theme 80% done)

Pro-tip for uncovering unexpected CSS styles: Open Firebug, select the item in question, look at the Computed CSS pane, and see where the dashed border is getting pulled from. To clarify your question, you're asking where hg remove files go? Or how to hg add them back?

It's from the screenshot program, not the site.

I want to know how to make my local copy have the files in the repo, but not the google code repo.

*Bump*

A better way to do this would be to have a different file replace it so that people could run it with default settings.

Every time I have needed to do something like this, I edit my file to change specific permissions to example / default ones, package that up, and then revert it. I'm think the solution for this would be to keep your UCF version separate from the development version. Hell, you shouldn't be live-testing production code anyway.

Ok, so while UcfBot was down (Juju's server was taken offline during the holidays; we were able to find a replacement but that has ben down as well for the past few days) I decided to redo some of the bot code. I also posted about the internal layout on Ucf. There are two fairly long posts there detailing the methods used to both send an receive messages. I plan on some more changes before the bot is in a runnable state, but it could be finished by the end of the day. I am hoping that we could also find some hosting for it as atm, juju has no idea when he will have his servers back. We would appreciate it if anyone could offer hosting.

I'm afraid we don't have anything to spare around here on Cemetech, but good luck finding hosting. It's always nice to hear that people are looking back at old code to make sure it is as tight as possible, as programming is a learning process that you never complete.