Vakkotaur

One of the recent LJ phenomena going around is a set of replies to be made to any commenter. I have commented on a few of these now and gotten some replies. One of the replies is a question, and in this case the question deserves a rather lengthy answer.

( Why an Ox? )

( Pastrami on rye )

A few new folks have shown up on IRC recently. It's been interesting, if disheartening, to find that some things seem not to change.

I'll quote one person, "I joined the #warnercafe on mirc and was at least welcomed with a "hello" right away. That's pretty rare from the few rooms that I've been to." Shouldn't being welcomed or at least acknowledged be the norm? It's certainly understandable that if everyone is /away or a channel is crowded and busy that someone might not be acknowledged, but to have something as simple as a harmless "Hello" be a rarity is a disappointing indictment of humanity.

There were a couple other people, friends of one another, who showed up even more recently. They seemed to be not quite familiar with things, but willing to learn. Yet what happened seemed to be that they were either ignored or poked fun of. Sheesh. I suspect what happened is that they made some minor blunder typical of those who have just discovered IRC and instead of a gentle correction or suggestion, they were ridiculed for their ignorance. Once again, ignorance is a curable condition. But only if it is treated. Belittling someone isn't nearly as effective as suggesting (Note that it's suggest, not order. Orders build resentment, suggestions don't.) a more acceptable way to do something.

I've left my session connected for a good many days and just set /away at times, and in scrollback I see these guys have been on at night or when I'm at work. I've seen that one guy was quoted, seemingly mocked, in the topic of another channel. So I know they've been around, on and off, for at least a few days.

I got the distinct impression a night or two ago that I was the first person who talked to one of these guys and gave straight answers instead of using them for crude entertainment or just blowing them off. They weren't asking things like "A/S/L?" or "Wanna cyber?" that deserve ridicule, nor were they making bogus claims of great cracking feats. They were just asking about the names they used or wanted to use, and weren't aware of what network services could do for them. The thing is, they should have gotten those answers much earlier.

This morning I talked with the other fellow. Guy said I seemed legendary. I don't see that. Evidently simply not being a jerk and actually answering questions in a friendly, straightforward manner is that all it takes to be legendary nowadays. How very sad. What I did was nothing special. It's what I expect would be, and indeed should be, the norm. Being reasonable ought to be a typical, normal, and quite unremarkable thing.

Want a better world? Be legendary. It's pretty easy these days.

A lot more learning, a bit of testing and refinement, more testing and refinement (thanks yakko!) and here what might just be the (first) final version of FadeAway.

What it does: Gives mIRC the ability to indicate away and idleness of nicks.

What it looks like: I've defaulted things to look good on a black background (what I use) but have pointed out in the comments what to change for a white background. (Search for "/InitFadeAwayVariables" sans quotes and you'll find the needed bits at the second occurrence.) FadeAway does not tamper with your background color or default choice of nick color.

The default colors: An active, non-away nick will look just like it would without FadeAway. A nick idle for 10-30 minutes will be repainted blue-green. A nick idle for 30-60 minutes will be repainted light grey. A nick idle for more than 60 minutes will be painted dark grey. An away nick (whether idle or not) will be painted dark grey. If you are away, your nick is painted bright blue.

The check is done every two minutes or so. Also, whenever a nick changes it gets checked.

How to use it: Copy FadeAway into the remote section. Or copy into remote.ini and be sure remote.ini is loaded. FadeAway will take effect on the next connect.

What can break: FadeAway changes how /who and /whois act - suppressing their responses. The aliases /w for /whois and /wh for /who are provided as replacements. The "/whois $$1" in popups should be changed to "/w $$1" and the "/w /whois $$1" in aliases should be commented out (put a ; in front of it).

You sure are wordy: Overdocumentation is better than underdocumentation. The script commenting may seem verbose. If that bugs you, you can strip the comments out. Good luck if you have to debug it then, though!

( FadeAway.mrc )

And now IRC server admins can start hating me, I suppose...

Some fundraiser thing here resulted in delivery of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to many people this morning. The engineering secretary sent an email about food at her desk. This was interesting as she said "food" and not "treats" this time.

Yes, there are (or were last I looked) a couple boxes of doughnuts. But there was also a fruit platter and a vegetable platter. I already had a doughnut courtesy of the fellow next to me, so now I'm avoiding having another by filling up on grapes and radishes and carrots and even some broccoli. Dipping leafy broccoli results in something that looks like a weird shaving brush...

My mIRC script is improving as I've been finding better ways to do things. Some on own, some with Yakko's help. He suggested using /who rather than /whois and that helped things quite a lot. Now I have one fairly clean loop instead of having less clean nested loops. The color list is used if not more efficiently, at least less intrusively. There is far less cluttering up of the status window. I still haven't found a way to get mIRC to not announce that the /who is finished for each nick or to not announce the away message of a nick that is away. I could, I suppose do a /who by channel and get only an announcement per channel of being finished instead of per nick, but that seems inefficient as then there'd be /who-ing of some more than once per pass. Oh, and the updating seems faster, even if it perhaps isn't. Considering how much improvement there has been in the past few days, I wonder how much more could be done if I were actually good at this. I'm very much still learning and probably trying to do more advanced things than a beginner ought. Also, I'm realizing just how weird and limiting non stack based, non RPN languages with fixed definitions seem to me.

I'm not sure I can do much more with this, as far as de-cluttering. So tonight I'll probably see about getting a timer set up and letting the thing free run a while. I suppose I could also color the nicks of those idle for a long time, too. Maybe even a different color if not away. Egad, I best be careful I don't end up overdoing the colors. I'm wondering if maybe I'm going about it wrong now, though. Would I be better off just looking at idle time and not caring about away? Could that be done without any clutter? Guess I have something more to look into tonight. After I've used the "finished" script for a night or two, I might see if anyone else wants to try it. Then I'll find out just how good or bad or useful or useless it is.

I've managed to use the treadmill regularly so far, as well as eat less fattening meals for the most part. This has had a few effects.

One is that I'm tired earlier and thus more likely to go to bed when I should rather than stay up too late. This actually helps the next day some as I seem a bit more awake - without benefit of caffeine. Another is that I am actually starting to look forward to using the treadmill and feeling a bit odd when I don't use it.

But the big one is that the last few days I've been around 218 lbs. That is under 220 and thus I've already achieved my first objective. Hopefully that trend can continue and the numbers will go down (and certain clothes will fit better again). Next objective: Be under 215 lbs. by the end of February. That shouldn't be too hard. I have no idea what the ultimate weight will or should be. Yes, I know there are charts and such, but they seem wildly off. One indicated 140 and that seems too low. And really, getting under 190 would be an accomplishment. But first things first. Under 215 before March.

So far it's actually been pretty easy. The time on the treadmill is a nice break where I can just sorta mentally idle, as well as listen to tapes and CDs. Supper is a bit less random, tending to be something from Subway, at least when I'm alone. I should vary it some, probably with some stuff at home (hello Chef Magnetron...) and lighter fair when going out for supper.

I'm learning the basics of mIRC scripting and finding it... irksome. It's probably just that's I'm new to it and all, but some is rather irksome. I started with a rather complex idea but set that aside upon realizing just how involved it would get. But while looking into it I found a neat command that gave me an idea. The command allows the color of a nick in the nicklist of a channel to be custom color. This, in itself, seems like it'd just candy-color things and get annoying. Well, in the wrong hands it would. I like to think that mine are not the wrong hands.

What I'd like to do is write a script that sets the color of the nicks according to if they're /away (or maybe idle for a certain time). This would give mIRC a feature that many other IRC clients have built-in.

Getting the away information will likely be the hard part, but right now I'm not even that far. I can get the number of channels and loop through the channels, so far just echoing to screen. I can get the number of nicks in a channel, but either I'm missing some subtlety of variable usage or how mIRC's while( ) loops work. Right now if I set the loop with a fixed number, it works - but that's not the desired thing. I should be able to set a variable to number of nicks in a channel and use that variable in a loop, to echo the nicks. So far, no luck. But I've only been at this a short time. What bugs me is that the various sites that try to explain things say the same few, and generally useless, things over and over.

What isn't explained is how some commands act when not just so. What is the failure mode? That would help quite a bit, I think. Also, what are common mistakes? I'm pretty sure I'm making those as I go. And then the more advanced, is there a way to snarf whois info and parse it, but not spam any window (not even status) with the result? And not break the typed whois? I suspect all these questions have been answered (and I'll likely see them as "D'oh! That should have been obvious!") but I haven't found out where. So far the mIRC help file itself is the most useful thing - which is quite surprising as most help files are anything but helpful. It's good, but not great. Just how does one actually use /halt for example? Maybe I don't need it, but it seemed to be one of those things only makes sense if you don't need the explanation.

And chances are someone already wrote a script like the one I'm thinking of, but 1) I don't know about it and 2) I'd prefer a script I've written, that way I know what it's really doing and 3) I might just learn enough to do something else useful.