irc

Freenode is dead. Long live IRC?

This is the text version; I have a video version of this post on YouTube: Freenode is dead. Long live IRC? [video].

I've been on IRC since I started participating in the Drupal community in the mid 2000s. For over three decades, countless programming and open source communities have centralized their real-time discussions on IRC servers. While overall IRC usage has declined in the past twenty years, Freenode became the most influential hub for IRC users, with the majority of users and channels, especially for open source discussion.

But all things must come to an end, and it seems like Freenode's new leadership—who took over the network over the past few years—are doing everything they can to drive it into the ground, fast.

When I first heard about a bunch of Freenode staff and volunteers forming a bit of a suicide pact, I knew something was up, and immediately many open source communities started discussing what they'd do if their main discussion platform went belly-up.

Changing a deeply-nested dict variable in an Ansible playbook

I recently had to build an Ansible playbook that takes in a massive inventory structure (read from a YAML file), modifies a specific key in that file, then dumps the file back to disk. There are some other ways that may be more efficient standalone (e.g. using a separate Python/PHP/Ruby/etc. script and a good YAML library), but since I had to do a number of other things in this Ansible playbook, I thought it would keep it simple if I could also modify the key inside the playbook.

I was scratching my head for a while, because while I knew that I could use the dict | combine() filter to merge two dicts together (this is a feature that was introduced in Ansible 2.0), I hadn't done so for a deeply-nested dict.

Meet Phergie, an efficient PHP IRC bot

The Drupal community uses IRC extensively for collaboration and community building. A permanent and ever-helpful fixture of the official #drupal-* IRC channels, and in the Drupal community itself, is the humble Druplicon bot. Druplicon is a Drupal-based IRC bot that was created in 2005, and is still going strong as part of the Bot module for Drupal.

Bots like Druplicon do a lot of nice things—they can remind people of things after they were away for a while, they can store facts, track karma, throw people virtual beers, store and retrieve helpful facts, and relay important information. For example, when a build fails in Jenkins, a bot can post a message in IRC. Similarly, if a server goes down, or is under heavy load, the bot could post a message.

Connect to IRC via Adium when connected through an LTE hotspot

When I'm on the go, I like to use my iPhone 5s as a hotspot, as I get 10-20 Mbps up and down (much better than any public WiFi I've used), and it's a more secure connection than a public, unsecured hotspot.

However, when I open Adium, I'm greeted with:

Notice -- You need to identify via SASL to use this server

To fix this, I forward port 6667 on my Mac to one of my remote servers using SSH, then tell Adium to use that server's connection with my Mac as a SOCKS5 proxy. If you need to do this, you can do the following:

  1. We need to forward port 6667 from your local Mac to a remote server ('example.com') to which you have SSH access. In Terminal, enter: ssh -D 6667 [email protected]
  2. In Adium, go to the IRC connection settings, and under Proxy, check the 'Connect using proxy' checkbox, choose 'SOCKS5' for Type, enter 'localhost' for Server, and '6667' for Port (see screenshot below).

Adium SOCKS5 proxy settings for IRC tunnel on port 6667

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