Archive for January, 2009

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Revision 41

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

I added two components to the page that displays logfiles in the web application, namely:

  • a selection box to limit the number of results per page
  • and a check box to show or hide non chat messages.
logfile.pl rev

logfile.pl rev41

The code for the web application is in some really bad shape. What’s killing me, is the fact that the view and the logic are not separated from each other, along with a whole bunch of other bad practices. If anything needs a rewrite, it’s going to be this part of the software!

On the same note; the entire web application could use a paintjob! A neat CSS stylesheet might just do the trick though.

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Thoughts on setting up a service

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

The mission statement for this Open Source project is:

“Providing solutions to archive, query and analyze IRC logfiles.”

My idea of “solutions” is twofold; On one hand, I should create software so users can archive, query and analyze IRC logfiles themselves. On the other hand, I should setup a service that provides the same functionality to users that don’t have the time or know how to install and configure the software.

At the time of writing, the software itself is not mature enough to actually start working on such a service.  But, I can ponder about it from time to time and publish some of the ideas here on this blog. Besides, I should spent that spare time on developing the actual software.

The service would basically be a website where users can register themselves and the channel they want to log. After they have registered, they can either invite a logging bot that will start logging the channel or upload their own IRC logfiles. Users should then be able to make use of the same functionality that the web application provides, such as viewing a logfile, browse the image gallery, create a paste, etc.

Back to coding…

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mIRC

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I wanted to update Appendix B “Notes on logfiles” from the installation guide, because except for mIRC all the other IRC clients have logging set up by typing commands whereas for mIRC it has to be done through the GUI.

To straiten this out, I installed mIRC on a Windows box, created a copy of the original config file, than ran mIRC and configured logging according to the instructions in appendix B. I than finally compared the new config file with the copy.

I was surprised at first to find out that mIRC doesn’t store all the changed settings as separate variables, but instead uses a set of obscured serialized variables that hold more than one setting each.

Then I  realized that for this reason Martijn (a supporter and contributor to the project) had to incorporate the instructions for mIRC as a GUI walk through, rather than listing commands that the user must type (as is the case with the other clients). A real bummer.

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Ohloh and SourceForge.net

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Recently I found an interesting website called Ohloh, which is basically a social network website for Open Source developers. I registered both myself and the project.

A nice feature of Ohloh are some of the metrics it can derive from the source code. But, before Ohloh can analyze the source code of your project, it needs access to a source code repository (CSV, SVN or Git). I was going to mirror the repository on SourceForge.net anyway, so now I had another reason to do it.

Check out the code analysis for the IRC Collective project for yourself.

Don’t forget to register yourself on Ohloh and add IRC Collective to your stack!

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Revision 40

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Since I hadn’t worked on the source code for a very long time, I wanted to try and improve or fix something minor. So I skimmed through the source code in an attempt to refresh my memory.

From the synopsis of the parselog script it read that you can set the path where local copies of images and thumbnails are stored from the command line using –imagedir. Turns out that this option was not yet implemented. The setting could be set from a config file, but not as an argument to the parselog script.

While fixing this I noticed that it’s better to install the Perl modules on the workstation as well so EPIC (plugin for Eclipse to support Perl syntax highlighting and object outline) wouldn’t yell at modules it can’t find. Haven’t made the trip to CPAN as of yet, but I’m planning to! ;-)

I tested the change and it works like a charm. Then I committed the changes to the source code repository and revision 40 was called into existence.

On to bigger challenges…

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