I’ve been fooling about with a Markov chain based chat plugin for rbot recently - just for a bit of fun and to give him some more character. It uses a fairly straightforward algorithm to learn patterns in text and reproduce them - his dialect and manner of speaking improves with more input and the type of input will determine the style of what you get out.

He’s been listening to our IRC channel in the office for a few weeks now and is starting to get somewhat coherent. In some cases spookily so! Most of the responses are more entertaining than intelligible but there are some gems ;)

<giblet> sam:  you could try ;)
<rbot> you could kidnap chaos
<giblet> chaos: I don't think he likes you
<rbot> I don't have it on sudo and it's been going back and forth while chaos watched

<rosie> rbot is on crack
<sam> lumines is like crack
<rbot> lumines is like a dieing calf

<giblet> sam: I'd like to release my branch to it and test this classpath issue
<rbot> I'd like to see
<giblet> rbot: ok you can watch
<rbot> i can take our windows PC's to the pub

<shloke> how did they stop HAL?
<rbot> how did your cat get so dirty?

<jake> fash: I know you're a bot
<rbot> I know you're a pothead

<rick> yeah, I decided to leave it until you decided to do it
<rbot> I decided to do it
<rick> thanks rbot!

<rosie> sureshk: i walked in and it took 1/2 an hour
<rbot> i walked in and done a
<giblet> glad he didn't finish that...
<rbot> glad he doesnt sound very welsh
<giblet> me too!

<giblet> doh - I have a 2pm meeting next thursday
<giblet> that could impact lunch plans
<rbot> that could be a problem

<giblet> rbot: tube northern
<rbot> No Problems on the northern line.
<copito> that's a first
<rbot> that's a good catch low down and is there a guy out or anything. he throws
       it 6 times and thats not a good kicking?
<giblet> rbot is watching the cricket

rbot 0.9.9 is finally out - after a long break I got stuck back in and did a bunch of refactoring, bug fixing and feature addition. This is actually a 1.0 candidate, so much has changed. The most visible changes include:

• rbot is now installable! Either via the included setup.rb, or as a ruby gem. If you have gem, try “gem install rbot”
• New configuration wizard for first-time runs (what server to connect to etc)
• Runtime configuration changes in IRC via the new config module
• French language file
• Improved HTTP proxy support (supports includes/exludes for urls)
• New restart command
• New method of creating plugins and mapping them to strings without regexps! See the new MessageMapper and the example plugins. This method will be familiar to rails users (plugin.map ‘myplugin :myparam blah blah :myotherparam’)
• Keyword (factoid) searching
• URL searching
• Various user-supplied patches and numerous bugfixes

rbot 1.0 will include long awaited (okay mainly by me) RSS integration among other things :)

feh 1.3.4 is out - includes a fix for the naughty EXIF bug when losslessly rotating (on some systems) and some E17 fixes submitted by richlowe and tested by numerous helpful folk :)

I recently discovered trac, a bug tracking, subversion-integrated, wiki including…. thing of usefulness. I just set it up for two of my projects, feh and rbot to help me expose and manage those projects.

I’ve been slack on my personal projects for a long time (for several reasons most of which revolve around working my ass off at my day job) - and I need to catch up on a raft of things. A while ago I moved all my personal projects from CVS to subversion but I didn’t set up public access for the subversion repository - now I’ve done so. Also lots of people have sent me bug reports, patches and feature requests over the last year or two, most of which I just haven’t done anything with. If I’d been using trac to maintain those requests at least we’d all know where things stood.

I’m keen to get back to work on these projects and crank out some new releases, so if you ever sent me a patch or suggestion you don’t think I did anything with, create a ticket in trac for it and the public shame will drive me to action :)

feh 1.3.1 is out. A few updates and bugfixes, as detailed below:

• Better tiled background support (makes various windowmanagers/terminal emulators happier)
• fixed a bug with –action’s and thumbnail mode
• Disabled thumbnail caching until a better spec can be sorted out (the current freedesktop.org spec doesn’t support custom sizing. feh does).
• New option –cycle-once to exit feh after one loop through a slideshow. Requested by various people

It’s running on the right there if you want a demo..

Update: It supports WordPress 2.0 too, as you can see on the right there…

Update: Version 1.3 is now out, which works since the latest del.icio.us API change.. Grab the phps or txt.

Update: Version 1.2 is now out, which fixes a bug with the extended description parameter. Grab the phps or txt.

Update: Version 1.1 is now out, which properly escapes entities in hrefs etc. Grab the phps or txt.

Drop it into your wp-content/plugins directory and rename to delicious.php. Now just call the delicious_links() function somewhere in your index.php, you’ll need to specifiy at least the first two parameters, username and password. There are other parameters you can use to tweak the output (see the plugin comments), and you can style it via CSS.

You’ll need to have the PHP curl module installed for this plugin to work.

As you may notice in the menu on the right there, I’m currently testing my new WordPress del.icio.us plugin. If all goes well I’ll release it tonight - let me know if you spot any breakage.

Finally… feh 1.2.7 is out. Various minor enhancements and fixes are included. Major additions include lossless jpeg rotation with Exif tag preservation, improved thumbnail mode (supporting freedesktop.org’s thumbnail management spec), multiple action support for organising images and running commands, some performance improvements and full X geometry support.

Feedback appreciated, especially about the lossless rotation - any jpegs for which rotation fails, or feh can’t read/write the Exif info, please let me know - send me the source image in question if possible.

In preparation for the new feh release, here’s giblib 1.2.4.. It’s going to be required by feh 1.2.7, because of a bug Claes Nasten (pekdon) found and fixed in functionality used by the new feh.

Got lossless rotation working for feh - took me a little longer than expected because this cold is making my head fuzzy. Anyway feh now correctly updates the Exif image dimension markers and makes a good stab at setting the Orientation marker correctly too. All other Exif information is preserved.

I have a couple of patches people have submitted which I need to look at - gonna take a peak at those tomorrow and then think about a new release.

By popular demand, I’m currently working on adding lossless jpeg rotation to feh - also ensuring all EXIF metadata is preserved. This basically involves working around imlib2, which isn’t interested in preserving EXIF or avoiding recompression. I’ve ended up invoking libjpeg directly but it’s working so far. feh CVS has the changes if anyone wants to test them. Btw CVS for feh has moved to linuxbrit:

1. export CVSROOT=\
2. :pserver:anonymous@linuxbrit.co.uk:/var/lib/cvs
3. cvs co feh

Found a bug in my bugfix and fixed it :p camE 1.9 is born.

A new camE is out, with a bugfix for the scale option (which was breaking text rendering in some cases). Also fixed a compile time header issue on some systems.

camE 1.7 is out, with a couple of new features, including a single shot mode suitable for running from cron.

Also finally got around to uploading my pictures from my little Brother’s birthday last month. Check those out here.

I still have some vestiges of this stupid pallsy thing, still can’t quite close my left eye - though apart from that I feel totally healthy now - ok not totally, I caught a cold at the weekend, but other than that I’m fine really!

Stupid rubbish immune system…