[TriLUG] Jabber - IRC question

[Jason Tower]

> Many moons ago I tinkered with extending an irc bot to take input from
> an external source and relay it into an irc channel.  It wasn't a
> terribly difficult hack, it just required plugging into it's poll /
> event loop an extra poll of the program generating the input.  Something
> along those lines might suffice for a handy way to integrate the two
> resources.
>
> Still, it seems that individuals joining the IRC server w/ the IRC
> transport is a readily available way to tackle this problem, although it
> doesn't have the added benefit of gradually allowing people to migrate
> to jabber MUC, with the expectation of phasing out IRC.  :)  *teases
> Jason*
>
> Aaron S. Joyner

lest anyone feel excluded from the inside joke here, allow me to explain
:)  aaron, joel, and i had a little, uh, discussion the other day about
the merits of jabber vs. irc.  while i will admit that i have never used
jabber for any significant length of time, i've been using irc for several
years now and have really come to like it.  so in a manner befitting gnome
vs. kde or emacs vs. vi, here are my particular reasons for liking irc:

- irc is text based, no gui required.  which means that the irc client can
be used on just about any *nix system, including very old hardware or a
server which may not have X installed.

- for the reason above, it is trivial to run an irc client on a remote
host.  if you're on a windows box that doesn't happen to have an irc
client installed, you can simply ssh (thank god for putty) to your
favorite *nix host and run irc from there.

- for both reasons above, you can use the most excellent combination of an
irc client and screen on a *nix machine to maintain a persistent irc
session that can be accessed anywhere from anything.  this is what many,
of the #trilug regulars do.

the latter is the killer feature for me - total portability.  i spend a
lot of time out of my office at client sites, sometimes i have my laptop,
sometimes i don't, sometimes i do but don't feel like using it.  but since
i run irssi (a popular irc client) in a screen session on the trilug
server, my irc session is running 24x7.  i connect at home, catch up on
things, and detach my screen session when i leave.  when i reach a client
site, i log back in to dargo and reattach to my screen session (from linux
or bsd or windows or osx or whatever machine i happen to be on) and it's
like i never left.  i can see any message sent to me, read scrollback to
see what i may have missed, etc.  heck, i can (and have) logged into dargo
from my treo 650 and had irc conversations while $wife was driving at 75
mph.

so that's my side of the story, counterpoints welcome.

jason