Improved the support for dievents.xml reporting

Cleaned up how the bot reports the event info, added long and short versions of the reporting, and added the ability to report the long version of only one event at a time.
Also, the first file release of the "new" Perl codebase it up, so you don't have to get the currently supported version of the bot from CVS.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 3:50PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /features | permanent link ]

Basic support for dievents.xml added

Basic support for the dievents.xml feed has been added, and comitted to CVS. Just type "!events", and it should spit back the next three events on DI. The formatting is still pretty ugly, but it's only rudimentary support, so far.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 12:50AM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /features | permanent link ]

Please welcome AmishOne.

Well, it's not exactly "new" news. AmishOne joined the team about a week ago, and the Perl rewrite is going along very nicely thanks to him. The new sources are up in CVS.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 11:44PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /developers | permanent link ]

Major code rewrite planned.

There is going to be a major rewrite of the code coming up, so there won't be any new features till that's done. The code will be rewritten in Perl, and the whole reason is that Python's urllib(2) library doesn't behave itself, so rather than rewrite a core language library, I'm moving the code over to a language with a working library, plus this gives the use of the POE perl modules for HTTP, IRC, and Job Queueing. There won't be much visible activity till the code rewrite is completed.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 7:15PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ / | permanent link ]

Update to the kludgey fix.

I decided to update the "stopForkBomb.sh" script so that it will start the bot back up if you kill all the threads manually (I've done this a few times, so I decided to update the script to make it easier to do.). Read more for the script contents, if you'd like.

[ Read more... (36% shown here) ]

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 9:23PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /bugs/fixes | permanent link ]

IRC channel

Not really a "site" update, but who cares. There is an IRC channel for the bot on InteliInternet's IRC network. The server address is irc.inteliinternet.com and the channel is #ditrackerbot (Link for mIRC users). There's usually at least one person in there (me), but I'm not always active, so if I don't respond, then I'm not there. Oh, and if SDF_1 doesn't respond either, it's because it's a bot. (You have no idea how many people try to talk to it in other channels, thinking it's a person, even though the fact that it's a bot is anything but a closely guarded secret.) So, feel free to stop by and let me know about bugs/feature requests/tweaks/patches that you might have, or to just chat.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 1:49PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /site | permanent link ]

Kludgey fix for slow fork bomb.

I got tired of having to check up on the number of processes that the bot was taking up, so I wrote a small script to kill the bot and restart it whenever the number of processes got over a certain amount, until I got around to fixing it, so that it's not a slow fork bomb any more. If you don't feel like waiting for me to add the script to the CVS, and/or create a new file release with it, here's the source to "stopForkBomb.sh"

[ Read more... (36% shown here) ]

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 7:14PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /bugs/fixes | permanent link ]

Site redesign

I got tired of even thinking about all the maintenance involved with how the site was designed before (One "PHP" script, that was really just static HTML), so I decided to look for a solution. I had been messing around with Blosxom for my blog, and I was liking it, so I decided to look for a PHP version (Why? Because I felt like it.). Lo and behold, I found PHPosxom, another project, here on Sourceforge.net. The result is what you see here.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 7:04PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /site | permanent link ]

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

Figured out what was causing the update thread to stall. Turns out it's a bug in Python's urllib and urllib2. Looking into a workaround for it.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 7:00PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /bugs | permanent link ]

And then there were five.

Got some more people to help out with the project, now we all just need to get more time to be able to work on it, on a regular basis.

Posted by Jacob Helwig | 7:00PM UTC (GMT+0000)
[ /developers | permanent link ]