Although I have a ton of things I *should* be doing around the house, I managed to find time to investigate two things that have been bugging me for a while. I had always heard about the "undernet" otherwise known as IRC and I knew I needed to read some to learn about that. Also I had been stymied in the past by getting MySQL to run under OS X and I wanted to try the latest version. This is a short report about the successes.IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is old (as time in the internet age is measured anyway). According to the Wikipedia, IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen (nickname "WiZ") from Finland in August 1988. The system was inspired by Bitnet relay which was only a little older. What Bitnet (and thus, IRC) offered was a quick messaging system over the internet where users could join "channels" or "chatrooms" as they are known today and converse in real time. The idea grew out of the early BBS systems that most computer savvy folks used before the rise of the world wide web (the first BBS was the Chicago Bulletin Board System in 1978).

In order to participate in IRC, you need two things: an IRC "client" and the name of an IRC server. Clients abound, in fact if you’re using Mozilla theres one built in. Most people will want a more robust client, something that adds features that make the experience easier to manage, like scripting (there are a bunch of languages that lend themselves to text modification on the fly like python, tcl and perl) which allows you to do more with less clicking. Scripting your interaction with an IRC server makes logging in easier too.

Since I have been using Linux and now OSX at home for almost 5 years, I don’t have much to offer you for Windows clients, but I can say that the nicest one for OSX I’ve found to date is X-Chat Aqua. I’ve spent a goodly amount of time on freenode.net this weekend participating in discussions on three channels: #macosx, ##linux (yes, that’s two "#" signs), and #geeklog.

The next project grew out of a need to organize. I generate tons of notes as I work on projects or investigate things. I usually paste these snippets into either a sticky note (a program on OSX), save it as a text file someplace, or add it to a growing html document I have been keeping for such things. Unfortunately, I can never find any of the stuff when I need it. The ultimate, I thought might be to use a script like that running this site on my own machine.

OSX has apache and php built in, so it shouldn’t be hard to get the scripts I use to power this site to run locally. I had to reinstall mysql (I had an old version that I had butchered in the past installed already). I downloaded the latest version from mysql.com and proceeded to create a database and users to prepare for the scripts (this site is a database driven site and all the stories and links and images are stored in a big database). Luckily, I had just completed a class on Oracle in the city a week ago and a lot of stuff was still fresh to mind, so it was a success! I set up a really nice layout (freshly downloaded from Axonz.com) and I’m all set to go! I learned alot about the httpd.conf file that sets up the configuration of the apache webs server too. These tasks complete, I am now free to attend to more mundane concerns. See ya!