Alex wrote: > I was thinking of installing an IRC client on my Win NT4 box to chat to the > Londonpm'ers ... but the one I chose at random crashes when trying to talk > to the "official" server.
When I use a local client on Windows, I use mIRC, but I've heard other people say good things about the XChat port. A good percentage of us (myself included) normally ssh to our unix boxes and then use command line irc clients. When combined with the 'screen' program this (assuming your unix box is perminatly connected to the Internet) allows you to always be on irc. When you close the ssh window your irc client continues to run in the background inside the screen sessions and you just seem very quiet. When you reconnect to your server you can run another screen command (for me it's "screen -R -d irc") to show the irc client display again. I personally like this as it means I can "drop in" and "drop out" of irc all day long, allowing me to quickly scan what's going on and get the context of what's going on before I started paying attention (so I'm not being rude constantly interupting other conversations.) It also means you don't tend to get 'caught' in irc as much as there's no real barrier to leaving either (as you can reconnect again in a minute or two) As 'nix command line irc clients go, I use irssi (http://irssi.org/). You can extend it with Perl scripts, so it should apeal to the Perl hacker in you. Hope this is helpful. Mark. -- s'' Mark Fowler London.pm Bath.pm http://www.twoshortplanks.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ';use Term'Cap;$t=Tgetent Term'Cap{};print$t->Tputs(cl);for$w(split/ +/ ){for(0..30){$|=print$t->Tgoto(cm,$_,$y)." $w";select$k,$k,$k,.03}$y+=2}
