The jury is still out on Twitter. Micro-Blogging is for the times between face to face meetings, major blog posts, emails, instant messages, and phone calls. As if we don't have enough ways to communicate already, it appears as if we needed a way to publish every 10 seconds "what we are doing".
My first thought is "why?!". Do we really need to update everyone out there every time we eat a meal or take a shower? I'm doing my best to keep an open mind and I'm trying to give it a fair go, but I'm just not ready to see the benefit of this new technology. At best Twitter can be used to update people with regards to your current location so they can meet up with you at a local pub. To me it seems like a broadcast based IM system with mappings to SMS phone technologies. Maybe I'm just missing the point of it all.
I'm not even going to get into the privacy issues that are apparent with technologies like this. If people don't keep in mind what they are posting about they are likely to give away far too much information to the world. This is a much bigger problem than just Twitter (Facebook, Myspace, blogs in general, etc).
If you use and actually like micro-blogging technologies like Twitter, please leave a comment and explain why. Help me get into the year 2008.
I, like most communication minded people, use irssi in a screen session on a shell box. I connect to roughly 5-6 servers, mixed between IRC, IRC+SSL, and SILC systems. The documentation on configuration of the irssi config file is pretty non-existant, so after struggling for far too long, I've decided to share my notes for anyone else that may find them useful.
Step 1: Add your servers and networks to the servers = section of the document.
Example:
{ address = "silc.XXXXXXXXX.com"; chatnet = "XXXXXXXXX"; port = "706"; autocon
nect = "yes"; },
{ address = "irc.YYYYY.org"; chatnet = "YYYYY"; port = "6667"; autoconnect = "yes"; use_ssl = "yes"; },
The item to note with this section is the use of the parameter use_ssl. It's not documented very well and I pretty much had to guess or get lucky with a google search to find it.
Step 2: Add your channels to the channels = section of the config file.
Example:
{ name = "BlahBlah-Channel"; chatnet = "XXXXXXX"; autojoin = "Yes"; },
{ name = "Foo-Chanel"; chatnet = "YYYYYYY"; autojoin = "Yes"; password = "NOWAY"; },
The interesting thing to note with this section is the use of the password parameter. This is used for channels that require passwords to connect. Again this isn't documented well anywhere.
Step 3: Autorun SILC Plugin
This is the one that took me the longest to figure out. To autorun a plugin in irssi you have to create a file in your .irssi directory called startup. It's not there by default and not documented anywhere. In this file put "LOAD silc" to autoload the silc plugin upon starting irssi. Becareful though, it took me a while to figure out that "LOAD silc" is NOT the same as "LOAD SILC". Loading the plugin is case sensitive.
And finally a bit of humour to ensure that this post actually gets hits *GRIN*. Thanks to Cooler for sending me this one...
