Michael Gorven - cocooncrash

I wrote three IRC bots in [Python][] this last week (although one was a rewrite). They probably aren't very useful to most people, but I'm going to share them anyway in case someone finds them interesting.

The first one was prompted by [Adrian][], who is maintaining a [countdown][] until his wedding as a factoid in [Spinach][]. Since [Knab][] doesn't actually support countdowns, it has to be updated manually. This clearly isn't the Right Way to do this, and so I hacked together a [script][irccountdown] which connects to IRC and teaches Spinach the updated factoid. I run this as a daily [cronjob][] to keep the countdown up to date.

As is usually the case with Python, there was already a library for accessing IRC, namely [irclib][]. It isn't documented very well, but has a couple example scripts which are fairly easy to follow. It follows an event based model, so you write functions which will be called when certain events occur (such as receiving a message).

The final of the [Currie Cup][] was held on Saturday (which my team (the [Sharks][]) won), and I followed the match online using [SuperSport's][] live score site¹. I then thought that it would be cool to have the score announced on IRC when it changed, and since I was bored I wrote a simple [bot][rugby] to do this. It worked well, but was very simple in that it only supported one hardcoded channel and one hardcoded game.

Since I was also bored on Sunday I [rewrote][rugbybot] this bot properly. I added a subscription mechanism so that channels and users can subscribe and unsubscribe to games by sending the bot a command. It's mostly working except for listing the available games (since there aren't any rugby games coming up which means that I can't test it ;-) ). Games are specified by the ID used by SuperSport's site, and finding the right ID is currently a manual process.