Miloping

It is always amazing to see how quickly something can be made by a group of people who have the same understanding of what is required and how it should be built. Today under the threat of our Jabber server's decommissioning, which entailed the shutting down of our beloved “DevChat” an IRC-style chat room for developers only, a vigilante group of us hacked together a chat client and “server” using only the unix utilities echo and tail.

I didn't strongly oppose Office Communicator. I hadn't even tried it out. But I heard through the grapevine that there was no longer going to be a “DevChat” in which to post silly news links, say “Good Morning” and initiate lunch trains.

It was part continuing the “DevChat” legacy and part wanting to prove a point that the following happened.

$ touch /var/tmp/chatroom
$ chmod 777 /var/tmp/chatroom
$ tail -f /var/tmp/chatroom

Then in another window (or screen partition):

$ echo `whoami` entered the room. >> /var/tmp/chatroom
$ echo `whoami`: hello! >> /var/tmp/chatroom

Which resulted in:

$ tail -f /var/tmp/chatroom
neuvon entered the room.
neuvon: hello!

That's all that was needed and before long came automatic escaping, emoting, and colorized tail output.