IM bot

Thursday, December 23, 1999, at 12:13PM

By Eric Richardson

I've spent most of the day today working on writing a multi-threaded IM bot in Perl. I've got everything SO close, but I've been stuck on one little detail for the last couple hours...

I've got two message passing layers (AOL <-> IM bot <-> nick client (individual processes for each nick which contacts the bot)), and both of them try to do blocking while waiting for an event. Unfortunately, I can't say what order the events will come in, so either is just as likely to hit an event first. I've thought about forking and then using pipes to talk between 'em, but that just seems icky.

It'll be a cool bot, though. Once I've got it finished I'll set it up with a screenname and post that here so you can give it a whirl. I'll also obviously open-source it, and put it on the eScripting site.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

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