Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I’ve been ill. I hate being ill, especially when you can’t even get out of bed most days. I hate the fatigue after the illness. In general, I dislike being ill and all that goes with it. I had tonsillitis as a part of glandular fever.

Well, that’s that, I’m at least partially well now. The unfortunate fact is that I seem to be one of the few people who get a post-illness fatigue from glandular fever, either that or I’m just lazier than normal.

I’ve recently become involved in yet another business. It’s certainly very comfortable and they provide good training, nice perks and a very reasonable wage. They also are open to new people so get in contact with me if you’re interested.

In general I’m getting by in life, my next trip to the States is being planned. I could use some advice there, especially on an inexpensive way to get to Amsterdam airport from Norwich. I love swimming, but not in that cold conditions! One of the annoying sides of my local airport is that it doesn’t seem to provide many flights to anywhere, and those it does are rather expensive. To annoy me more I find the website for it is both badly designed and dysfunctional.

For those of you who know what ‘Project X’ or ‘That Project’ is, it’s now named ‘Footman’ and is coming on reasonably well. In fact I hope to have a working demo soon for internal testing.

V8d Org IRC will be moving to InspIRCd from UnrealIRCd. This move will take place over a set time (probably a day) which is yet to be confirmed. We will attempt to prevent any disruption, but some will be inevitable.

I think this should get everyone up to date with my life; if you have any questions, do comment.

Kind regards, Robert.

Another BottleCap release candidate, this one is Windows compatible out of the box. Just remember to edit bcsettings.py. Get the update and please report any bugs here.

Kind regards, Robert.

I’ve just uploaded another RC. I advise updating as it has a few bugfixes, especially if you’re on windows. Tonnes of work to make pylint happy and adding of docstrings, expect another release soon as I change and add things. I still have to fix the clones module but I’ve made the highlight ban code actually work.

Have fun, stay safe, and feel free to tell me if there’s anything wrong, remember to check the official channel for updates! irc.v8d.org #BottleCap

Kindest regards at this festive season, Robert Small.

I’ve released some more code, it provides a few new features:

• HTTP update checking (now threaded)
• timed unbanning and a *better* way of banning
• it has the beginnings of the new correction script
• a few other minor changes

I’ll leave it as such, do join the channel (irc.v8d.org #BottleCap) and ask more questions. Since rc1 I’ve added a few little things to allow windows to function better with BottleCap, I’ve not yet given it a full testing, let’s hope it all works soon.

Kind regards, Robert.

People often ask me why I wrote BottleCap, this normally comes immediately after asking what BottleCap is. I might as well answer both. BottleCap is a small modular Python script designed to replace or create a few features I found either partially or completely lacking in XChat. It was primarily designed for Linux but should work on any OS providing it has XChat and python. It provides a fair few things and is in slow development. Some of the features are:

• Spelling and grammar correction
• Toaster pop-ups
• Highlight handling
• Auto-away and auto-return
• Automatic invite handling
• Regexp banning.

It’s a useful script and to my knowledge there are no ways to exploit it. I’ve mainly written it on request or as I’ve needed it, the regexp banning module is in direct result of an attack levied at a channel I’m op’d in. The attack used stupidly easy to spot nicknames which were rather hard to ban, a regexp did the job wonderfully.

Spelling and grammar correction is mainly to help me when I’m reading certain channels I moderate which are mostly used by children, it takes the strain off reading and deciding what they’re talking about!

There’s more information on this page (http://www.v8d.org/wiki/index.php?title=BottleCap) and please as in #BottleCap on irc.v8d.org for a copy and help getting it working.

If you’ve used BottleCap, or use BottleCap now, please post, I’d love to have a few ‘BottleCap changed my life!’ comments. Any suggestions would be great too.

Kind regards, Robert.