Crappy IRC and Unicode

I use MacIrssi as my IRC client at work and at home. It's mostly great. By mostly, I mean, I wish when people sent smart-ass messages on IRC filled with unicode characters, I could actually appreciate how much of a smart-ass they are being. Instead, all I see is this:

< ganeshanator> gonna go to the \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    and \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    getting those \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    and the \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    on \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588

I always forget how to convert it, so I wrote this, and now I never have to remember again:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use Encode;

sub unicode_plz { encode( 'UTF-8', pack( 'U', hex shift ) ) }

( my $message = shift ) =~ s{\\u([a-fA-F0-9]+)}{unicode_plz($1)}ge;
print "$message\n";

And, BAM!

Crappy was a harsh word. MacIrssi is pretty great, except for this.

DateTime Woes

This morning, I hate DateTime for this.

$ perl -MDateTime -wle'$a = DateTime->today( time_zone => "Australia/Melbourne" ); $b = DateTime->today; $b->set_time_zone("Australia/Melbourne"); print $a->iso8601; print $b->iso8601'
2011-03-31T00:00:00
2011-03-30T11:00:00

I understand why it happens, but it's still an annoying, pissy, little bug to find. sigh...

Update to an Old Post

A past post about tweeting from the command line with the Net::Twitter Perl module is one of my most visited entries. Anytime I check my traffic, it is always the second most visited entry for the day/week/whatever. However, it has a problem. The code does not work anymore for a simple, yet annoying, reason.

Last year, Twitter turned off its basic authentication support and now requires application developers to use OAuth. More detail about how that affected Net::Twitter can be read here. This kinda sucks because it's not longer as simple as providing a username/password combination. You need consumer keys/secrets and access tokens/secrets and that makes things a tad messier.

The original code I posted uses basic authentication and, obviously, will not work anymore. However, if anyone is interested, the code for that small side-project, Twitsh.pm, is on github and I recently updated it to use OAuth so that it works again, however the configuration file requires you to add your own consumer/access keys/tokens/secrets. Enjoy.

Goal for the Year: IPv6

First blog post for the year! Yay? And I'm only setting myself one goal for the year: Learn everything about IPv6 and set it up at home.

And by everything, I mean everything; from IPv6 packet headers to the implementation complexities to the business issues to the security issues to the political issues.

Why? Because, potentially, in the next decade, migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 will become important, and considering that it's a topic that I know next-to-nothing about, other than what I've read in passing on IRC, it's a knowledge gap that needs filling.

It's certainly possible that this will all take me less than a month, assuming enough free time. When that time comes, perhaps I'll pick a non-geek goal to spend my time on this year.