Building a better bot

So, it's no secret that I spend an unhealthy amount of time hanging around the Google AJAX APIs. Between the Google Group and IRC channel, I certainly find enough to do to keep myself out of trouble (or get myself in trouble, if you ask my wife). For the last several months, people in the channel have kicked around the idea of building an IRC bot to help out in the channel and have a little fun. Well, this past weekend, I sat down and started tinkering.

The result: http://code.google.com/p/cringer

Now, I know there's no code there yet, but it's coming. cringer is a Perl-written IRC bot that will eventually run Javascript, search the web, listen to your troubles, and even make snide remarks about MSIE and Flash.

So far, I've learned that getting Perl to talk to IRC is extraordinarily simple with the right modules, giving it a very rudimentary level of artificial intelligence is a snap, and getting it to run with DBD::mysql means making sure you have the right version of MySQL installed on your computer. What I'm needing to learn now is how to make it interact with TraceMonkey, Mozilla's brand-spanking new JS engine. So it's back to work for me!