After not being able to get this card’s GPS to do anything, I forgot about it for a while. Now that I’ve had some time, I revisited it and was able to get it working. Read on to see how.

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I have rewritten most of MVpyBot. New features:

• It has a GitHub page
• The GitHub page also has some good documentation for admins, users, and developers
• Improved module architecture (unfortunately, modules will need to be rewritten but this isn’t hard)
• Code in general is much less of a clumsy hack
• Proper error reporting (no more having to guess what’s wrong/enable debug mode)
• New implicit authentication mode, designed for IRC servers where nicknames are already authenticated (such as twitch.tv)

Head on over and try out the new version.

I recently came into possession of a Firebox X550e Core that was thrown out due to a bad power supply. Turns out OpenWRT (or almost any OS for that matter) is pretty easy to install on this thing. Read on for some photos and a how-to.

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As I mentioned in my review, the Routerstation Pro only has a single user-programmable LED. However, it has 7 GPIO lines that can easily be attached to more LEDs. Read on for instructions and pictures.

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After finally deciding to replace an aging WRT54GL, I decided to not get a typical poor-performing home router and go for a more professional product. The RouterStation Pro fit my needs perfectly, with its expandability and performance being far beyond most home routers. Read on for the review and pics.

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Just a few minor fixes, new version should be in SVN.

The bot now supports “hot reloading.” The bot can now reload itself without losing connection due to a new wrapper.

You need to run ‘mvpybot.py 0’ because start.py is broken now. Substitute the zero with a different server number if you want to connect to a different server.

There is a somewhat-major bot update in the works. The plugins system has been completely redone. Instead of plugin files being used for whatever functions can be found in them, they now have to explicitly register functions. Here is an example, the rewritten ping plugin:

#!/usr/bin/python

def register():
 registerfunction('ping', ping)
 addhelp('ping', help_ping)

def ping():
 outstuff=''
 print "ping called"
 if (len(cmd)<2):
  return('PRIVMSG %s :Incorrect usage. Syntax: ping (4|6) <address>.' %(channel))
 else:
  if cmd[1]=='4' or cmd[1]=='6':
   if cmd[1]=='4':

    output=syscmd(['ping','-c','5','-i','0.2',cmd[2]])
    outsplit=output.split('\n')
    outparts=outsplit[-3:-1]
    for part in outparts:
     outstuff+='PRIVMSG %s :%s\n' %(channel,part) 

   if cmd[1]=='6':

    output=syscmd(['ping6','-c','5','-i','0.2',cmd[2]])
    outsplit=output.split('\n')
    outparts=outsplit[-3:-1]
    for part in outparts:
     outstuff+='PRIVMSG %s :%s\n' %(channel,part)
  return(outstuff)
  else:
   return('PRIVMSG %s :Error: protocol must be either 4 or 6' %channel)

def help_ping():
 return('PRIVMSG %s :Pings an internet address. Usage: ping (4|6) <address>.' %(channel))

A plugin’s register() function is called when the plugin is loaded. It can use registerfunction(), addlistener(), and addhelp(). You can use each function as many times as you want, in case you have multiple functions and/or listeners, or if you want to include help with your plugin.

Read more to find out how to use the new plugin features.

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First of all, while I figure out how to have a system for hosting modules, I will put modules in mattventura.net/mvpybot/modules. Secondly, a bug tracking system is being set up.

Lastly, I will be improving the plugin system, and I will try to make older plugins backwards-compatible, but the new system will make the plugin system more efficient. Instead of always having to scan for functions in plugins whenever a certain command is called, all function plugins will register in a list of plugins upon being loaded. This has the advantage of also allowing plugin authors to specify what functions are actual functions for the bot to use.

I just did another major update to MVpybot. Listeners have been implemented. A listener is a function that gets called whenever the bot receives data, or it can be set to only be called when a certain type (privmsg, join, part, etc) is received. As usual, the source is at the SVN repo.

Now for the technical stuff. A listener is just a python file in the listeners folder, with functions defined in it. A function’s name should be botfunction_type, where type is the type of message to listen for (privmsg, join, part, etc) or it can be ‘any’ for all data received by the bot. Here is an example logger function:

#!/usr/bin/python

import time

enabled=1

logfile=open('log','a')
timestamp=time.strftime('[ Session starting at %y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S ]')
logfile.write(timestamp+'\n')
logfile.close()

def botfunction_any():
 logfile=open('log','a')
 timestamp=time.strftime('[%y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] ')
 logfile.write(timestamp+line+'\n')
 logfile.close()

As you can see from the example, plugins can be quickly enabled or disabled by toggling the ‘enabled’ flag. Also, ‘line’ is passed to the plugin. Not that anything outside of function definitions will be run when the bot starts.

Listeners can use the ‘socket’ variable to send data to the server, as shown in this example:

#!/usr/bin/python

enabled=0

def botfunction_privmsg():
 print "called"
 out="PRIVMSG %s :Botfunction_privmsg called" %(channel)
 print out
 socket.send(out+'\n')

Note that in the example, it uses botfunction_privmsg. To make listeners easier to write, the main program will automatically figure out these variables from privmsgs and pass them to the function:

info         #user info
msg          #the message
channel      #the channel the message was from (set to the sender for private messages)
sender       #the sender of the message
senderstuff  #info of the sender
isprivate    #whether or not the message was a private message as opposed to a channel message.

This only applies to privmsgs. All other events only get ‘socket’ and ‘line’ passed and have to figure out everything from ‘line’

That’s all for now.