Category Archives: EyeInTheSky

Technology updates

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Quite a bit has happened recently!

I’ll try and give a bit of info about each, there’s quite a lot to write about though!

EyeInTheSky

An IRC bot which stalks changes to Wikipedia based on regex matches. Read more

caterpie beedrill as minecraft server

Those of you who use my Minecraft server will know that the server known as “caterpie” was bad. Any more than one person connected, and it would lag to the depths of hell. I’ve replaced it with a 1.7G beast of a server, still running as an Amazon server instance.

stwalkerster.co.uk

I registered a new domain! I’m still in the process of setting the thing up though, but that will become my main website, not quite sure what I’m gonna put there yet, but it’ll probably replace what webspace I had at http://helpmebot.org.uk/~stwalkerster/

ACC‘s IRC Bot, ACCBot

A couple of weeks ago, the IRC bot that we use over at Wikipedia’s Account Creation Assistance project decided it would stop giving notifications to the IRC channel.

I’ll write more about this at a later time, hopefully soon, but probably when I’ve finished messing with my new site :P

strobe light

Growing tired of the poor strobe light applications available on Android Market, I decided to build my own.

I’ll also write more about this too at a later time – I think this bit and the last one need their own posts.

EyeInTheSky

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EyeInTheSky is one of my newer projects, an idea which I’ve stolen from two other people.

Wikipedia has so many modifications being made to it that it’s just not possible to keep an eye on everything you want to watch. While the MediaWiki software has a feature known as a watchlist, it’s neither flexible nor easy to use in my opinion.

EyeInTheSky is an IRC bot (seems to be my speciality!) which monitors the Wikimedia IRC recent changes feed, compares every entry to a set of regular expressions and reports them to a different network.

It’s possible to set up the bot with an entire XML tree of regular expressions matching on the username, edit summary, and page title. There are also logical constructs which allow more-or-less unlimited regexes to specify what exactly you want to watch.

For example, with this tree, I could specify I wanted to stalk all the edits which are made by someone with “the” in their name, “and” or “or” but not “xor” in the page title, and with “train” in the edit summary:

I also can set a flag, something that I can then set my IRC client to respond to, and it will speak that flag for every stalked edit.

Of course, it’s not just edits that can be stalked this way – log entries are sent to the IRC RC feed in the exact same way. It’s just a case of specifying Special:Log/delete as the page title to get the deletion log, for example. The entire log entry except for the time/user is sent in the edit summary field. This means the same system can be used to stalk log entries as well.

The bot logs all stalked edits, and is capable of emailing the entire log to me, so I can clear the log when I disconnect from IRC, and when I get back on, I can email the log, go through what I’ve missed, and catch up.

I’m planning on making it multi-channel too, with probably multiple people able to command it to email them the log. I can already tell it to not email certain stalks, especially as some of the stalks that have been set up are not things that interest me, but rather interest other people. I just ignore those when it reports them, and have it set not to email me for those stalks.

There’s quite a lot this little bot can do, if you want to learn more, I’d recommend taking a look over the source code, and see what you think!

The source code is available on GitHub here.