This week is Ubuntu Developer Week, and I’m giving a talk named
Hooking your app into your desktop CouchDB on Wednesday at 1800UTC.
Ubuntu Developer Week is sort of a conference, but it’s all on IRC. I’ve
never given a talk on IRC before. Anyway, some people just speak off the
cuff. (I do this in real life a lot.) Some people have notes and speak
from their notes. (I do this a lot too; with slides for talks at
in-person conferences.) Since this is IRC, though, I thought I’d write
my talk ahead of time. Now, you don’t want to just cut-and-paste your
whole talk into an IRC channel and then log off. That’s not a talk,
that’s a blog post. The way UDW is set up is that you give a talk in
#ubuntu-classroom*
and people ask questions on #ubuntu-classroom-chat. So there’s some
interaction with the audience. So, what I wanted was a way to deliver
the talk, line by line, and be able to stop when I wanted. Enter an
xchat plugin: xchat-give-talk. To use: enable the XChat Python
plugin (Edit > Preferences > Scripts and Plugins > Python in
xchat-gnome), and then:
/py load /path/to/xchat-give-talk.py
/talkload /path/to/talk/as/a/text/file.txt
and then /talknext will send the next line of your talk to the
channel. (If you lose your place, /talkinfo will tell you how far you
are through the talk and what the next line will be.) /talkload loads
that talk for the channel you are currently in; you can have more than
one talk going at once in different channels. So, just keep doing
/talknext in the channel and it’ll walk through your talk, line by line.