I’ve been quite shocked and saddened by the online disappearance of why the lucky stiff last week. Heck, the blogging engine for this site is written to make use of his micro web framework – camping.

_why wrote (writes!! we await the second coming) some of the more interesting ruby code out there. And he also wasn’t afraid to write things that were quite out there – on the borderland between programming and art. One of his creations was called blimlimb (the code is still around, but I fear some of the blimlimb scripts and repository history is lost). Imagine this, you’re sitting in a peaceful IRC channel and all of a sudden a whole troupe of bot actors appear in channel. They start performing a play for you, complete with actions and appropriate dramatic pauses. And the weird part is that the bot puppetmaster can also add a bit of improvisational scripting to spook those in channel further.

The newest version of my IRC bot, irbie is able to evaluate python code in channel and respond with the output.

It does this in only 33 lines of RUBY code.