IRC After a 10 Year Hiatus

Posted on September 21, 2007 by Michael Schurter

Its probably been 10+ years since I’ve touched IRC. In the early days of the public Internet, IRC was IM + MySpace + Filesharing, only a lot geekier. :)

Then came ICQ and soon after a flood of IM clients that rendered IRC clumsy and antiquated for casual chatting. When I went from High School to College in 2000, I left IRC behind…

Now its 2007, I’m an old man and returning to my old ways. I’m back on IRC except instead of chatting with friends using pIRCh* on Windows 98, I’m lurking in technical channels using irsii centrally located on a Debian Etch server.

If you want to track me down I go by the nick schmichael** and am currently lurking in the following channels.

  • #cherrypy on irc.oftc.net
  • #linode on irc.oftc.net
  • #python-genshi on irc.freenode.net
  • #drupal-ecommerce on irc.freenode.net

I also pop in and out of #gnome on gimpnet and #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net.

To experienced free and open source software community members the fact that IRC is new or strange to anyone is probably a bit hard to grasp. As far as I can tell, IRC is simply the de facto method for communicating about FOSS projects. Mailing lists may be more popular for some projects, but I find the instance gratification of IRC much more appealing.

* I remember liking its scripting better then mIRC or some such nonsense… I’ve never been known to use the most popular software available…

** A very unimaginative combination of my first and last names given to me by some friends in college. It works.

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  • http://dancoulter.com Dan Coulter

    I always use Pidgin for IRC. It has good IRC support and I’m already in it all day. WordPress and Prototype.js both have rooms on irc.freenode.net.

  • http://michael.susens-schurter.com/blog/ Michael Schurter

    @Dan:

    Cool! I used Pidgin at first, but I switched to irsii because I can leave it running 24/7 and access it from anywhere I have SSH access to the server.

    Pidgin is definitely easier and prettier to use though. irsii, despite being text mode, is really easy to use, but things like channel and personal message management are a little more difficult.

    Whats your nick?!