IRC Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 63 Create Comic Strips

IRC chat certainly has its moments.
Wouldn't it be great if you could immortalize some
of these moments in the form of a comic strip?

At times, an ordinary conversation on
IRC turns into something much more amusing. People take funny quotes
(quite often out of context) and plaster them all over the Web so
other people can enjoy the humor. One of the most popular IRC quotes
web sites is http://www.bash.org,
which contains thousands of manually approved funny quotes.

Plain text quotes are all very well, but there's no
reason they can't be made into comic strips.
ComicBot (http://www.jibble.org/comicbot) is an IRC bot
based on the PircBot framework that sits quietly in a channel and
observes what people say. If somebody utters
"lol" or suchlike, the bot assumes
that something funny has been said and uses the last few lines to
fill in a comic strip template.

9.7.1 Setting Up ComicBot

ComicBot can be downloaded from http://www.jibble.org/comicbot. The ZIP file
contains the source code, the compiled bytecode, and several comic
strip templates.

The first step is to edit the configuration file, so open
bot.ini in your favorite text editor.
You'll find several settings in this file that you
will need to change:

nick = MyComicBot
login = comicbot
server = irc.freenode.net
channel = #channel
outputDirectory = /home/paul/webpages/comicbot
helpString = Check out the latest cartoon at http://www.jibble.org/comicbot/

You can change the nickname of your ComicBot by changing the
nick setting. You will need to make sure you set
it to something that isn't already in use on the
server. The server and channel
let you tell the bot what to connect to and which channel to join.
When the bot creates a new comic strip, it will write it to the
outputDirectory, so make sure this directory is
writable by the bot. Finally, the helpString is
what the bot says when people ask the bot for help. It is always a
good idea to provide a help feature in a bot so that other users can
establish what its purpose is, for example:

<Paul> ComicBot: help
<ComicBot> Check out the latest cartoon at http://www.jibble.org/comicbot/

9.7.2 Running ComicBot

Windows users can simply double-click on
run.bat to launch ComicBot (the program is
already compiled, so you will only need to run
comp.bat to compile the source code if you have
made any changes to it).

Linux/Unix users can run ComicBot
from a terminal window by entering:

% java -classpath .:./pircbot.jar CartoonStripBot

After the bot has been started, you should see it connect to the IRC
server and join the channel specified in
bot.ini. Leave the bot running for a while and
you will see each comic strip generated and stored in the output
directory.

9.7.3 Comic Strip Templates

Each time ComicBot sees something
that it believes is funny, it will randomly pick one of the templates
stored in the data directory and use it to
create a comic strip. Each template consists of two filesa
configuration file and a background image. For example, the first
template in this directory would consist of the files
strip1.ini and strip1.png.

Making your own template is straightforward. The easiest method is to
copy an existing template, alter the PNG image, and edit the
configuration file in a text editor. The configuration file will
start by setting the filename of the background image:

background = strip1.png

This particular background image looks like Figure 9-7.

Figure 9-7. A simple background image for a template

ComicBot will write a date stamp on the output so that you know when
each comic strip was generated. The datestamp
setting is used to specify the x,y coordinate of where this should be
placed, so make sure you know how big your background image is and
that there is a suitable area of whitespace for the date stamp to be
written. Figure 9-7 provides room for a date stamp
along the bottom left.

datestamp = 11,261

Each template background should contain white regions that can be
used to write each part of the IRC quote. The inner bounding box of
the first "speech bubble" is
defined like so:

bubble1 = 29,65,146,82
maxlength1 = 100

This means that the first line of text to be placed in the comic
strip will be fitted into a rectangle with a top-left coordinate of
(29,65), with a width of 146 and height of 82. The ComicBot will
shrink the text if necessary so it fits nicely. However, if there is
too much text, it could become so small it is unreadable. In this
case, the maximum length of the speech bubble has been limited to 100
characters. If there are more than 100 characters, ComicBot will
simply give up instead of producing a comic strip with small,
unreadable text. The next speech bubble coordinates are specified
with bubble2 and so on.

Once you have made the template, you should end up with something
like Figure 9-8.

Figure 9-8. A complete comic strip created from the template

If you make any interesting comic strips, let me know and I can link
to them or even include your templates in future versions of

ComicBot.