AIM Information

Profile and Away Message

My profile rotates on a schedule. Every thirty minutes it changes to something new. There is a directory containing text files on my machine. I have a timer in my AIM client pork that runs a perl script every three hours to read that directory. Each text file is stored in memory, and every thirty minutes a new profile is set.

My current profile:
This feature is not implemented yet.

At some point my away message will rotate as well. At this point, I have not yet implemented this feature in my perl script. I hope to do this someday soon.

My current away message:
This feature is not implemented yet.

Screenname Origin

My AIM screenname has a relatively distinct origin. I chose it with a purpose. The Greek word for fish is ichthys. My screenname is a transliteration of that word, with an extra 'q' on the end. The Wikipedia article has a lot of information regarding the history of that term.

I chose to end the name in a 'q' because the name I originally wanted was already taken. I did not want to simply append a number like my birthday or anything, because no one ever remembers a number. I chose the single letter 'q' because it would stand out in everyone's mind. Since everyone always asks specifically about the 'q' after I explain the significance of the first part, it must be working!

History

I have had my screenname since: 31 JUL 1998.

AIM Client

The AIM client that I use is called pork. It is a text-only ncurses-based client. I really like it because I can use it remotely from my server, connecting only with a console. It also supports perl scripting.

I have actually contributed to the development of pork by writing a patch to implement command completion. This allows you to type a portion of a command and press the specific bound key to complete the command with possible options. Pressing the bound key again will advance to the next possible completion. When all possible completions have been exhausted, it will return to the original (uncompleted) portion.

My friend Aaron has also submitted a patch. Together he and I diagnosed (and fixed) a pointer problem with pork that caused awkward displays of multi-line Instant Messages.