megasus (Marcus Extremly Genuine Automated SILC User Support)

Copyright 2005, Marcus Thiesen (marcus@thiesen.org)  All rights reserved.

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of either:

    a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
    Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later
       version, or

    b) the "Artistic License" which comes with Perl.

    On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the complete text of the GNU General
    Public License can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL' and
    the Artistic Licence in `/usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic'.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  

Installation
============
Megasus runs inside the Irssi/SILC client. Because of that, you don't
really need to install anything but you have to make sure that
the prerequisites are met.

Megasus needs the following Perl Modules:

Carp::Trace
Class::Accessor
Devel::Size
File::Modified
Finance::Currency::Convert::XE;
HTML::TokeParser
IMDB::Film
IMDB::Persons
Lingua::Bork
LWP::Simple
Module::Pluggable
Net::Amazon
Net::DNS
Net::Ping::External
Net::Traceroute
Net::Whois::Raw
Regexp::Common
String::Similarity
Time::Duration
Weather::Com
Weather::Underground
WWW::Search::Google
WWW::Search::Googlism
WWW::Wikipedia
XML::RSS

To test if a module is installed you can try the following;

	perl -M<name> -e1;

e.g. for Devel::Size do

	perl -MDevel::Size -e1;

When you don't see an error message, the module is installed
in your system. 

To install a module you need to do (most of the time as root)

	cpan -i <name>

e.g. for Devel::Size

	cpan -i Devel::Size

When the 'cpan' shorthand is not installed (i.e. when you type
cpan it gives you a command not found error) you have to do

	perl -MCPAN -e shell

to start the CPAN shell. When the CPAN Shell is started, you can
type "install <name>" to install a module.

(Debian: If you happen to run Debian, a lot of modules are already
in Debian. To find a module, you have to replace the '::' (i.e. colon 
colon) with a '-' (i.e. hyphen), prepend 'lib' and append 'perl'.
For Example, you can get XML::RSS with apt-get as
	
	apt-get install libxml-rss-perl
)

Furthermore, Megasus needs some other programs, at the moment they
are:

w3m

Please make sure they are installed on you system.

After you have all the required modules installed you have to 
adapt the "config.pl" file in order to make it suitable for
your needs. "config.pl" has comments for each value. 

!!! NOTE: config.pl contains my personal keys for some webservices.
As I'm far too lazy to strip them out and don't want to ship non functional
software, they are still in there but please, please get your own ones.

When some Modules are not installed in your system but only in your local
home directory, have a look on the very first lines of megasus.pl
which look like 

    push @INC, "$ENV{HOME}/perl";

Just add any other directories by replacing the $ENV{HOME}/perl with
any directory you like to make Perl look for the modules in these directories
as well. 

To start Megasus, you have to start your Irssi/Silc client.
Then type

	/script load /path/to/megasus.pl

where you have to replace /path/to with the appropriate path.

In case script does not work, try to first

	/load perl

in case the Perl library is not loaded. If it still not works
you happen to have a not scripting enabled client, complain
to your Distribution.

When the script is loaded, Megasus will magically join the configured
channel and change his nick to the configured name. It might happen
that your Irssi/SILC Client looks a little bit messed up afterwards,
that is because Megasus forks and the curses interface doesn't really
like it. You won't need this client anyway, so just ignore it.

Because Megasus runs inside your client, you can't use it anymore as 
your client. The best way of using it is to run it on a server
inside a screen session (see 'man screen', basically it lets a program
run even when you're not logged into a machine. To start silc inside
screen, run

	screen silc

When you started Megasus, you can leave it alone and detach using 
CTRL+A D). 

Now go back to your usual client and start talking to Megasus,
begin with 
	
	megasus: help

to see all of Megasus nice features. (Of course, when you renamed
megasus to not be named megasus, you have to replace megasus by the
name you choose.)


PASTEBIN
========

Megasus comes with a pastebin, i.e. a way to talk about larger amounts
of information without spamming the channel. You have to put the 
pasty.pl file somewhere into your cgi-bin and change some of the
constants defined in the beginning of the file (i.e. mostly the URL
constant to specify a URL and the FIFO constant which points to the
fifo which is created by Megasus on startup.)
When you point your browser to the location where you installed pasty
you'll see a rather simple page that shows a big textfield. You should
be able to paste something into the field and submit the form. If
your setup is correct, megasus will tell the default channel that
something was pasted and give a complete url to the content. 





Have fun, any feedback will be appriciated

Marcus (marcus@thiesen.org)