IRCcat + cowsay == hilarious
Today I managed to get some of the developers at work to hope onto IRC. Most of us talk to each other through AIM or Gtalk, but personally I think that IRC provides an easy way to announce messages to the group and is much better than isolated conversations on AIM. Plus if you really want to you can private message someone. After setting up the channel and letting people know about it people start to trickle in. We were pasting apache errors, pasting bash commands, and asking general questions. So far it was working out great. We weren't even abusing it by goofing off that much.
Then someone mentioned cowsay. I have never used cowsay before, but I knew what it was. A coworker brought it to my attention a couple weeks ago. This is when I got the best/worst/best idea ever. I remember seeing IRCcat, the IRC bot that the good folks at http://last.fm use, and thinking of how useful it would be. Basically the bot logs into IRC and opens a port on localhost. Whatever you netcat to that port it sends to IRC. This allows you to setup hooks for your favorite version control system and have it announce commit messages, tail logs, monitor your network, and relay these messages to your entire company (those that are on IRC anyways). All very useful stuff, but not very funny.
Back to cowsay.
$ sudo apt-get install cowsay
$ cowsay -e '$$' WE BALLIN | netcat -qo localhost 12345
Instant awesome.
