IRC

The first hack shows you how to create a bot that performs Google searches using the Google and PircBot APIs. Conveniently, most IRC clients will highlight the resulting URLs and let you click on them to load the page in your default web browse...

When someone pops into your IRC channel with a question, you can bet your life that 9 times out of 10, he could have easily found the answer on Google. If you think this is the case, you could tell him that—or you could do it slightly more su...

Sometimes it can be helpful to have a clue what they are saying. One solution is to look these words up in the Jargon file (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon) or the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC—http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/fold...

Databases and applications can be used to provide dynamic information, but the result has typically been available only embedded in an HTML document. Web Services were created to better facilitate the exchange of information by providing mo...

This bot uses a Web Service to get its data. The translator Web Service is not listed on XMethods but is provided by RestlessDelusions.net. Here is the information about the service that you need: WSDL URL http://www.restlessdelusi...

Using Web Services again, you can create an easy hack that will convert currencies. Users can enter the names of two countries and see the exchange rate or convert a specified amount from one currency to another. This hack uses another servic...

If you're looking for a particular person on IRC, you can tell if she's around by seeing if she's in any of your channels. But what if she's connected to the network but not in any of your channels? Most people resort to a simple /whois nic...

Amazon provides a Web Services Developer's Kit, available from http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html. You can download this for free and use it to search Amazon for books or other items. To use it from a Java program, you will also need to ...