I recently blogged about a nice hack presented by the Last.fm guys on the Future of Web Applications conference here in London.

The hack consists of having an IRC bot tell everyone on a certain channel that something in the development process has happened, i.e. ticket changes in Trac or commits to Subversion.

Richard Jones open sourced the hack and I’ve managed to get it to work on a project we’re working on. The trickiest part was to get Richard’s code for the Trac plugin to work.

I’ve created a Google project for the packaging of Richard’s Trac code: irccat-listener-trac-plugin

As for the title of this post: The bot in our development channel is called overlord (with a lowercase ‘o’).

Before going to the Future of Web Apps conference last week, I’d become aware of some buzz about OpenID on sites such as Tech Crunch, Slashdot and in the blogosphere in general.

Simon Willisson’s talk on FOWA (slides, video) was an eye opener and OpenID seems close to reaching a tipping point.

David Heinemeier Hansson has recently shown interest, Dan Webb posted the Rails based The No Shit Guide to Supporting OpenID in your Applications and East Media Group have made a plugin available.

Following the Rails community’s reaction to this will be interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if OpenID support becomes native to Rails in the near future.

In my last post I mentioned a hack that was featured in a presentation made by Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia of Last.fm at The Future of Web Apps conference last week. Anil has blogged about the presentation and the hack which has just been open sourced by their CTO, Richard Jones.

The hack is basically an IRC bot, called IRCCat (as in cat to IRC), that listens to messages on some port and sends them to an IRC channel the developers are logged onto. This can be used to make commits to Subversion, ticket changes on Trac or any other event in a development environment become part of a chat conversation.

Now that IRCcat has been open sourced, implementing this for Capistrano deploys will be very straight forward.

Best theatrics: Soocial.com

Founder Stefan Fountain made the conference’s most entertaining presentation. His style was relaxed and funny but slightly intense at the same time. His theme was how much trouble he had getting his mom’s phone number into his new mobile phone. His product is going to solve this problem for him and everyone else: “Enough about my mom, let’s talk about your mom.” My own contact list is a fragmented mess and if he solves it elegantly, he’s on to something.

Most informing: Simon Willison

I’ve been meaning to look into what exactly openId is and how it works. Simon saved me the trouble. Very interesting.

Most surprising: Rasmus Lehrdorf

Why should a talk by the creator of a programming language I don’t like interest me? Sure, Rasmus is a hero and PHP is used to run a large chunk of the web, but PHP causes pain while Rails is sweet. Rasmus’s talk turned out to be both entertaining and thought provoking. Why haven’t I heard of Valgrind until now? Note to self: Always show up to talks by superhackers.

There was lots more of juicy stuff in the conference. Digg’s Kevin Rose and Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia had some thought provoking stuff to say and the Last.fm guys presented an interesting hack I might blog more on later.

In short: Good stuff.

I’ll be attending The Future of Web Apps conference on the 20th and 21st of this month, i.e. tomorrow and the day after.

Speakers who I’m sure will have something interesting to say include Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, the Last.fm guys, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Tariq Krim of Netvibes (who was recently featured in the Economist article Web deux point zéro) and Digg’s Kevin Rose.

If podcasts become available, I’ll link to any talks I find interesting.