SASL auth with python-irc

I maintain a couple of IRC bots that help out with Wikimedia devops tasks. Jouncebot was a bot I started helping with when @mattofak moved on to other projects. Later I developed Stashbot as a replacement for using the Logstash that collected data for my SAL tool in Tool Labs.

Both bots are built using the awesome irc python library from Jason Coombs. I've copied various core irc behaviors from one bot to the other as I've discovered and fixed various bugs in how I was using the library. I finally got around to extracting these core parts into a Python library of it's own that I have named "IRC Bot Behavior Bundle" or IB3 for short.

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Hacking GitHub Contributions Calendar

GitHub profile pages include a neat visualization of commit history that they call the "contributions calendar". This 53x7 grid shows the number of commits and other GitHub interactions that the user performed on each day for the last year.

Example graph

Each cell in the graph is shaded with one of 5 possible colors. These colors correspond to the quartiles of the normal distribution over the range [0, max(v)] where v is the sum of issues opened, pull requests proposed and commits authored per day.

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Using GitHub issues for comments

I was inspired by Ivan Zuzak's post to try using GitHub issues on the repository for this blog to collect and display reader comments. I'm using Octopress to generate the site, so I decided to make some customizations to make applying Ivan's ideas easy for me.

I started by adding a new configuration setting to my _config.yml file: github_comments: true. I'll use this configuration switch to turn the new feature on in other places in the codebase.

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