While sitting downstairs chatting on IRC through my serial terminal, I thought it’d be great if I could also chat to people on Google Talk through it. I had a quick search of the web and came across Bitlbee:

BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It’s a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don’t want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.

Just install the program and connect to the BitlBee server with your favourite IRC-client. You will be force-joined into the control channel where root (the bot, your assistant, the bee) will try to help you to get the program working.

A quick apt-get install bitlbee soon had it installed, and after working out I had to type /server +localhost into IRSSI I had a new channel open with me and the ‘root’ user. Telling the bee about Google Talk seemed fairly simple, but it didn’t want to connect, giving an error with the unhelpful “Connection Closed” message. A bit of searching came across a post that had some helpful wisdom on it:

account add jabber username@gmail.com mypasswd talk.google.com:5223:ssl

The important bit being :5223:ssl added to the end of the server string. Bitlbee now connects perfectly and I’ve been chatting away to my GTalk contacts as though they were on IRC.

My NQT file has been checked today, to make sure I’m keeping lots of nice juicy evidence of the things done this year. Not content with proving I know stuff during my PGCE, I have to do it all over again this year. I’ve spent all day sticking little post-it notes to lesson observations and things with cryptic little notes everywhere.

Yep, it’s death by paperwork time again. Hopefully they’ll be as interested in this file as my Uni was with my PCGE files.