Europa v0.01 Copyright (c) 1999, Ed Schlunder <[email protected]> This is Free Software licensed under the GNU GPL. Please see COPYING for details. WARNING - YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. AUTHOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES INCURRED THROUGH THE USE OF THIS PACKAGE. SUMMARY -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa is a BitchX (popular irc client) plugin to provide easy access to an SQL knowledgebase. This is helpful for use in help channels where common questions repeatedly come up. BACKGROUND -------------------------------------------------------------------------- For the past 2-3 years, we've been answering people's questions about Linux in the EFnet IRC channel #linuxinfo. Jeremy Tregunna wrote a bot in Perl called 'Penguin' that stored tons of keyword/answers pairs in a database so that channel operators could store commonly asked question answers in. When a Linux newbie came in and asked a question already answered several times before in prior conversations, we simply ask Penguin to please explain the keyword associated with the question, saving us a lot of typing time. I've always admired the Penguin bot a lot and wished I could run one myself. However, I don't have access to any IRC servers that allow bots. This led to the developement of Europa, a BitchX plugin that listens to channels you are chatting on and automatically responds when it sees someone giving it a command. This lets you chat on IRC as a normal user like you've always done, but also have a nice SQL knowledgebase available at your (and your friends) finger tips. REQUIREMENTS -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Europa currently only support MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) for the database backend. You will need to have MySQL already installed and working to use Europa. To use Europa, you need to be using BitchX (http://www.bitchx.org/). In addition, to compile Europa, you will need a copy of the BitchX source code extracted as ../BitchX (relative to Europa's directory). INSTALLATION -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Extract the Europa source code and the BitchX source code: gzip -cd europa-xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf - gzip -cd BitchX-1.0c13.tar.gz | tar xvf - These should be extracted this way so that the Europa makefile can access the BitchX include files (see Makefile to see what I mean). 2. Compile and install BitchX cd BitchX/ less INSTALL 3. Create a database for Europa to use on your mysql server: mysql mysql -u root -p create database europa; insert into user values('%','europa',password('APASSWD'),'N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N','N'); insert into db values('%','europa','europa','Y','Y','Y','Y','N','N','N','N','N','N'); exit mysqladmin reload -u root -p mysql europa -u root -p < knowledgebase.sql 4. Edit europa.h to match your settings, should be self explanatory. 5. Compile the Europa source code: make 6. Copy the resulting europa.so file to your ~/.BitchX/plugins/ directory, or alternatively you could put it in your system wide BitchX plugins directory (/usr/local/lib/bx/plugins/ on my system). 7. Start up BitchX. Do a "/loaddll europa.so" and you should see Europa load and connect to your SQL knowledgebase. You may want to add the command "LOADDLL europa.so" to your ~/.BitchX/BitchX.sav file so that Europa loads automatically everytime you start BitchX. USING EUROPA -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that you've got it running, what can you do? Join a channel with some people on it. You may want to start another IRC session so you can talk to yourself (Europa can only see public commands from other clients, someone tell me how to fix that ;-). Suppose the client running Europa has the nick "jonny" and your second session has the nick "jon". A typical chat might look like: <jon> jonny: explain winnt <jonny> jon: Windows NT is a fully 32-bit operating system for the i386 and Alpha hardware playforms with superb multi-tasking and server functionality. Written by Microsoft Corporation (http://www.microsoft.com/). <jon> jonny: forget winnt <jonny> jon: winnt forgotten... <jon> jonny learn winnt Windows NT is a 32-bit operating system for the i386 and Alpha architectures with superb multitasking and server functionality (yeah, uh-huh, and pigs fly)... See http://www.microsoft.com/ and http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/15/nt-mare.idg/ <jonny> jon: winnt learned, thanks... Public command reference: NICK: explain KEYWORD NICK: forget KEYWORD NICK: learn KEYWORD ANSWER TEXT NICK: shutup -- europa disables saying anything to others NICK: hello -- europa turns back on and talks again And thus is the gist of using Europa. Also, Europa installs a new irc command "/explain USER KEYWORD" which lets you send a private message to a specific user containing the answer to KEYWORD. You could also do "/explain #CHANNEL KEYWORD" to send it to a channel you are currently on publically. I haven't implemented "/forget KEYWORD" or "/learn KEYWORD ANSWER" yet, sorry. FUTURE PLANS -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'd really like to redo Europa in Java and implement some natural language processing capabilities in it. You can see some of my experimenting with interfacing C to Java in the corba/ directory. Processing text in C is not particularly easy to do in a safe manner. Doing AI stuff is even harder to do without a nice garbage collector taking care of memory management for you. Normally, I depise Java for just about every project due to its closed sourced nature and buggy Linux support. But this is one case where it might be a good choice, we'll see. You can see my previous NLP work in the cse476/ folder. If you actually figure out what the code is doing in there, you'll understand why a garbage collector would be really nice for this and why C isn't.
