The big news of the year [for me] [thus far] is ZorkBot. Dan and I have been working on this since I came up with the idea this summer in a fit of boredom. In the initial beta version, there was a TCL client and a C server and then the original source code. I wrote the TCL and Dan wrote the server.

At the last moment, Dan came up with a way to do it all with a single perl script and before even telling me of the simplification, he implemented it. Leaving me having not contributed anything to the current working code base. heh well it was still my idea...

The basic bits & pieces are working, though it still needs a lot of work. Luckily, there have been some optimizations and upgrades that I've been able to code and contribute to. The big problem right now is getting around the dumb rate limitations in the AIM protocol. If you have one AIM bot talking to 20 people's clients, it overrates itself in about one message.

We're working on a system now that will farm out subservers to each client to get around this problem.

For now, though, the single-server beta is up and running on ZorkBot. I feel ok posting that here because I know I have about 3 readers and one of them [yes you, rob] is too lame to have a proper instant message client [nudge]. If you're reading this and thinking of promulgating the link, please hold off until we get the rate limiting work