There seems to be a lack of information out there on IRC clients for Mac OS X. On Windows, my choice is pretty clear; I use mIRC with NoNameScript, and for running an fserve bot, the script of choice is SysReset.

So, briefly, what’s usable (and totally free!) on a Mac these days?

Colloquy

Colloquy was the IRC client I started using when I first got my MacBook. Importantly, it makes every attempt to conform to the Mac Human Interface Guidelines. It seems decent, but to an mIRC user like me the interface can actually end up slightly frustrating. A possibly more major problem I had was that it would randomly run up the CPU usage really high once in a while, causing the CPU fan to turn on. I’d then have to close the program and start it up again. I’m not sure if it’s been fixed by now, but I’m sure they’ve made some progress overall since then, at least. In any case, Colloquy has a few problems, but it’s certainly usable; I just don’t prefer it.

X-Chat Aqua

Until yesterday, for about a year, I used X-Chat Aqua. In terms of configurability, X-Chat Aqua is pretty good. It has rather extensive options, just as an mIRC user (or an X-Chat user…) would expect to have, and, similarly, the interface is okay but definitely could be better. It’s not out of Alpha yet (and development seems to have stalled a bit) but still seems stable enough.

However, there are some problems with it common to other ports from Windows/Linux (e.g. MS Office); assigning a Space to it in Spaces preferences does nothing. But I would still say that, overall, X-Chat Aqua really isn’t bad. (X-Chat Aqua may be comparable to an older and shareware—but still maintained—Mac IRC client called Snak. I also tried it and don’t think Snak is really worth the bother since X-Chat Aqua does pretty much a similar job.)

LimeChat

I’m glad I found LimeChat the other day. Relatively new and under development, it has some of the mIRC familiarity just as in X-Chat Aqua but with an arguably better interface and easier setup. It’s functional, yet certainly lightweight, and it doesn’t look bad, as far as IRC clients go, at all. I’ve yet to run into any real problems with it, except I almost just kept using X-Chat Aqua until I found the LimeChat keyboard shortcuts to switch between channels easily (cmd + up/down). They definitely should have shown how to do that in the program itself instead of just on the website/documentation.

Anyway, I’d really currently recommend LimeChat for any OS X IRC user. If I find any problems, I’ll update this, and if anyone has further comments, please do make them!

I haven’t blogged in a while. So here’s a quick blog post—not really much of an opinion type entry but probably more of a quick overview of what’s going on.

Where do my priorities lie right now? More specifically, where do I think my priorities should lie? In other words, I don’t follow this strictly, but maybe I should… Well, it’s really some mix of what I should follow and what I do follow. Anyway, without further ado, let’s organize this in tiers in which, within a tier, priorities are dynamically close to equal (relative to items in other tiers).

top tier

• God/prayer (I definitely need to improve here…)
• family
• friends
• schoolwork

high tier

• music (including piano)
• getting distracted philosophizing (more like simply collecting my thoughts and/or thinking about metaphysics, contemplating my existence, and so on)

third tier

• Rice Go club
• Rice Thresher

fourth tier

• other club activities (Hong Kong Student Association, Rice Taiwanese Association, etc.)
• StarCraft (with the whole Collegiate Starleague thing going on)
• swimming
• playing Go for fun, improving myself, and sharpening my mind

bottom tier (still priorities nonetheless)

• taking the time to explore interests related to some goals in life (i.e. cyber law, Lessig)
• clearing up my reading list (extremely slow progress at the moment)
• redesigning this blog (creating Pax Asiana v4) and fixing technical problems
• blogging (oops)

Yeah, so blogging is a priority of some sort at least. I’ve just scarcely found the proper combination of inspiration, time, and energy recently. I’ve (almost) always believed that blogging should be done whenever one feels like it, but I really should push myself to blog more. Sorry about that.

Another thing to notice is that Super Smash Bros. Brawl is not listed as a priority. I do it in between different things (although not so much recently) to relieve some stress, but it’s not something I take seriously; it’s really, really just for fun.

One final thing—I’d definitely appreciate prayer for my family. Thanks.

Akinator is pretty cool (http://en.akinator.com/). You think of a real or fictional character and play the game twenty questions with this genie dude interface. If you don’t know what twenty questions is, you are basically asked questions about the character you’ve decided on, to which you respond yes or no (although with this thing you can also choose “probably/partially,” “probably not/not really,” or “I don’t know”). After twenty questions it tries to guess the character.

For fun, here’s a list of characters it did and didn’t get correctly for some of my friends and me:

Characters it guessed correctly:

• Suzumiya Haruhi (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya)
• Lelouch Lamperouge (Code Geass)
• Euphemia li Britannia (Code Geass)
• Setsuna F Seiei (Gundam 00)
• Tieria Erde (Gundam 00)
• Osaka (Azumanga Daioh)
• Light (Death Note)
• Arbiter (Halo)
• Hydralisk (StarCraft)
• Captain Falcon
• Captain Planet
• Jolin Tsai
• Richard Stallman
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Anubis
• Condoleezza Rice
• Otto von Bismarck
• Ron Paul
• Armin van Buuren
• Tony the Tiger
• Longcat

Characters it didn’t guess correctly:

• Taeyeon (SNSD) — it guessed BoA
• Younha — it guessed BoA
• Sarah Kerrigan (StarCraft) — it guessed Tanya (Red Alert)
• Marine (StarCraft) — Jim Raynor (StarCraft)
• Archon (StarCraft) — Tassadar (StarCraft)
• Gold Roger (One Piece) — Sir Crocodile (One Piece)
• Ma Ying-jeou — Hu Jintao
• Charles Darwin — Isaac Newton