I have a RIM Blackberry 957, a little always-connected PDA-and-pager combo that
work provides for on-call and entertainment value. They pay for flat-rate connectivity too, so I figure I might as well get some personal use out of it.

And what better personal use than being able to IRC from anywhere?

Unfortunately, it’s not directly connected to the ‘net — any Internet-based applications on it have to communicate with gateway applications at the provider, via WAP. But it comes with a decent web browser, so for all practical purposes, the thing can speak email, WAP, and HTTP.

So I found Alan Cox‘s
‘wapirc‘, which with a
bit of tweaking works pretty well — the IRC server and nickname are compile-time settings, so it’s a little limited, but it’s limitations I can live with. And the WAP was specific to his phone, so I’ve fixed that a bit too.

So anyhow, I can now IRC from anywhere. But I’m staring at this source code, thinking that it’d be neat if it did THIS and THAT and the OTHER THING. But it’s a daemon and a CGI program in C. C is not a pretty language for writing things CGI in.

This means I have three choices:

• Use it as-is.
• Brush up on C well enough to maintain this.
• Port the whole thing to Perl.

The second and third option have the advantage of giving me a neat project to work on; there’s really nothing else like this out there, and I get the feeling Alan’s not planning on preparing for general release. The first option has the advantage of not needing a bunch of effort for something that pretty much already works for me.

WWMLJFD? (And would any of you find a wap-irc gateway useful?)