The
Inner Child in Me
By David Shamah,
The
Help! I’ve made a horrible
discovery recently – apparently there’s some sort of incoherent being living
inside me, a nasty little bloke who surfaces from time to time spewing the most
ridiculous nonsense. Last week he started up when I was trying to convince the
bank manager that I’m really a good credit risk, and that the 20,000-shekel
overdraft I’m running is just temporary. Hold on… oh-oh! He’s back!
“Doods! i got to clu
u in on won of the kewlest things evuh!
U r not going to believe it!”
See what I mean? It’s as if
he seems to know when I’m doing something important, and makes his appearance
at exactly the wrong time – like some antisocial teenager!
Which he
may indeed be. I may have picked
up this stupid kid hanging out in one of those IRC chat rooms, which is full of
these characters. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. It’s got a reputation as
the “bargain basement” of Internet communications – and tends to attract even
more antisocial teenagers (and adults, for that matter) than newsgroups, ICQ
and MSN Chat Rooms combined!
The IRC network consists of
about 50 major chat servers where users can communicate with each other in real
time, as a group. When you open your chat client program, you get a list of
available servers and the channels – the specific chatrooms
– available on each. There’s also a list of users so you can see who’s currently participating – usually funny-looking
nicknames like NixBoy, Blacksheep,
and Dedzed. Names no rational adult could ever
possibly think of.
Actually, there are adults
on IRC, too – and not just middle-aged teenagers. Universities often have their
own chat servers with channels dedicated to specific classes or faculties, and
some large corporations run servers for internal, secure communications. CNN
also has a public chat server for people who have nothing better to do than
comment on the news – it’s sort of like the talk radio of the Internet. But
there’s no question that many IRC chat sessions contain lots of teenage-style
bravado, nefarious discussions about hacking and other wholesome subjects, and
the inevitable swapping of music, software and video files.
What’s heaven to a
rebellious teen is hell to a parent, and IRC is just too big and popular to
ignore. If you’ve got net-savvy kids around the house, chances are good they’re
already wired into IRC, so you may want to check it out for yourself. If you’ve
ever tried to download an IRC client, you may have been put off by all the
funny looking characters and commands you need to run in order to get anything
done. Even I, the great Newzgeek, was intimidated by
IRC for the longest time – until I found a great free chat client called IceChat (http://www.icechat.net).
Because IRC is an older,
text-based communications protocol, all IRC clients (programs that run the IRC
protocol and can log onto servers) are somewhat clunky-looking by the smooth
standards of messaging programs like ICQ, AIM, etc. In order to log onto a
server, you need to type in a command like “/server irc.servername.com” –
there’s just no way around it. IceChat takes all
these arcane commands and gussies them up with buttons and contextual pop-up
menus. For example, once you connect to a server, you’ll want to list the
channels available – normally done with the command “/list.” With IceChat, you click on the question next to the command line
and click on the List Channels command, which will automatically type this
command into the correct dialog box. Click OK and your channel list appears.
The same pop-up/contextual menu scheme works for all the other major commands. IceChat’s charm is in making the process easy, but not
prettifying it too much; you see the commands listed and executed in their
natural text format, even though you clicked on buttons and lists.
Unlike many chat clients, IceChat makes running IRC scripts easy. A script is a
preset list of actions that you can take when something happens – for example,
if a young ‘un gets a little ornery and starts cussing (how’s that for
metaphor?), you can set up a script that will identify the offending term and
the user it came from automatically, and either warn or “ban” that person from
your group. Banning is an extremely popular activity in the IRC world, and
users or channel operators are constantly threatening other users with bans for
all sorts of infractions – and heaven help you if you get caught trying to
sneak back into a channel with a different user name!
IceChat has a good help file, and the program’s Web site has
tutorials about the program and IRC in general. But to really understand IRC
you have to use it for a while – it’s really a whole subculture unto itself,
and if you were to pick one term that succinctly encapsulated the IRC
experience, it would be “freedom of speech.” Anything goes on IRC, and if you
don’t like the way the chat’s going in the channel you’re in, just start your
own! On some servers, you will see hundreds of channels with only one
participant listed – most likely the person who started the channel because
they didn’t like what was going on elsewhere, or because they were banned in
another channel. Some servers are considered more “serious” than others, and
some servers seem to attract the illegal software and file trading groups, the
wannabe hackers, etc. One feature IceChat has that
other IRC clients lack is a “stop” button – to stop loading the channels list
on very popular servers (the Undernet server, one of the most popular, has
about 10,000 channels!).
As Ralph Kramden
used to say, “Youth is wasted on the young” – and there is no better example of
that adage in action than IRC. I really shouldn’t knock it too much, though – I
still have that kid to worry about. If I push him too far, I may end up getting
banned myself!
Download IceChat
from http://www.icechat.net; for all Windows systems.
Send questions to ds@newzgeek.com or check out http://www.newzgeek.com