01:59 <Alren> hello?

02:02 <Alren> i'm new to ruby and have been looking to use irc as a way of getting a better grasp on the language. I've been trying to get cinch to work, but when i try and run the example scripts they don't work. I could use a bit of help if anyone has a bit of time. I hate asking, but i've already read the read me files that are downloaded with it and.. well.. obiviously i'm missing something.

02:03 <leftylink> yeah I think we can do that. first let's dig in deeper into the "they don't work" I guess

02:05 <Alren> I i've been trying to get the most basic ones up and running so I could learn from there. In particular the /examples/basic/hello

02:05 <leftylink> sounds like a good starting point

02:05 <leftylink> and what happens?

02:05 <Alren> when i run it with ruby interperiter (cui) it flashes a window up then closes

02:06 <Alren> i've been able to get a basic dice bot up with ruby before, but had to put in a message to the bot to get it to reconect to irc after the initial log in

02:07 <Alren> i'm wondering if it's the same issue with cinch and if so if there was a way to compinsate for it?

02:07 <Alren> but this is very new territory for me

02:07 <leftylink> my instinct is that maybe the cinch gem isn't installed? what happens if you fire up a ruby interpreter, and type:

02:07 <leftylink> require 'cinch'

02:08 <leftylink> if it prints '=> true', life is good, if it prints LoadError or something similar, life is not good (yet)

02:09 <leftylink> and in the latter case I would say install the cinch gem, and then require 'cinch' should work

02:10 <Alren> seems like a good place to start. Now i'm guessing that the ruby interpreter is different then command prompt with ruby?

02:11 <Alren> i loaded the gem using : gem install cinch on the command prompt with ruby.. so.. the ruby interpereter is a different program?

02:11 <leftylink> actually, it might be the same thing

02:11 <leftylink> when you have a command prompt with ruby, is that a thing where you can type ruby expressions and it will print out the result?

02:12 <leftylink> like type 1 + 2 and it prints 3?

02:12 <Alren> no

02:12 <Alren> or at least it didn't allow me to just now

02:12 <leftylink> however, you said you did gem install cinch, which was the correct thing to do

02:13 <leftylink> that should install the cinch gem

02:13 <leftylink> altough I guess we can check whether it was done corectly

02:13 <leftylink> ok, so the ruby interpreter is a different program from what you mentioned. it's called irb, do you have anything like that?

02:15 <Alren> one moment

02:15 <Alren> i do

02:16 <Alren> and when i open it the window flashes open before closings

02:16 <Alren> hrmm.. maybe i should reinstall it?

02:16 <leftylink> sorry, dumb question, but what do you do to open it?

02:17 <Alren> i dobe click it

02:17 <Alren> double*

02:17 <leftylink> before we reinstall, can we try to run this from the command line

02:17 <Alren> i have it opening with ruby interpritier (cui)

02:21 <Alren> trying with no luck

02:21 <Alren> though, thats likely user error

02:22 <Alren> yea, same thing. The window flashes open then dissapears

02:23 <Alren> when at the file location and putting in: start irb.exe

02:28 <leftylink> hmm, I'm sorry that I'm not familiar with what start does

02:28 <leftylink> what about just irb.exe? no start?

02:32 <Alren> it won't accept irb.exe as a command

02:39 <Alren> is there a particular version of ruby that i have to run for cinch?

02:41 <Alren> ha!

02:41 <Alren> ok, think i have it figured out

02:42 <Alren> i was running an older version of ruby to get the other dice bot i was playing with working

02:42 <Alren> that version of ruby wasn't compatiable

02:42 <Alren> just updated my ruby version to 2.0.0 and tried to run the example help script and the window didn't shuton me but instead ran something

02:43 <Alren> thank you for you help leftylink. I feel a bit silly, but i'm learning and do hope that there will eventually come a time where i know enough that i can help others

02:44 <Alren> just starting out now really with learning about computers. I'm quite wet behind the ears when it comes to programming, and while I'll likely be learning things with a greater focus on networking, theres no way to get around having to have at least a basic understanding of prgraming these days.

02:45 <leftylink> oh, did you figure it out? I see a lot happened while I was grabbing my dinner, then

02:46 <Alren> I did, and .. now that it's up I think I'll take a bit of time poking around with the code a bit to see how things work. I'm all ears to any suggestions.

02:49 <leftylink> hmm... I don't have any suggestion off-hand so I'm kind of making this up as I go along, but I am remembering a common task given to new programmers

02:50 <leftylink> which is to make a guessing game. so in this case you would make your bot think of a number, and then you have a command that lets the user guess a number, and the bot says "that's my number" or "my number is higher than your guess" or "lower than your guess

02:51 <leftylink> might start out a bit simpler though

02:51 <Alren> ahh, i think i have a rough idea of how to do that..

02:51 <Alren> it'll be something to putter around with

02:51 <Alren> programming i think is going to be a hobby of mine. My real goal is to get my ccna by the end of the year

02:52 <Alren> but i do want to get comforatble enough with ruby so I can test the waters of learning rails

02:52 <leftylink> somehow I got into ruby without knowing rails! But I am learning a little bit of it for my work now

02:52 <Alren> i'll see if i can get the number guessing thing up and running by the weekend.

02:52 <Alren> very nice lefty

02:53 <Alren> er. i've gotten as far as the install with rails, and getting a page locally hosted

02:53 <leftylink> and of course check out the examples or ask here if need some help with that

02:53 <leftylink> ah

02:53 <Alren> but my lack of knowlege of actual programming was a bit of a brick wall from there

02:53 <Alren> I'll do that. And thank you. I've always heard that the ruby community had great people involved in it

02:54 <Alren> glad to see there was truth in it.

02:58 <leftylink> glad to help

03:05 <catepillar> leftylink: your welcome for the ruby without rails bit

03:05 <catepillar> that's still how i am

03:08 <leftylink> rails is pretty big, it's a lot to take in

03:08 <leftylink> I dunno how much I'll actually touch at work

03:08 <leftylink> and then there's microframeworks! we use sinatra sometimes at work too

03:31 <CM-Punk> Alright, I have a question for you guys. I'm pulling a variable named 'user' from the arguments supplied in a matcher, and I need to compare that variable with a key in a YAML file. That comparison looks like this: "if @storage.key?(user)". I need it to return true regardless of case, is that possible

03:31 <CM-Punk> ?

03:52 <leftylink> if I understand you correctly, if storage contains "BLAH", you would like it to be able to search for "blah"

03:53 <leftylink> er

03:53 <leftylink> CM-Punk: if I understand you correctly, if storage contains "BLAH", you would like it to be able to search for "blah"

03:53 <leftylink> I have two ways in mind of accomplishing such a task

03:53 <CM-Punk> Yes

03:54 <leftylink> one is that you always store lowercased keys in storage, and then when you search, you lowercase the search term as well

03:55 <leftylink> the other way is you override a comparison function to do a case-insensitive equality check, but I am not 100% clear on how to achieve that, and I like the first way better anyway

03:55 <CM-Punk> I like the first way better as well except for one thing...I already have a large storage file built and I wouldn't want my users to have to re-store everything

04:03 <leftylink> CM-Punk: are you the only maintainer of the storage file? in such case, I would say to just convert your copy of it

04:11 <CM-Punk> Yeah I am

04:12 <CM-Punk> Well, I could do that and I have to rewrite a lot of plugins that depend on it, but honestly I should do that so it's standardized anyway.

23:13 <Liru> CM-Punk: casecmp would work, if you don't mind an inefficient solution

23:13 <Liru> like, going through all the keys in @storage for each match

23:14 <Liru> O(n) instead of O(1)

23:15 <Liru> Granted, if you aren't storing a significant amount of keys and don't foresee it happening in the future, or if said matcher isn't activated on each message, it shouldn't matter

23:16 <Liru> leftylink has the right idea, though. Reconverting the yaml file to all-lowercase would work better and make better code