You need help. Informal non-professional help. Your code is unconcious at 4AM. You can’t wade through the sea of coders at the hackathon, but you need to tell your friend to save you a burrito. You’re terminally bored, and browsing reddit isn’t cutting it anymore.

If only there were a virtual space for Columbia techs to hang out in!

Have no fear, for the ADI now has their very own IRC channel.

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat; it is, and has been one of the most popular chat options in the virtual world. It’s dead simple: anyone can set up their own IRC server*, and the protocol is very mature. Sure, it can’t do video conferencing or cook you an omlet, but by golly does it do chat.

To start chatting, you need an IRC client. Pidgin is my preferred client, although you can go out and simply google ‘irc client’ to find a whole host of choices.

Pidgin is pretty darn cool: not only can it talk to IRC servers, it can speak essentially any other chat language, including AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Facebook chat**, and many more. It doesn’t do video conferencing or omlet-cooking either, but for our intents and purposes it’ll do swell.

Okay, go get pidgin here.

Installation

Windows

It’s a pretty standard installation process. Open up the installer, hit next until it finishes.

OS X

You probably want to install Adium instead. It uses the same chat engine as pidgin, but has a more mac-y feel.

Linux

Use your favorite package manager to install pidgin.

Examples:

Ubuntu – apt-get install pidgin

Fedora – yum install pidgin

Getting on IRC

Fire up pidgin if it’s not already running. When you run it for the first time, it should ask you if you want to add an account, and you should go right on ahead and add whatever chat accounts you want.

Since you’re reading this, I’m guessing you want to join our IRC channel, so you should add an account that uses the IRC protocol. Choose some username for now, set the server to irc.freenode.com (it might be the default), and finish making the account.

When you finish adding the account, it should log into the freenode server (this might take a minute) and you might get some messages from someone named ‘nickserv’ or ‘frigg’. This is just the way IRC lets you know that the connection is finished, so there’s no need to get scared or anything: go ahead and close those windows. Do note that it’ll happen every time you log in***.

Once you’ve logged onto the IRC server, there are different chatrooms/channels you can join. Usually, the channel name starts with a pound symbol, like #blender (general talk channel for the 3D software Blender) or a double hash like ##church-of-loudbot (ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME).

To get into the #adicu channel, go to your buddy list (if your buddy list disappeared, it usually minimizes to wherever your “system tray” is) and go into the Buddies->Add Chat menu. Select your IRC account in the drop down menu, and put in the channel name into channel. Don’t forget the # at the beginning: so if you want to link into the ADI channel, put #adicu into the channel field. Tick off autojoin when account connects, and finish adding it.

Great! A chat window for #adicu should pop open, and you can start chatting.

If you’re new to chatrooms, then it’s a good idea to read this uber-short intro to netiquette, and this guide on how to ask questions (we won’t be rude, but it’s good to read anyways). If you want to, the freenode guidelines are also fun reading.

Do keep in mind that pidgin usually doesn’t alert users whenever someone posts a new message to a channel, so responses may be slow.

Note that the username you chose earlier when logging into the account isn’t saved anywhere: other people can use your username (nick, in IRC parlance) and no one will be the wiser as to who you actually are. If you want some measure of protection for your IRC nick, so that other people can’t steal your username so easily, type the following into the #adicu chat window:

/msg nickserv register <your-password> <your-email>

Make sure you type in a /, not a \****, and change the password you login with (Buddy List->Accounts->Manage Accounts). The original instructions for registering are here, with more info about registering in general.

Happy IRC-ing!

* No one sets up their own servers, true, but the fact your chat is not tied to a company is pretty cool

** There is not an obvious Facebook chat option, but googling ‘facebook chat pidgin’ will get you there. Ignore the pidgin-facebookchat plugin, it’s somewhat obsolete now.

*** http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#freenodeconnect has more information about why this happens