when starting another sentence because the main one is too short,
do a bit of work in an attempt to avoid "nick: blah" starts, since
they're fairly common. instead we just ignore nick: and start with
"blah blah"
when starting a second (or Nth) chain because the results so far
are too short, add punctuation to the end of the chain, just to
make things feel a bit more natural
this clarifies a bunch of sections and seems slightly faster
target_word (which would be randomly selected from the input every
time) is replaced with seed_words, a shuffled list from the input.
this is to eliminate accidental reuse of the target word, which
would result in chains like X X X X X X X X X X X X X because
it'd keep targeting X
the rest of this is mostly just debug cleanup, though to simplify
the backwards code it only tries to find one target word
WARNING!
there's no going back now. this change is *huge* but it was overdue.
WARNING!
the database backend is now mysql. modules that should use a database
but don't yet were left untouched, they'll come later. scripts haven't
been converted yet, though i'm pretty sure i'll need to soon.
while i was going through everything, connection/cursor idioms were
cleaned up, as were a bunch of log messages and exception handling. this
change is so gross i'm happy things appear to be working, which is
the case --- all modules are lightly tested.
this could be fun. provide an XML-RPC web service that allows for
remote access into the bot. in addition to some obvious stuff, this
includes a method that lets you execute any arbitrary module's arbitrary
method (so be careful) and retrieve the results.
as a side effect this has made it apparent that i need to clean up
some of my modules so that functionality and irc responses are decoupled.
