Download and install one of the many IRC Clients that are available. A client is the software that you use in order to interact with the chat environment. Wikipedia has a comparison of various IRC clients .
Cross-platform
is available as an extension to
and Mozilla's popular
is a web based Ajax IRC client.
includes a built-in IRC client.
is a multi-platform instant messaging client which supports IRC, as well as AIM, Yahoo, Facebook and several other protocols.
is an irssi-inspired, flexible, user-friendly and cross-platform , targeting the GNOME desktop.
Several terminal based IRC popular ones include
and . These two in particular are very feature rich and highly extensible - especially the former. Note that these are usually made for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and OS X.
There are numerous web clients that can be used to access IRC. These are often found on the website of the organization that has an IRC room or channel. These will usually limit you to access to a particular channel or network.
is the successor to the most popular Linux client for IRC . It can probably be found in the software repository of your Linux distribution of choice. Unlike XChat before it, HexChat is completely open source software and free of charge on all platforms.
For Windows
is the most popular IRC client available for Windows due to it being so easily modifiable. It is known as
and you are granted a 30 day license in which to try the software, after which you may still use the software, but are given a message asking that you register it for a fee of $20.
Whilst mIRC is the most popular, there are a number of other free IRC clients available: ,
and many of the platform-independent IRC clients mentioned above.
hosts many IRC clients for Linux
is a popular KDE IRC client, that usually comes with the install of the popular Kubuntu distribution.
Popular Mac IRC clients include ,
and . Colloquy is free and open source.
Refer to the user guide and help which should be avail these will tell you how to perform common tasks with your software.
The first thing that you will need to do is supply the name by which you wish to be known. This may be either your real name or any other title of your choice. People often choose not to reveal their personal details.
Often the software will include a list of some of the world's most popular IRC and you should peruse these, if there are no servers that you have a special interest in. Their names will often indicate whether they are aimed at a particular audience. Popular servers (also known as networks) include , and
(a network generally aimed at gamers). These all have over 100,000 users on around the clock. wikiHow currently has an IRC room on the
network. You can connect to any of these networks using your client. All IRC networks have addresses similar to web addresses (i.e. irc.freenode.net). Choose the server and hit "Connect".
Congratulations! You've just connected to an IRC server! You'll notice that there's a scroll of information that comes up first. You might find it useful to read some of this, as it may include important notices as well as information on the more popular channels (see below). This blurb also includes the terms of use that you will find on most IRC networks.
However, you can't just chat straight away. IRC networks can contain numerous rooms, or channels, which are used to hone conversation, because there will often be one channel for a particular topic of conversation. You can join any of these quite easily, if they aren't password protected. First, however, you might need to fi and this can be accomplished by using a common function of your client that lists all of the channels on the server. To do this varies from client-to-client.
When you have chosen a room to join (for example, #wikihow on irc.freenode.net) you can join it by simply typing /join #channel name in the input box. If you truly can't find one, most servers have a help channel (#help) where you can, of course, ask.
Chat away!
Can you tell us aboutaquascaping?
Can you help usrate articles?
aquascaping
how to aquascape
Can you tell us aboutrelationships?
relationships
how to spot a player
Can you tell us abouthome construction?
home construction
how to build a roof
Can you tell us aboutguns and ammunition?
guns and ammunition
how to bed a rifle stock
Tell us everything you know here. Remember, more detail is better.
Please be as detailed as possible in your explanation. Don't worry about formatting! We'll take care of it.
For example:Don't say: Eat more fats.Do say: Add fats with some nutritional value to the foods you already eat. Try olive oil, butter, avocado, and mayonnaise.
IRC is great for problem solving and troubleshooting! For example, most pieces of computer software have support groups of who at least some are continually on IRC. You're more than welcome to pop in and query them about anything.
Other IRC-related Links:
Most people on IRC are nice, but it is best not to annoy them. If you have a question or comment to make, quickly check the channel topic first and see if it has any recommendations.
If you feel that you need more conceptual information before tackling these steps, you could try these pages:
As in any section of society, there are always some immoral and dangerous people. Naturally, never reveal your credit card number, but also it is best not to reveal any personal details about yourself, especially if you consider yourself to be "vulnerable" (a minor). There are people on IRC who may pose as other people and try to gain your confidence.
There are some risky networks and channels.
#wikihow (
)- WikiHow IRC channel
#wikipedia (
) - Wikipedia IRC channel
#wiktionary (
) - Wiktionary IRC channel
#wikisource (
) - WikiSource IRC channel
#wikibooks (
) - WikiBooks IRC channel
#wikimedia (
) - Wikimedia IRC channel
#wikinews (
) - WikiNews IRC channel
#wikiquote (
) - WikiQuotes IRC channel
Note: you must have a browser that recognizes the irc:// protocol for your IRC client to open any of these links.
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I saw mentions of Redis a few times and I looked it up and glanced at the . From what I can tell it's a server (rather than in process library). I see it mentions storage and I am confused. What would redis be used for? I heard of websites using mysql and redis. It isn't a really fast in process lib/dictionary like I originally thought. So what is it being used for?
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TL;DR: If you can map a use case to Redis and discover you aren't at risk of running out of RAM by using Redis there is a good chance you should probably use Redis.
It's a "NoSQL" key-value data store. More precisely, it is a data structure server.
Not like MongoDB (which is a disk-based document store), though MongoDB could be used for similar key/value use cases.
The closest analog is probably to think of Redis as Memcached, but with built-in persistence (snapshotting or journaling to disk) and more datatypes.
Those two additions may seem pretty minor, but they are what make Redis pretty incredible. Persistence to disk means you can use Redis as a real database instead of just a volatile cache. The data won't disappear when you restart, like with memcached.
The additional data types are probably even more important. Key values can be simple strings, like you'll find in memcached, but they can also be more complex types like Hashes, Lists (ordered collection, makes a great queue), Sets (unordered collection of non-repeating values), or Sorted Sets (ordered/ranked collection of non-repeating values).
This is only the tip of the Redis iceberg, as there are other powerful features like built-in pub/sub, transactions (with optimistic locking), and Lua scripting.
The entire data set, like memcached, is stored in-memory so it is extremely fast (like memcached)... often even faster than memcached. Redis had virtual memory, where rarely used values would be swapped out to disk, so only the keys had to fit into memory, but this has been deprecated. Going forward the use cases for Redis are those where its possible (and desirable) for the entire data set to fit into memory.
Redis is a fantastic choice if you want a highly scalable data store shared by multiple processes, multiple applications, or multiple servers. As just an inter-process communication mechanism it is tough to beat. The fact that you can communicate cross-platform, cross-server, or cross-application just as easily makes it a pretty great choice for many many use cases. Its speed also makes it great as a caching layer.
Update 4/1/2015:
was released today. This version of Redis brings cluster support, which makes it much easier to scale Redis.
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What it can be use for?
Few examples
Show latest items listings in your home page. This is a live in-memory cache and is very fast. LPUSH is used to insert a content ID at the head of the list stored at a key. LTRIM is used to limit the number of items in the list to 5000. If the user needs to page beyond this cache only then are they sent to the database.
Deletion and filtering. If a cached article is deleted it can be removed from the cache using LREM.
Leaderboards and related problems. A leader board is a set sorted by score. The ZADD commands implements this directly and the ZREVRANGE command can be used to get the top 100 users by score and ZRANK can be used to get a users rank. Very direct and easy.
Order by user votes and time. This is a leaderboard like Reddit where the score is formula the changes over time. LPUSH + LTRIM are used to add an article to a list. A background task polls the list and recomputes the order of the list and ZADD is used to populate the list in the new order. This list can be retrieved very fast by even a heavily loaded site. This should be easier, the need for the polling code isn't elegant.
Implement expires on items. To keep a sorted list by time then use unix time as the key. The difficult task of expiring items is implemented by indexing current_time+time_to_live. Another background worker is used to make queries using ZRANGE ... with SCORES and delete timed out entries.
Counting stuff. Keeping stats of all kinds is common, say you want to know when to block an IP addresss. The INCRBY command makes it easy to atom GETSET to atomical the expire attribute can be used to tell when an key should be deleted.
Unique N items in a given amount of time. This is the unique visitors problem and can be solved using SADD for each pageview. SADD won't add a member to a set if it already exists.
Real time analysis of what is happening, for stats, anti spam, or whatever. Using Redis primitives it's much simpler to implement a spam filtering system or other real-time tracking system.
Pub/Sub. Keeping a map of who is interested in updates to what data is a common task in systems. Redis has a pub/sub feature to make this easy using commands like SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE, and PUBLISH.
Queues. Queues are everywhere in programming. In addition to the push and pop type commands, Redis has blocking queue commands so a program can wait on work being added to the queue by another program. You can also do interesting things implement a rotating queue of RSS feeds to update.
Caching. Redis can be used in the same manner as memcache.
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Redis is a key value data store.
The following link is superb to learn the basics of redis
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One reason I got started with redis is that socket.io can use redis to sync pub/sub across multiple servers.
This is handy when a user is connected to server A, but server B is issuing the event.
All answers for this question are good, I have extracted content from all answers plus my findings for simple understanding. As the question demands so.
Q1. What is Redis
- Redis is a data structure server
- "NoSQL" key-value data store.
(The essence of a key-value store is the ability to store some data, called a value, inside a key. This data can later be retrieved only if we know the exact key used to store it).
If you want try Redis just make your hands dirty
For Understanding advantages read this @carl zulauf
Q2. what do I use it for?
caching(due to its speed).
If you want a highly scalable data store shared by multiple processes,
multiple applications, or multiple servers.(you can communicate cross-platform, cross-server, or cross-application just as easily makes it a pretty great choice for many many use cases)
For details regarding use please read .
This is my simple understanding of Redis. Hope helps you to have a gist about Redis.
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