Rasputine

Apparently some things never die. In January 1994, a friend of mine, Paulo Ferreira, created an online community around a Lambda Moo server. Its called Moosaico and it still kicking.

I spent an enormous amount of time there and I still have fond memories of that time, of the people, the stories, everything.

But access to Moosaico (and other MUD's or Talkers) is usually done with Telnet or using a client like TinyFugue or Atlantis. Keeping one of those open to be connected somehow never entered my normal workflow, so I drifted away.

Its amazing that something that I was hooked on 14 years ago is still alive in me.

The friday something happened that will pull me back in.

Another friend, Marcos Marado, commented that he was looking for a XMPP interface to his talker, Selva. I had an headache and didn't feel like working on what I was supposed to, so I took the challenge.

Later that afternoon, Rasputine was born.

Rasputine (or Ras, as Corto Maltese called him) is a generic Moo/MUD/Talker-to-XMPP gateway. You add a buddy to your roster and then you can use it to connect to that world.

For example, to log in to Moosaico, add [email protected] and then type //connect. Presto, the login window of Moosaico should be readily available. The Selva talker is available at [email protected].

The code is still very young and feature-less. The copy that I run on my staging server already has per-user status messages and avatars, and next I plan to implement auto-connect (probably even XEP-0100 support).

For now, I'm just enjoying getting back to Moosaico.

Update: by the way, if you want to connect your own talker/MUD/Moo, ping me via XMPP or email and I can set you up. At least to try it out.