I've mentioned IRCcat in a previous journal entry. It is an IRC bot for development support that allows messages from monitoring, ticketing and development systems to be easily sent to IRC channels our developers use.

Example:

echo "#sys Dumping database X now" | netcat -q0 hostname 12345


This allows automated scripts to put a message into the #sys channel on our IRC server, alerting people about significant events. We also use it for svn commits, trac tickets, nagios alerts etc.

There have been a couple of improvements since the first release so I've packaged up the latest code:

http://cdn.last.fm/rj/irccat-20080121.tar.bz2

Changelog:
- Manage channels at runtime
- Better config file format
- Ant build file and deploy as jar
- Address messages to multiple channels and or users at once
- Code cleanup
- Newer libs (pirc, commons etc)

See the included README file for more details.