Personal Projects

What I have done in my spare time.

These are open source too, but I am the only contributor.

CussBot

CussBot is an IRC bot designed to keep statistics on curse word usage on IRC. I programmed it while I was in college after spending some time in a channel with a particularly high amount of cursing. The idea is based on kids-in-mind.com, a website intended to allow parents to check movies for content that may be objectionable to children. Part of each review is a list of many categories of curse word an how many words from each of those categories were said in the movie. CussBot is intended to automatically generate such a list for IRC channels. Use "CussBot: help" in IRC to see all that it can do.

Since its inception, it has become somewhat popular on Freenode. You can find it in a variety of channels by the nick of "CussBot". If you have the correct channel privileges, you can also send an INVITE command to have it join your channel. You can also see a summary of all the data it has collected at the web statistics page.

CussBot has now been discontinued, mainly due to the increasing amount of maintenance it had begun to require along with concerns over GDPR regulations. The source code is still available, but the bot and the web statistics page have been taken down and all collected data has been deleted.


TVSText

TVSText is a program that allowed for checking bus locations from TransLōc TVS on a dumbphone without support for a web browser and without a data plan. At the time (2010), the TVS service had a rich website with a map, a text-only mobile website, and an iPhone app. I had a Verizon dumbphone, but was a heavy user of NCSU Wolfline (the first transit system to implement TVS), so I wanted to be able to access TVS from my phone as well. To accomplish this, I developed an application that ran on my server and would check an email address (tvstext@michaelmarley.com) every two seconds, parse the body of received messages for a bus route number, screen-scrape the bus positions for that route from the TVS mobile site, and send the reply back to the sender address. Since every major carrier operates an SMS-to-email gateway, this allowed for a user with dumbphone to send an SMS to the email address and receive an SMS reply containing the requested information.

TVSText is no longer operational for a few reasons. TransLōc eventually developed their own SMS access method and later dramatically changed the format of the text-only mobile site, making it much more difficult to screen-scrape. By this time, they had also introduced an API for proper remote access, however the official SMS service made TVSText obsolete, so I shut it down.

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