{"id":487,"date":"2007-12-16T20:22:15","date_gmt":"2007-12-17T04:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/16\/hacking-chatzilla\/"},"modified":"2007-12-19T21:32:51","modified_gmt":"2007-12-20T05:32:51","slug":"hacking-chatzilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/16\/hacking-chatzilla\/","title":{"rendered":"Hacking ChatZilla"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a certain coworker (who will remain nameless<\/a>) who razzes me endlessly when I’m not in the team IRC chat room. It’s not that I don’t want to be, it’s because the software is too stupid to reconnect me. I’m in and out of meetings all day and when I lose my connection, my IRC client of choice, ChatZilla<\/a>, waits too long to reconnect me. <\/p>\n

ChatZilla uses an exponential reconnect interval, so it starts at 15 seconds and then doubles after every failed attempt up to a max of 2 hours. Usually it hits that 2 hours overnight when I’m not connected to the VPN, then when I get into the office it can be up to 2 hours before it tries again. <\/p>\n

I’ve tried other IRC clients, but I really prefer ChatZilla. It’s simple and can send all messages to Growl<\/a>, so I don’t have to switch back and look at ChatZilla as messages come in. The only problem is this reconnect issue. Since ChatZilla is written in JavaScript, this was easy to fix.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Find your ChatZilla Extension code. On my Mac, it was in \/Users \/ jeff \/ Library \/ Application Support \/ Firefox \/ profiles \/ 71r60ff3.default \/ extensions \/ {59c81df5-4b7a-477b-912d-4e0fdf64e5f2} \/ chrome \/ chatzilla.jar<\/code> . The username and profile directory name will differ on your system.<\/li>\n
  2. Unzip the jar file (unzip chatzilla.jar<\/code>)<\/li>\n
  3. Open the file content\/chatzilla\/static.js from the extracted files.<\/li>\n
  4. Change the line CIRCNetwork.prototype.MAX_RECONNECT_MS = 2 * 60 * 60 * 1000;<\/code> to whatever interval you want. I set it to 15 * 60 * 1000 to make wait a maximum of 15 minutes.<\/li>\n
  5. Rezip up the extracted files (zip -r chatzilla.jar content\/ locale\/ skin\/<\/code>).<\/li>\n
  6. Restart Firefox.<\/li>\n
  7. Enjoy the silence of non-whining coworkers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It works:<\/p>\n

    \r\n[20:33]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 15 seconds. [Cancel]\r\n[20:33]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[20:33]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 30 seconds. [Cancel]\r\n[20:34]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[20:34]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 1 minute. [Cancel]\r\n[20:35]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[20:35]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 2 minutes. [Cancel]\r\n[20:37]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[20:37]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 4 minutes. [Cancel]\r\n[20:41]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[20:41]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 8 minutes. [Cancel]\r\n[20:49]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[20:49]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 15 minutes. [Cancel]\r\n[21:04]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[21:04]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 15 minutes. [Cancel]\r\n[21:19]\t[INFO]\tConnecting to irc:\/\/irc\/ (irc:\/\/irc\/)... [Cancel]\r\n[21:19]\t[ERROR]\tThe proxy server you configured is refusing the connection. Reconnecting in 15 minutes. [Cancel]\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Hopefully the ChatZilla folks will make this an option in the future. For now, it’s good enough for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    I have a certain coworker (who will remain nameless) who razzes me endlessly when I’m not in the team IRC chat room. It’s not that I don’t want to be, it’s because the software is too stupid to reconnect me. I’m in and out of meetings all day and when I lose my connection, my …<\/p>\n
    Continue reading ‘Hacking ChatZilla’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}