MySQL

This weekend I started working on FICSiface, a sort of toolkit to getting software hooked up to the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). My initial plan was to have a class that could connect to FICS, send data, and raise events when FICS sends data to it. This came together quite quickly (remind me to talk about asynchronous IO soon), and of course I got carried away. I decided it would be nice to use it to hook up Blikskottel , my chess engine, which would run as a Windows service. All of this glue stuff is being written in C#, because one day it would be nice to run it on Mono. Then I got carried away some more. While I was testing on FICS (my computer account, Skottel, having been reactivated by an extremely helpful and industrious FICS admin - thanks!), Blik (another computer, Rookie by Marcel Kervinck) came on and made some random joke. So I thought, in light of the fact that Blikskottel is now based in Scotland, it would be cool if Skottel could make self-deprecating jokes about Scotsmen from time to time. In order not to be boring, it would need a biggish database of jokes - and Google came through handsomely.