UNIHACK Melbourne is a Melbourne-based hackathon that was run last weekend (August 8/9) and is open to all university and TAFE students in Victoria. Over the past few years, I’ve heard lots about hackathons, particularly the ones run in the USA, and the amount of creative potential they seem to unleash. You hear the stories about how Facebook Video and Chat emerged from hackathons. This, for me, sounded exciting. An opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

Update 13/08/15 I’ve been getting a few emails asking for my configuration files so I’ve uploaded them: weechat.conf, irc.conf (temporarily unavailable). “weechat.conf” contains general configurations for looks but “irc.conf” contains a setting that lets you create indented channels, under their respective server. What we’ll be doing Important things to know Installing Weechat. Installing plugins Making it look pretty. Setting up ZNC which lets you stay connected to IRC indefinitely. Prior knowledge Before we get started, it’s vital that you have some command line experience, whether it’s a little bash here and there or programming.

In my final year of schooling, I worked out how I could bypass my school’s proxy. A shame that I discovered it so late, but hopefully those reading this may be able to get a bit more use out of it than I did (only a few months!). This idea/hack will really depend on your school’s proxy system but it should, theoretically, work on most networks (don’t quote me on this).

I’ve been working on a pretty big project on Github with a couple of developers. It has a lot of potential and requires a lot of work. We happen to be using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), because we’re hosting files. I thought I would be smart, and route all traffic via the server before routing to the CDN. This would then allow me to restrict access to the files so that they could only be accessed by specific referers (specific IP addresses or websites).