<Raccoon> If you wouldn't spend 12 hours a day bitching on these message boards and maintaining your #1 posting status... your IRC client could already be done and out of beta and you'd be teaching all of us a lesson.
Well dispite what people think, that I'm sitting at my PC 24/7 just monitoring these message boards, that's not true. When I post during the day, I'm usually at school. That means either I have maybe 5 mins in between classes, or in the case of boring classes, I wind up on here and chatting during the class. Overall, during the week, I'm probably online maybe at most 3-4 hours a day, and maybe 1-2 hours of that is doing homework. Then, when I do get some free time, I have other projects. I work on UnrealIRCd whenever I get the chance, then I have my new project SolarStats that's been eating up a decent amount of my time. And more recently, I've been trying to submit some patches to the java IRC client called PJIRC (mainly to try and enhance my Java skills). Then even more recently I've been contributing to a project called cURL and a related project of expanding the MIT ares library. Then, in my spare time I try to come up with suggestions/bugs/fixes for a regexp library called TRE. When you take all that, add in the fact that I (try to) have a social life, it doesn't leave me with much free time at all.
Believe me, I'd love to write an IRC client, I think it would be a fantastic learning experience, it's just well... that's not gonna put the food on the table, and therefore that means it has to be low on my list of priorities.