A simple announce-only IRC bot, used to display system status messages on IRC.

Ideally for use only on your private IRC server.  You may piss off the ops if
you use this on a public server.  It would also be wise to protect your IRC
server with a password and SSL.

Inspiration:
 It's well known that various botnets use IRC to communicate between the 
 infected computers and with the people controling them.  A google search for
 "botnet irc" shows the research in this area.  How can we use these tools 
 and ideas for good rather than evil?

The specific architecture it uses is designed to tackle the following
problems:
 - you don't know how frequently you'll be sending messages, or which
   processes will be sending them
 - you don't like using a single bot that all machines multiplex their
   messages through
 - you don't want to maintain a long running, heavyweight process - nodebot
   starts up on demand
 - you have systems with various python versions and different libraries -
   nodebot aims to be extremely portable

Features:
 - aims to be extremely lightweight compared to other IRC bots.
 - should work well from shell scripts
 - no dependencies other than stock python libs; copy to system and use
 - by default identifies itself with a NICK equal to the hostname; supports
   additional fixed identies, for corner use cases
 - for convience, any user can invoke it, and any local process can connect 
   to it to send more messages (becomes nobody if invoked as root)
 - when connecting to the IRC server, supports SSL and server passwords
 - supports multiple channels

Unfeatures:
 - doesn't join a channel, so your IRC server needs to allow talking on a
   channel that isn't joined
 - doesn't accept privmsgs from IRC users, not a method of remote control of
   a machine, the majority of input from the server is dumped
 - not an IRC bot in the traditional sense

Maintains a listening socket on localhost, later invocations will use the same
connection to the IRC server.  Better than a single bot that all servers use
to connect to because a single node's activity won't influence the other nodes'
ability to send messages (such as due to rate limiting).

Ideas for use:
 - create an identity in the configuration file specifically for your revision
   control system and invoke nodebot in a post-commit or push hook.
 - hook into monitoring systems like nagios.
 - monitor log files and live monitor many systems at once.  immediately report
   sudoers violations.
 - use with a netlink socket or ULOG iptables rules to announce specific
   network activity (ssh port accesses, for example).
 - anything that can detect an event and invoke a script can use this to 
   announce it on IRC