I liked last.fm’s irccat as an easy way to post events (task completion and errors) to an IRC channel. I was less crazy about the recommendation to use ant to execute it. When I moved it to a OpenVZ VPS that used venet, it stopped working reliably. I’ve actually had trouble with quite of few Java services on that sort of VPS. So, I wrote my own in python, and it can be found on github and PyPI.

An added benefit is that much less memory is now used as well.