Hello,
UltraHal is already designed to get the weather and the news from the web if you click the option to have him "web enabled."
As far as adapting routines from a different bot over to Hal, it would depend on how different the languages were, and the experience level of the programmer. Hal's control script is written in VBS, Visual Basic Scripting. If your other bot ran on VBS, it would be relatively straightforward. If not, it could require a lot of programming skill.
Other members of this forum have expressed interest in getting UltraHal to interface with the X10 system, so that Hal could turn on lights, open a garage door, etc. So far, none of us have the know-how to port Hal's outputs to the X10 system... although it must certainly be possible!
If you possibly know how to do this (or figure it out down the road), a lot of people here would really appreciate learning about it!
Sincerely,
Don