A print() method in class Object will make things a lot simple

[Thomas Weidenfeller]

That is not what I mean by a newsreader. A newsreader maintains a
local copy of posts you have already read in the last week or so.

Since a decade or longer Wayne Davison's trn is a fine newsreader. You
have very little chance of re-defining the meaning of the word
newsreader to exclude readers like trn. trn is the threaded version of
rn (rn = readnews). rn was written by Larry Wall (today of Perl fame).
This is all part of Usenet technology from the times long before this
web and GUI thing became popular.

ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/readers/trn/
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/help/usenet/trnint-3.3.html

/Thomas

 

[Roedy Green]

It still seems a bit wasteful to maintain a local copy of all posts
read, even the junk, but maybe disk space is so cheap these days
that no one cares.

The advantages are:

1. If your newsserver is slow, you can mark the message you want and
tell it to fetch them in the background while you read something. Then
when you read the news stuff it pops up instantly.

2. you have copies kept as long as you want even if your news server
drops them after a few days. In these days of 40 gig disks and DVD
downloads the space is trivial.

3. You can use local search tools to find stuff rapidly.

4. you can rapidly navigate to review previous posts if the context
unclear.

 

[blmblm]

Since a decade or longer Wayne Davison's trn is a fine newsreader. You
have very little chance of re-defining the meaning of the word
newsreader to exclude readers like trn. trn is the threaded version of
rn (rn = readnews). rn was written by Larry Wall (today of Perl fame).
This is all part of Usenet technology from the times long before this
web and GUI thing became popular.

ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/readers/trn/
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/help/usenet/trnint-3.3.html

Be advised (you may know this) that a more recent (though officially
"test") version is available at

http://trn.sourceforge.net/

I'm not sure anyone is actively working on this program any more --
it's been years since the last update -- but I've been happy with it.
This "test" version (4.0) includes some nice features not in the 3.x
versions as best I remember (e.g., a "newsgroup selector" menu).

 

[blmblm]

The advantages are:

1. If your newsserver is slow, you can mark the message you want and
tell it to fetch them in the background while you read something. Then
when you read the news stuff it pops up instantly.

2. you have copies kept as long as you want even if your news server
drops them after a few days. In these days of 40 gig disks and DVD
downloads the space is trivial.

3. You can use local search tools to find stuff rapidly.

4. you can rapidly navigate to review previous posts if the context
unclear.

All true. I suppose I grew up in an era in which disk space wasn't
regarded as essentially unlimited and so I'm uneasy with using space
for posts I almost surely will not want to look at again.

Lately I've been keeping my own archive of threads in which I'm
participating, and that does have some of the benefits you mention.
But it's a bit more work. (Maybe I should consider setting up the
"local news spool" mentioned in the trn installation documentation.
Hm.)

 

[Luc The Perverse]

But you have no control over what other people do. As you can see, all
the screaming about top posting, multi-posting, too much quoting, too
little quoting, trolling and spamming has not managed to come anywhere
near controlling others.

So your best defense is to get a newsreader which helps you deal with
the crap.

I have not found a newsreader which can detect if a message has not quoted
what it is replying to and fill it in automatically, or correct a top post.

Perhaps we can find a charitable, talented Canadian Java programmer who can
fill the void

I have a few good ideas.
1. A hotkey which attempts to create quotations from previous messages.
(Without actually having to load the previous message, leave the current
message or look through a tree of read messages)
2. Autoformatting which changes non standard "|" to ">" and corrects loop
around when lines have gotten too long
3. Signature randomizer and option to put signature at bottom of post.
(Signatures can have simple rules - like an offensive signature would only
show in alt.* or more specifically alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk, and
"proper" sigs and attribution lines for sci.* and comp.*)
4. Configurable signature clipping for people who have 4 Kb sigs
5. Ability to pass any message to a java function - either to modify it
before viewing, forward it or generate statistical data.
6. Check multiple news servers to look for missing messages - perhaps even
parse through the google groups notification email to make sure your server
isn't being gh3y
7. Multiple methods of newsgroup viewing through a provided GUI, at the
command prompt, through telnet or over a webpage. (Of course a viewer java
plugin feature would exist that would allow virtually any type of viewer
conceivable.)

Maybe you could take my ideas and make a student project page out of them
(if you think it's worthwhile)

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

Two points:

(1) Irrelevant stuff is not supposed to be requoted, only the points
to which one is replying.
Agreed.

(2) I wonder about that "just a keystroke away". I use trn, and I
have it configured to retrieve articles from the news server one at
a time (rather than maintaining a local cache of articles), so
trying to search back through a thread for the replied-to article
.... Actually there *is* a keystroke command to do that, but it
requires another fetch from the server, and often simply doesn't
work. Could be a problem with how I have it configured, could be
simply a bug, who knows. Best case, though, is "only a keystroke,
and a wait while the article is fetched from the server". Do other
newsreaders behave "better" in this regard?

I don't know about newsreaders, but my scheme mostly works.

I run leafnode on the machine from which I read news (via slrn).
Leafnode acts as a news server that only retrieves messages from the
groups you've specified. So I tell it to read from my ISP's server
and from gmane. Then it pulls news from those servers via a cronjob.

Even if the client has to go "back to the news server", the server is
on the same machine.

 

[Thomas Kellerer]

moop™ wrote on 14.12.2005 08:55:

Hi,
It can not measure how many lines of System.out.println() has been used
around the Java world. I think if there is a function like this:

public static void print(String msg){
System.out.println(msg);
}

Inside class Object will make many developers' lives a lot of simpler,
do u think so?

I disagree.

I simply type sout and then my cursor is placed inside the quotes of a
System.out.println("").

Thomas

 

[Cos]

Well, should be

import static System.out.*

and then you can use your print without any wrapping

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

Well, should be

import static System.out.*

and then you can use your print without any wrapping

No, you can't.

 

[Roedy Green]

Perhaps we can find a charitable, talented Canadian Java programmer who can
fill the void

My idea is to use a more machine friendly protocol to track
attributions automatically and prevent misquoting or spoofing.

See http://mindprod.com/projects/mailreadernewsreader.html

If you rely on humans to be fastidious, that is hopeless.

 

[Roedy Green]

through the google groups notification email to make sure your server
isn't being gh3y

More dudespeak for the glossary. What is that one?

 

[Luc The Perverse]

More dudespeak for the glossary. What is that one?

Uh oh. . . . . um.

gh3y = gay, but I was using it as a synonym for "stupid"

*ducks head*

It's incredible though - I don't MEAN to use 1337 speak in this NG - it just
comes out without me realizing.

 

[Luc The Perverse]

My idea is to use a more machine friendly protocol to track
attributions automatically and prevent misquoting or spoofing.

See http://mindprod.com/projects/mailreadernewsreader.html

Ah I had read that already, I should have remembered.

I think we have very little chance of updating existing protocols. Even
when we do the changes tend be to evolutionary instead of revolutionary.

I admit you had more good ideas than I did.

If you rely on humans to be fastidious, that is hopeless.

After a quick trip to dictionary.com, I would have to agree with you. (I
typically consider myself to have a good vocabulary, but perhaps I just
don't hang out with too many intellectuals.)

 

[Roedy Green]

I think we have very little chance of updating existing protocols. Even
when we do the changes tend be to evolutionary instead of revolutionary.

It depends on your time frame. Surely you don't expect SMTP and NNTP
to be still in use 100 years from now. Things don't seem to change.
They get replaced.

 

[Roedy Green]

gh3y = gay, but I was using it as a synonym for "stupid"

Fighting words Luc.

See http://mindprod.com/ggloss/blurb.html

 

[blmblm]

On 2005-12-16, (e-mail address removed) penned:

[ snip ]

[ snip ]

I don't know about newsreaders, but my scheme mostly works.

I run leafnode on the machine from which I read news (via slrn).
Leafnode acts as a news server that only retrieves messages from the
groups you've specified. So I tell it to read from my ISP's server
and from gmane. Then it pulls news from those servers via a cronjob.

Even if the client has to go "back to the news server", the server is
on the same machine.

Hm .... One of the configuration options for trn has to do with a
"local news spool". It sounds like I could get that by running
leafnode. Worth investigating sometime, maybe. Thanks.

 

[Luc The Perverse]

Fighting words Luc.

No . . rather society's evil prejudices infiltrating my vocabulary. I blame
Howard Stern actually

(I knew the mistake I had made as soon as you asked.)

See http://mindprod.com/ggloss/blurb.html

I would like to get a copy of your book actually Is it still available?

 

[Roedy Green]

I would like to get a copy of your book actually Is it still available?

Even in the 80s it was a collector's item. There is one in the Kinsey
Library and is some library special collections. I have only one copy
left.

 

[Chris Smith]

well, I spent a lot of typing for using System.out.println, dont you?

To explain a bit more...

You clearly are writing code in courses to study Java. In that context,
you end up using System.out.println() a lot. It's also frequently used
when writing sample code, testing out features of packages, etc. It is
almost NEVER used in production code in Java. User interfaces are
provided via either HTML/XML/WML or GUI libraries like AWT and Swing.
Logging is done with flexible logging packages. Most of the time,
production code doesn't even have a well-defined destination for the
standard I/O streams.

So do your typing, learn Java, and you're unlikely to care much about
the extra typing once you get into the real world of programming.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

Hm .... One of the configuration options for trn has to do with a
"local news spool". It sounds like I could get that by running
leafnode. Worth investigating sometime, maybe. Thanks.

This sounds exactly like what I'm using.

In my case, rather than setting a special option, I just set

NNTPSERVER=localhost

I'm not sure if I'm adding unnecessary socket overhead that way, but
it works.

I don't know much about trn, but another nice thing about leafnode for
slrn users is that leafnode allows you to access groups from multiple
servers in the same slrn session. (slrn expects only one server per
session.) That's actually my original reason for using leafnode.