Slashdot Mirror

There are alternatives - check them out at http://www.custard.org/~richard/avantslash.

On a side note, I'm desperately looking for people who can host a public avantslash site in non-UK locations. If you can help, please let me know at the email address on the URL above.

Reproduced for the terminaly lazy:

First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.

In order to make that usable, I'd have to pump my link depth to something like 4 in order to read the stories. Plus, for the first time in months, slashdot.org has stopped serving 403's to sync.avantgo.com, which basically killed it's usefulnes... (It was one of the first sites I tried to sync to my iPaq via AvantGo, and until today, everytime I tried, I'd get access denied errors reading it when I tried to sync.)

The biggest problem I have with Open Source software is that there is this myth that because something is open, anyone can fix bugs and contribute updates.

Well yes they can. But the problem stems from the lead time required to get the know the project, how it works, what does what and how different functions interact with each other.

Some examples. One of the companies I used to work for (a large IT consultancy company) I worked on a telemetry project. For every person who joined that project, there was a lead time of about three months for them to get used to, understand and know how the system works.

Okay, so that was one massive project and with people working full time on it, but Mozilla and other open source projects aren't exactly small either.

Another example. I wrote a GPL perl script called AvantSlash to take the content of Slashdot and process it for handhelds (since Slashdot's own isn't very good). Unfortunately due to a bug and an overdependence on AvantGo's caching, it accidenly spammed the slashdot site and got its IP barred. (This was in the 1.x thread, v2.0 doesn't suffer this problem).

A comment by Jamie a couple of days ago mentioned why it was banned and suggested that I contribute to slashcode.

Whilst this, in theory, is a great idea, as it would seem to be common with open source coders he unfortunately forgot that there would be several months of lead time whilst I learn how the code works, what does what and why and then, once I knew the system well, actually apply a well written patch.

Don't get me wrong, I love open source and the stuff it produces and I have a lot of respect for anyone who spends their time doing such stuff.

However, I'm just pointing out that there is a common myth amongst people in massive open source projects that people can just download, install and then immediately start dipping into the code and producing patches without having to go through the whole learning process.

So, back to Mozilla. Anything which speeds up this lead time has got to be a good thing and will have the added advantage of getting more people interested in the whole project.

AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.

You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:

First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.

Thanks for listening.

AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.

You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:

First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.

Thanks for listening.

Here is something that the /. authors seem to have missed that belongs in this section.

The editors have seen fit to ban web clipping devices from using slashdot. Avantgo gives a "forbidden" sign when using it to try to access http://slashdot.org/palm and avantslash now gives error messages because the author of website has had his website blocked.

All of this without a peep from any of the editors? I have been a reader of slashdot for years. I normally do not post messages such as this one, but they have not responded to my emails. The avantslash author is a nice guy. How about letting him know whats going on? Whats up with all this? Whats going on with you guys???? Please snap out of it.

-ali

Its better than Slashdots own effort in the following ways:

• You see synopsis of each of the postings on Avantslash where you do not on /palm
• It removes all the useless gubbins you don't need to see
• You can read comments rated 3 or above

There are probably others but I've forgotten them now. Avantslash would have been listed on slashdots links page but I've emailed the url to them three times so far and they seem to have forgotten to do it.

At some point I'm going to completely rewrite it so that it copes with external sites and is even more customisable. However as it is, it still is IMO better than slashdots own.

--

OTOH I'm not so sure about the advice on the site - the section "what about NET and ORG domains, do I want them as well as COM?" is awful! The namespace is confused enough already without people taking names which don't represent what they are. Like, how on earth is 'hotsexygirls' valid as a value-adder in the .net domain?!

Anyway. Feedback left about one of my domains. And boy it was not a nice experience!
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

Aaaargh!
CmdrTaco, your preview mode is broken. That worked for me before.

In any case, the source is available here.

Even better still... why bother with PGP with all its commercial connotations and export problems, when you can do much the same things with GnuPG without export restriction (no IDEA or RSA)?

(It doesn't support all the key formats of PGP but things generated in GnuPG can be imported into PGP with no problem...)

Otherwise I agree entirely. Everyone should use ssh, gnupg/pgp-according-to-taste; I also like the idea further down this thread concerning double-encrypting things so you can say you've decrypted it and it is an encrypted file. The alternative is to get the government to back off the 1-level encrypted file as a valid format anyway...

~Tim, GnuPG and PGP keys on website :)

~Tim
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