Slashdot Mirror
Slashcode v1.0 Released
Patrick and Chris have been working their kung fu overtime for some
time now to clean up Slashcode and release a version one point oh.
Its available on Slashcode: if you're interested in setting up your own slashdotesque weblog and are up on mod_perl and apache, you'll enjoy it. With 1.0 out, its time to once again start hammering on new features including wireless device support. I hacked in quickie WAP device support, so if your phone handles it, give it a whirl. Avantgo will be coming soon as well, along with many design improvements that will drastically improve performance (thank god!) and simplify administration, and allow usage on a variety of SQL servers.
http://www.rgctech.com/slashdot
I run it on my Palm VII and it works great. You can first pull in the 5 most recent headings (about 500 bytes it tells you). Then you can click on a heading to get the full text (about 800 bytes it tells you). It's read only, but you do get your news!
Later.
mattj@invisik.com
One other thing to look at is the PHP Slashdot clone, PHPSlash at http://phpslash.org/ I haven't really evaluated this yet, but it looks promising.
Don't confuse bigotry of comment posters with the bigotry of those of us who run the show. We have a whole different set of bigotry ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
And even though it's way old and needs to be rewritten, it's never been an issue with locking. But how would I know, I only try to keep things running...
--
Yes, Virginia, there really is a CowboyNeal.
So should we follow the general rule of .0 releases, and wait till .1 or .2 for all the bugs to get worked out ;)
-----
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
>objects have everything to do with scalibility and portability.
Um, no. Objects are a tool that can be used for lots of things, and one of those things is ease in scalability, and one of the applications of objects can be ease in portability, I suppose. But there are many other ways to do the same thing. There is no direct link between scalability and objects, or portability and objects.
No problem. Re-reading my reply to you, I sounded a bit harsher than I wanted or needed to be (end of a long week and all that :). I just wanted to be very clear that there is no expressed or implied condition in Slash as to the purpose of the sites that use Slash.
Extrans does work as it is supposed to: it translates < and > to HTML entities so they show up as we literal characters, not as HTML tags, so I don't have to type < and > each time.
PRE is disallowed because it is too easy for people to totally screw up a page's formatting. Sorry.
That sounds like a good question to ask on the Slash site instead of this one.
Then you don't think very well on this matter.
He said, "You mean, like objectify the whole lot, so it's truly scalable and portable?" That means two things:
Expressed: That by using objects, something is truly scalable and portable. This is bullshit.
Implied: That in order to be truly scalable and portable, you must use objects. This, too, is bullshit.
I am not biased against objects. Most of my more widely used projects have OO interfaces. I am biased against useless use of objects (see the original File::Spec interface), and I am biased against saying that the only way to achieve scalability/portability/whatever is with objects.
That feature, like many others, can be turned on or off with a boolean flag. So Slashdot, even running 1.0.x, may or may not have that feature.
Extrans was broken before. It is now working properly. Now it appears plain text is broken. Sigh. On the TODO list. :-)
If you are going to libel someone, have the guts to use your real name, loser.
What the heck do objects have to do with scalability or portability?
Fix it or shut up. How about that, tough guy?
Matt, yeah, I know of your module, and we are looking into doing something very similar to this. We may even use your module, but we need to get deeper into evaluating all our options before we decide the specifics, of course. :-) Thanks,
--Chris
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Node/408 1/cspl.html
You did not see that on Slashcode. This is simply false. Use it to make an anti-Slashdot site. Who cares?
Maybe you saw that I wrote that I don't want advocacy for alternatives to Slash posted on the Slashcode site, but that had nothing to do with Slashdot or with the code itself. That was just because Slashcode is a site about developing and helping with Slash, not about advocacy or general discussion.
Um, yes it does. Please re-read the FAQ.
It'd be cool if there was an option, to display something like the +4 and above comments, when viewing slashdot from your phone.
--
Or, is it all a conspiracy to move over to ASP/SQL and rebrand to either
http://slashdot.microsoft.com or
http://slashdot.linux.com?
#8^p
Hey, Taco, care to fix it where AC's and negative karma-ites can't MetaMod? Methinks we're being Had....
--
sooner or later, the only way to
run a truly value-added anything
is to become a real BOFH on trolls.
No, man, the question is,
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Those who want to run a weblog like /. but don't have access to database servers could try out sips. It's written in PHP and doesn't need anything beyond a php enabled web-server. The trade-off is you don't get half of the features of /., and it's only in version 0.1, but this looks like a really interesting project. I'm going to follow it closely (esp. since I'm the developer! :-D) ;)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
The FAQ indicates you are using the GPL (good for you!), but says nothing about how I submit patches (or who I submit them to).
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Are you certain about this? I've never worked with mySQL, but generally, the conventional wisdom is to leave sorting to the database. That's what databases do... I'd be quite surprised if it was actually faster to dump a set of records and have perl sort them rather than have the database do it. If true, that says nothing good about the database software.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
I actually would like to have the option to see very highly moderated comments on the phone. The thing is, the screen is tiny, and the connection is slow. So I don't see it being terribly useful. If I really want to read slashdot from anywhere I can just hook my phone up to my laptop and use a real browser.
--GnrcMan--
Boy is this ever not the way to lock:
/tmp/portald.pid: $!";
} else {
open LOCK,">/tmp/portald.pid"
or die "Can't open
print LOCK "$$";
close LOCK;
}
This is from the portald makeTmp subroutine.
You have to use flock or fcntl to make sure of
atomicity. You have a race condition between
when you open the file and when you write.
It's good to be root....
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think metamod and moderation are limited to individuals with a positive karma. However, since it's not hard to get one upmod, I think that what's happening is the trolls are creating a large number of bogus accounts, get a single upmod on each, and then metamoderate badly. Perhaps what should happen is that you shouldn't be allowed to metamoderate until you have +10 or more karma (if you can generate 10 good points, you probably know what a good post/bad post looks like), and you cannot moderate until you have a karma of +20 or more.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Are there any real sites based on the "Slashcode"? I certainly haven't seen any. And if not, why does anyone care about this? It's not like it's doing anyone a whole lot of good or anything. Really - what's yet another bloated,
overblown, messy, ugly Perl script going to do for me? Nothing, that's exactly what.
You like to flame huh? I would give up a good deal juts to be able to run the slash code or in fact any server type code on a web site. Being a sysadmin is a luxry that I do not have at the present time.
What slashdot has done rather successfully is take the concept of a nested and web based interative dynamic type of medium that usenet could only dream of. By eliminating the need for a specific client you make your access to millions instead of a trusted group of elites. It really depends on what you want to do. I think that the ability to dynamically add stories and bits of interest in a dynamic way is good. I was toying around with the idea of having dynamic content that could update a web page remotely. The only good script that I have seen as of yet has been one that hasn't worked on any of the unix systems I have tried it on despite using the portable perl language. I wish to god I could get this to work on one of the "free" sites. A few of them allow for the perl language but I haven't found one that would have both mySQL and perl with the necessary extensions. But I have a good idea why. Control C-O-N-T-R-O-L in it's most basic form. Oh sure speech is free but the presses aren't.
I don't understand this about the "Open Source" movement at all - there's all this messy code floating around out there that nobody would ever use in their right mind, and you've got to wade through so much of it just to find some
decent software, much less what you're looking for. It's probably no coincidence that Freshmeat, Slashdot's sister site, is one of the worst perpetrators of this travesty.
I think you miss the point entirely about the open source methodology. Essentially the code is out there to be fixed. That's about like saying that if you go to a garage and see people working on broken cars. They are doing this not to say that these cars work but that they are actively fixing them. What's happening here is a little less like a garage and more like a group of people "souping up" a car not only to fix the carburator but to give it a nice tune up when it's needed.
I, personally, believe that RMS and ERS and crew have some serious revising to do if the "Open Source" movement is to remain viable. First step would be to tell people that until their code is usable and cleaned up and ready for a
1.0 release, they should keep it to themselves!. Second, of course, would be to not throw it out on the web if you can't think of at least fifty people who'd want to use it - you're just cluttering the spiders and wasting your disk. This
applies equally as much to the Slash code.
You know I remember another AC who was whining and spamming a discussion with a discussion about the slashdot not being open. Multiple bitched and whined about it and then finally Malda got tired of having his mail box filled with 100,000,000 requests to open source the code and released it.
He knew damn well the code wasn't ready but he was pressured to release it. I personally thing the code is better for his decision and bugs that were possibly hindering the code have been worked out much more quickly.
Don't get me wrong - I think "Open Source" is an excellent idea. I just think the implementation is flawed.
You know I think it's people like you who deliberately make me wait for updates to my favorite open source updates and debian packages because you like seeing people squirm. There is no good technical argument that would support such a thing. Source should be open. The version dosn't matter because most projects are works in progress. I think the ultimate progress of systems is the main goal and not 100% stability.
In short if I want to risk my system with untested code I should be able to. If you want trusted code get a good linux distribution linux slackware 2.0 and update the entire thing by hand from source and do all the updates yourself. I tried that route and got insanely irritated with the results (which were usually very, very, frustrating because of little problems and not so little problems.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Now is the chance. There can be a better Slashdot, which retains both the technical and non-technical aspects of
Unfortunately you have to get the kind of traffic that slashdot for your site to be even remotely successful in any way. That's really the tricky part or not. At one time I had a site that was being generated as the first match for a particular keyword on excite (no I won't tell you what it was). Also you have to keep that audience.
No more idiotic "trolls" who post worthless flames. No more brainless zealots whining about Linux for karma points. No more self-congratulatory "X device uses Linux" bullshit. No more targeted attempts to sell you worthless
linux-using merchandise. In breif, no more Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Andover.net management, VA Linux, etc.
Again in your site becomes popular with anyone all the problems (well maybe not the editorial kind) with slashdot will come to you. Trolls were never asked to come to slashdot they came because they wanted to. Zealots can come if you have an open subscription of any kind and can even be created by your own "trusted" users.
Then maybe this whole idea will come together.
That would be an emense level of social engineering and isn't a trivial task. What is your outlook for this?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Is anyone waiting for Elightenment 1.0? Red Hat 6.2 isn't using XF86 4.0, but they've been using E as the wm for a while now.
Exactly what is the difference between Emacs vX.Y.Z and vA.B.C? I think the version numbers are automatically incremented by a random number generator.
Netscape Navigator 6.0, anyone? They probably shouldn't even call it "Netscape"...
Thank goodness I'm using Windows 98 here at work -- with a version number that high, it must be good!
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Will you stop using ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements? Your ORDER BY statment in selectComments is most likely slowing down this site by an order of magnitude. MySQL doesn't do well with ORDER BY and GROUP BY! You really should look into returning your information and having perl do the sorting. Perl was built for sorting. Perl likes sorting. Perl is your sorting friend. If you wish I can submit a fix, I wrote a slashdot-type messageboard over the past few weeks that borrowed from your design (it's functional and it's proven :-) but -god help me- not the horrendous sql or code.
.agrippa.
For those of you who haven't figured it out, you can go places by editing the sid in the URLs by hand.
This needs to be fixed in Slashcode 1.1.
Otherwise, thanks for a great site, Pat and Chris.
Here's what I've found so far...
Slashdot Marketing
Hot Grits
Slashdot
Natalie Portman
As much as the script is based on the linux operating system, it'd be not much to port it win32, but knowing the people at slashdot, it'd be impossible, since they'd think anything win32 would be a waste. If there were at least any tips on how to do this with out the ego drunk penguin, or any of the unix based extensions, there might be some good code. -Sephiroth, 'cause the penguin's d.w.e. (drunk with elitism)
I might also mention that Squishdot is available. It is a lot easier to set up than Slashdot and its code is a lot cleaner. It runs under Zope, using a modified Confera engine.
Back when I joined slashdot over 2 years ago (is there any way to find out exactly when?), it was an inovative site with an interface that was hardly used anywhere on the web- back then, the hot things in webdesign were frames and portals. Now, I can hardly pass 10 websites without seeing atleast one that has a similar "web-logesque" interface. It looks like slashdot was one of the first sites of this trend. Now, we have reached version 1.0 of Slashcode, and we can truely say that both slashdot and it's community have gone a long way. Even though we have to face trolls on a permanent basis, we can now easily face them with our army of well-selected moderators. We have even grown some "hidden" forums, created by using comments.pl with a sid that doesn't point to an article. Back when I joined, I got ID #4213. The comunity has grown so much, that the poll often goes into the tens of thousends of votes, and that's just the people who vote! Slashdot has grown from an anonymous site that only a few select geeks knew about to a gaigentic news agency of sorts for nerds worldwide!
Way to go Slashdot!!
I certainly hope you are not trolling, as this is something that comes up time and time again.
It's really not enough just to upload the code to a public site and release it under one of the free (as in speech) licenses to call yourself "Open Source." While technically your source is open, there is much much more to that than just having publically accesible/modifiable code.
At the heart of the Open Source concept is the notion that software developers should "release early and release often." Note that this is entirely contrary to what you have suggested. It's ok. You're still learning.
The reason you release early is to catch major problems early, when they are minor ones. That way they don't develop into huge problems later which require an entire redesign. Note that Open Source isn't an instant cure for design problems; rather, by its very nature, more eyes see the code, more brains work on the concepts, and thus better solutions tend to arise.
The reason you release often is to keep things moving. Hoarding the code leads to a slow development process wrought with bugs. Releasing often encourages people to try the software and submit feedback, since they know that a new release which will address their concerns/bugs/RFEs is just around the corner. Without the release often, you are losing much of the benefit of open source.
You would do well to read ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It does an excellent job of documenting a particular example where the Open Source development process resulted in a high-quality application. Along the way it explains much of what I have hinted at, with documented evidence as proof.
May the source be with you.
I like this Slashdot thing. Cool stuff since I was led to it a couple years ago. Perhaps this is beyond what slashdot hopes to accomplish, but there is SUCH a great wealth of knowledge here, its a shame it can only be accessed via designated topics. Even Ask Slashdot questions are picked for us.
So how about setting up a part of this venerable website as a general forum? Where folks can post questions which the Powers That Be may not consider worthy enough to post on the front page?
I'm trying to learn Linux, and often have questions directly related to the OS, or others about what type of programs are the best, the options- how exactly a recompile works and such.
It would be fantastic if I could post these questions in a general forum in case anyone is willing to help.
Or perhaps such a place exists already! But usually I have to remember 10 different newsgroups/webboards and which I posted questions to...
Kinda like an Open Ask Q/A section. Embrace and Extend?
Perhaps the moderation of such an area would be overwhelming. Then again, the same user-moderation scheme could be used there. Or perhaps just ask for volunteers from among those with the higher karma points.
Regardless, love the site and would really dig if it expanded in such a way.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
I when I read this, I fired up the web browser on my phone. Works nicely but the text formatting is a little wierd. You, of course, don't get to see the comments.
--GnrcMan--
I refer of course to the trolls who are waging a DDoS attack on moderator points. Just like any other DoS attack, they seek to consume all of a resource to prevent legitimate users from accessing it. Instead of consuming sockets, bandwidth, CPU, or disk space, these guys are consuming moderator points.
I've even noticed that the last several times I've moderated, I end up losing about 3-4 points of Karma. Now, perhaps I'm being "a bad moderator", but I don't think so: I take great care to moderate well and in the spirit of the Moderator guidelines. I wonder if the Trolls haven't managed to get several accounts they use for bogus MetaModeration.
So I wonder what if any attempts to correct this have been added to Slash1.0
www.eFax.com are spammers
The URL is the same (http://slashdot.org/). Rob simply added a mime redirect to httpd.conf that redirects text/vnd.wap.wml requests to /slashdot.wml. WML has some issues with HTML tags so the WML is basically a stripped-down lowercase HTML version of index page. Viewing comments via WAP is going to take some work becuase viewing 100K of text on a cell phone LCD screen is obviously not feasible so it will most likely be view-one-comment-at-a-time type of scenerio.
If you think the Slash code sucks, you have not looked at recently, and don't know what you are talking about. It could stand for a lot of improvements, which we are busy making. But it is far from sucktitude.
If you think Perl is slow, you are a stupid troll. Go away.
If you think SquishZopePHPYourMamaSlash is better than Slash, then by all means, use it and shut up about it.
If you have patches or want to otherwise participate in developing Slash, make sure you post it on the Slashcode site (or better yet, please read the FAQ about how to help, because if you don't, we might not see your contributions or patches or suggestions.
This has been a public service announcement. You can go back to your hot grits now.
"Hah! Taste my Third Heaven's Gate Parsing Strike!"
"Useless against Golden Willow Parts the Nested Documents!"
And lots of programmers wearing jeans and t-shirts flying around on cables through bamboo forests.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Not yet -- Slashdot has a lot of tweaks that have to be massaged out but during the next few weeks it will be upgraded to 1.0, then once Slashdot is on 1.0 code base it will stay in synch with the latest-greatest Slash release. I think Slashcode is running on 1.0.
This is a shameless plug, but can I suggest you guys take a look at DBIx::AnyDBD. It's a module I wrote to greatly simplify making cross db perl DBI applications.
The basics are that you put all your db access methods in a Default.pm file (in the class hierarchy of your choosing). Then when you want to port to a new platform, anything that's different to your original development platform goes in [Driver].pm, where [Driver] is one of Sybase or Oracle or Pg, etc.
This has really simplified things for me on a cross platform development system, and I think it will for slashdot (and other systems) too.
Mail me direct if you have any questions.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Am I the only one who has visions of two programmers talking out of sync with their mouth movements?
"Huh. So you wish. To review my code. You must be eager. To die. Huh."
When I loaded slashdot this morning, did
I load a page generated by slash 1.0? That is
the question.
Amazing magic tricks