Slashdot Mirror
New Slash Version v1.0.3
pudge writes "Yo. We released slash-1.0.3. Bug reports and CVS and file downloads are on SourceForge. Slashcode is now hosted at Exodus with Slashdot and Freshmeat. "
The scary part is that now Slashdot and Slashcode are totally synched up... which means programmers can e-mail diffs instead of bug reports and feature suggestions (hint hint hint!)
Slashcode and Slashdot are synched up? Who are you, and what did you do with CmdrTaco?! We demand his release!!
In the last update, you mentioned that you abandoned Adfu in favor of a C program that you developed for ad-rotation, which would run under Apache. When will the code for that be available?
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Constitutionally Correct
Yeah, they're so lousy, they can't even come up with a web site that anyone actually uses. :p
And what's wrong with using what you know? If the code _works_ and it works just fine, why write it in a "more complicated" language? Did I mention that the code works?
the real wonderful part is that there will now be lots more 'pairs of eyes' checking the slashcode for loopholes and bugs that will allow quicker bugfixes and a more robust system...
ai731
--
"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent"
Some of us out here are even worse programmers, and wouldn't have the skill to write something on this scale if they wanted to. I should know, I'm one of them.
I setup slash a few months ago, and had a major learning experience with apache, perl, CPAN and funky virtual server setups. Now, I've got it running great and I'm extending the functionality by running Zope side-by-side.
I've been talking about my website idea for a LONG time with my family. Thanks to these lousy programmers, an even worse programmer has been able to impress a lot of people.
Now, if I can just get hits.
Dave
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
For the last few weeks, Slashdot has add annoying "pauses" where the browser will connect to the server, but no data will ever come. These pauses last for anything from one minute to 30. Then I have to squish all my posting in before the next piece of downtime.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Rewrite it in VBScript so that it runs locally on compliant browsers.
Sorry..... I'll shoot myself now.
Here's a few things to bandy about (no need for actual diffs).
Theming
Everyone bitches about the colors, especially in the BSD and Apache sections (and, I must say, YRO isn't much better). Why not setup a colors preferences panel? That shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Removal of Comments
Given the recent controversy over Microsoft and what not, give users the ability to remove their own comments, maybe with a karma penalty or something. We can moderate our system, but we can't responsibly manage it.
That's just a couple of ideas, and there's tons more, I'm sure. On to Slash 2.0!
I think that Cascading Style Sheets _should_ mean that you can set up your own colour schemes, which override those used by Slashdot. If Slashdot is using CSS properly, that is.
I don't know if any browser lets you specify different stylesheets for different sites though.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yes, the meta-mod bug looks like it's fixed.
If you have never meta-moderated, go to http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl and get in on the fun.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
As to us "not knowing SQL" (I am not sure if that is tongue-in-cheek or not), well, all I can say is that there is a lot of really old code in there. Sure, you are going to see a lot of cruft. We're working hard on rewriting major portions of the thing. You may see some code in there that does nothing at all, or does nothing useful, or does something bad. All I can say to that is "duh." Send a patch or a bug report if you like, we will certainly appreciate it.
But don't bother pointing out that, gasp, bugs and bad code are in Slash. That's a given. That's why we are working so hard on it and devoting so many resources to it (four full-time developers, IIRC, not including CmdrTaco, plus several more, like Cliff, who are splitting time with Slash and other projects). The code was pretty good for what it was, but over time it got crufty, and now we are going back and fixing it. That's how these things work.
My suggestion would be to use redundant in those cases. Like this one.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
The most important goal of this change should be code compactness, whereby repetitive use of bgcolor, font, align, etc is replaced with simplified CSS classes. This should significantly reduce bandwidth requirements per user, most important considering the ever-solid limit of 56k dial-up.
While it is nowhere near valid HTML 4, users of the very latest nightly builds of Mozilla (an important display bug was recently fixed), or the excellent IE5 for Windows (I hate Microsoft more than YOU do, but their HTML rendering engine is admittedly a work of art), can check out the following link here: whirlpool.net.au
It's my hobby site with a slash-esque feel, written totally by hand and powered with Cold Fusion (it's no PHP, but it's easy and fast). The design concept, programming, content and everything else was done by me.
I would be very interested in donating a design structure for Slashdot, keeping in mind download times, the legacy look-and-feel, and HTML 4 compliance. test
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
I don't know enough about mysql and other databases to know if something else would be better. That said, I am impressed with mysql, and my only significant problem with it for Slashdot is lack of replication, which is being developed now.
I would absolutely not go to PHP, basically because I love Perl and don't like PHP.
Would PHP increase development speed? No. I am very fast at developing with Perl, and I don't see how developing in another language would be faster. Even if I could learn PHP real well, I would still be as fast or faster in Perl. For other people, it might increase development speed, I dunno. Not for me, certainly.
Would PHP be able to keep up with traffic? Probably, as much as Perl can.
Would PHP be faster than Perl? Of course not.
Would PHP require less memory than Perl? I don't know. I've heard it would.
Would PHP make it more maintanable and expandable by other people? If those people knew PHP better than Perl, yes. If they knew Perl better than PHP, no. "Maintainability" is a function of good programming practices, not language. My Perl programs and modules are far more maintainable than a lot of C, C++, Python, and PHP code out there. And there are far less maintainable than others of the same languages. The language is mostly irrelevant in this respect.
And in that line of thought, objectively speaking, it is a clear fact that moving to PHP would make Slash less maintainable, since the developers working on the project know and like Perl a lot better.
This stupid PHP advocacy is about as useful and as interesting as BSD vs. Linux. If you like PHP, use it. I don't give a damn. But don't try to make me feel silly or stupid or wrong for using Perl, just so you can feel better about your personal decision to use PHP. It won't work. I am proud to use Perl, and love it, and the best emotion you can get out of me is pity, not because you are using a language I feel to be less useful and interesting and mature, but because you have little better to do with your time.
A little off-topic, but important to /. and /.'ers
/.
/.'ers how important bug reporting is. Why do we have to hunt for that link? It needs to be prominent, in several places around the site, including the 'front page'
Sometimes I notice bugs that do not seem to be in the Slashcode per se, but seem to be affecting Slashdot alone. Often these are not consistent ongoing bugs, but transient, lasting 1-3 days.
One example: one weekend, my BBC Science slashbox was filled with VA/Linux corporate links instead of articles. The problem was reproducible (on my account at least) from different machines.
I realize this may be due to changes and updating (both software and hardware), but I am of the opinion that 'bugs don'f fix themselves'. I have reported a few to slashcode, but clearly this was some sort of config error at
Also, it took me quite a bit of searching before I was moderately confident that Slashcode was the place to go. This should be in the FAQ, or better, be a separate entry in the upper left corner, along with FAQ, privacy, submit story, etc.
Slashdot: every responsible site needs a good site specific bug reporting mechanism! How would you feel about *any* company that linked you to the BBS software manufacturer, under the presumption that the underlying code may be flawed but their own site implementation and administration was perfect?
No one knows better that
_____________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
I added a special "Slashdot" bug group on SourceForge yesterday, so you can submit your Slashdot bugs in the same place, but tag them as specific to Slashdot if you like.
And yeah, I suppose this should be somewhere on the site in a FAQ or something. I just mentioned it to CowboyNeal.
At some point, will the "Plain Old Text" posting option get fixed so that it really posts exactly what gets typed?
You know, like not processing tags and not removing anything that looks like a tag?
(Previewing, I see now that it has just somehow been swapped with the "Extrans" option.)
The cake is a pie
This information is available today. If you click on the #cid of a comment, it shows a breakdown of the moderation so far.
But it would be nice if this information were part of the header of each comment on the main page.
Given these, let's look at PHP/MySQL. You've got the web server, PHP, Zend, the Zend Optimizer, the PHP application, the database driver, the database server and the database itself.
That's a lot of components, and a LOT of overhead in lines of code. And that means lots of bugs.
IMHO, the only conclusion I can reach is that, if I were to write a Slash-like system, I would start by throwing out the web server. It doesn't really DO anything for you, it just copies data from one place to another. A 4 or 5 line program could do that. That gives you enormous speed-up (by freeing up RAM as well as by having a much faster server).
After the webserver, I'd have to throw out the database. Each URL points to a unique entry, so I can just as easily use sparse arrays and hashing. A database is just wasted overhead.
That leaves PHP, Zend and the Zend optimizer. Since the rest is now direct, in-line code, you're better off with C. This removes 3 packages and 5 interfaces, all of which would rip out yet more bugs.
In the end, the entire Slash/Perl|PHP/DB/httpd gumph, with the potential for a huge number of security holes and other assorted bugs, could be replaced by a much smaller, specialised C app that did everything.
(In practice, I doubt anyone'd ever want to write such an app. The Unix practice of reusable components has proven good enough, to the point that everything is done that way, now, even if for any given task, it's horribly inefficient and very prone to errors.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have to disagree with many of the other posters - I've found that web sites with CSS often render poorly with my browser. I'm in favor of simplified HTML that lets the browser do most of the formatting. So what if the colors are bad? A preferences panel for color choices will take care of that. There's no reason to make major changes to Slashcode.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
In your opinion, what defines a 1.0 release?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Keep the number of daemons/threads BELOW OR EQUAL to the number of CPUs.
I suppose by this you mean that the number of daemons/threads SPAWNED from a single user request keeps at n-1 in relationship to the processor. At my Concentric-hosted site, I have to keep it under 1 thread per script or it will kproc me. That isn't so bad, since it keeps me from doing stupid things like globbing massive directories and the like when I can just do an opendir/readdir and run the results through grep. I take up one read that way.
Given these, let's look at PHP/MySQL. You've got the web server, PHP, Zend, the Zend Optimizer, the PHP application, the database driver, the database server and the database itself.
Actually, on one server I work with PHP and Apache are compiled against each other, we don't use Zend, and the MySQL can't be helped. However, it is nice in the fact that our editors don't need to worry about setting up the ODBC every time, or even writing out headers every time, as php does a lot of this for you. It already knows where mysql is and so on.
On my personal site, I use perl. I use it because:
it's on almost every server out there.
It's mostly backend stuff, and
It is a programmer's language, and not just a programming language. Larry thinks about how hard it would be to progrom something, and adds functions accordingly.
IMHO, the only conclusion I can reach is that, if I were to write a Slash-like system, I would start by throwing out the web server.
If you wanted to get really technical, you don't even need a webserver. You could do the whole thing through text in a telnet session like a mud or a old-fashioned bbs. You can even write your own caching and load-balancing software to keep it up. But you don't have to. There is already a framework in place to do this. In fact the next Linux kernel will have khttpd, and you won't even need a webserver unless you want to do dynamic content. Then the program you mentioned above would be quite nice. As above so below.
(In practice, I doubt anyone'd ever want to write such an app. The Unix practice of reusable components has proven good enough, to the point that everything is done that way, now, even if for any given task, it's horribly inefficient and very prone to errors.)
In essence, a lot of the programs mentioned in your post already are quite debugged, and checked for security by the "thousands of eyes" looking over the code. Your proposition would only be safe if you followed in their footsteps and copied their code. However, You could just use their software and save yourself the trouble. Why build the cow when you can run the milk for free? <ducks>
Lowmag.net
I think that the check box should be used to get your' +1, i.e. the default is the normal posting level and, furthermore, that your karma should go down by 1 for each +1 bonus you give yourself.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
You picked the code that is actually the oldest code in Slash (significantly older than the MySQL book). It's being changed. Schemas are being changed, code is being changed. You found some obviously crufty code that needs to get changed, that is being changed. Good for you.
Yeah, I know I'm not the only one saying it, but I don't see enough posts saying it yet:
Thanks for releasing your CGI code, and double thanks for getting the running code and the public source in sync.
I was one of the more annoyingly whiny complainers before the 0.9 slash release; here's hoping that now that both the slash code and school are out I can do something with it this summer..
No.