Well, popcorn, here it is.  the official "I WANT MY OWN PARTY CHANNER
*NOW*" item.  Before we were so rudely interrupted by the restarting,
I had asked about the possiblility of "cloaking'   a channel.  can it be done?

111 responses total.

   I think we might want to talk about seperate party channels in
general, and why we might want them, or not.

   We don't have private conferences, except for staff, but we have
private party channels.  Why?  Does the party concept more closely
follow mail, which is inherently private, or that of a conference, 
which is public?

i think that the private channels are good...it lets people have a serious
conversation with more then just one person, and without people like fuzz
butting in with stupid and annoying things.  but i think that having a 
permantly closed channel is a bad idea.  private cf's i think would be bad,
but i can't give a solid reason why.  :(

        It's a solid mix of both. Party is as personal as mail, but has the
chance of being as populous and thought provoking as the cf's. Because
of this, I'd say that it needs aspects of both, and *I* think our current
setup has. As for permanent private channels?
        I dunno.. if staff doesn't mind setting them up, fine. If they've
got better things to do, then tough on the sillies who feel they want a
piece of "surreal estate". I find that the options allowed by adding the
_x or _z or _x! are adequate enough, and if I want privacy, I'll just make
a _x channel.. I don't need to have a permanent abode down there!

This response has been erased.

   Interesting point, about the public conferences.

        Well, you know, from my experience, it's when the partiers have
some control over who they do and don't party with, that they are happiest.
To eliminate private channels would eliminate a good share of said control.
        I must say that there is not much a user can do about main channel,
except avoid it, if someone is there whom you do NOT like. Perhaps the
intro message Valerie proposed in oldcoop could include channel-switching 
instructions, so that a newbie won't be "trapped" into sharing a channel
with one of our infamous "gnats".

This response has been erased.

(But I don't think that anyone would type it *exactly* that way . . .)

but most newbies don't know that...hey, i didn't until you just put it there!

Re #7:  That would filter out responses that include the word 'popcorn'
anywhere -- probably broader than what you'd want.  A better filter:

        :set filter="grep -v '^popcorn:'"

That will filter out only the responses *entered* by popcorn.

        Hmmm.. okayyy..
        I think that maybe should go into the message that sidhe mentioned,
maybe like below it or something..

Actually, when I'm trying to filter somebody out, I usually prefer to
filter out the responses mentioning them as well.  That way I don't have
to deal with all the people who can't be bothered to filter them telling
them to shut up repeatedly.

re #7, 10: 

that works just fine for one or two twits, but when you have to filter
out twenty or so twits, it doesn't seem to work.

And if you want to filter out both what popcorn is saying,
and any sound effects she enters, you can always do:

        :set filter="egrep -v '^popcorn|<popcorn'"

Why you'd want to do that to popcorn, I have no idea.  >8)

Believe it or not, I talked to fuzzball for hours last night (this morning?)
and found him to be far from a twit.  Some peole just need a little more
work to get to their good sides, that's all.

i admire your patientce, nephi.  you have great courage.  :)

   I've been talking to him too, via mail/write.  I think he has potential.

now, to get him to focus that potential on something non-annoying...

It is very nice to know that the inner circle of Grex can publically
identify and thereby humiliate certain users as "twits." It really
gives a feeling of friendliness and community.

At the risk of sounding flame-ish....
 
(a) you're the one who first used "twit" in this item
(b) nephi's the only other one who used it, to say fuzzball *wasn't* one.
(c) nephi lives like umpteen states away from grex; he's no insider!
(d) as far as other peoples' perceptions of fuzzball (which did not
    involve name-calling), if they're generally negative, it's in all
    likelihood fuzzball's own doing.

        It is his own doing. What's good, though, is that he seems to have
taken it upon himself to behave, as he noticed how quickly everyone down
there hated him before.

Socialization really works wonders, doesn't it?

(What's the difference between grep and egrep?  I saw that most people 
here used grep in their filter, but robh used egrep.)

This response has been erased.

Less powerful?  Now my interest has really been piqued.  

But egrep allows | to look for multiple patterns, and grep doesn't.
(So said the manual I checked, anyway.)

Um, Valerie, you've got that backwards. egrep is more powerful, but slower.
egrep does full regular expression parsing, grep does limited regular
expressions. grep is ussually the smaller faster tool that you use for
most easy searches, and then you use egrep for the trickier ones. I think
egrep may have orriginally meant "extended grep".

The smaller argumetn doesn't hold true for the gnu versions of these programs
however. The gnu grep has all the code for all the versions of grep. It is
then installed with links to egrep and fgrep and it determines what set
of functionallity to use based on argv[0].

And I will award the Unix Trivia prize of the day to the first person
to say what "grep" is an acronym for.

"Global regular expression parser." or sometimes "(G)lobal (R)egular
(E)xpression search and (P)rint".

Although alot of people believe that this definition was rationalized
later, after the fact, and "grep" was either a meaningless word, or some
piece of slang that was personal to the author.

This response has been erased.

re #20:

I never identified anyone as being a twit or possibly being a twit. It
is a very different thing to say "there are twits" than saying "there
are twits, and so-and-so's one."

My apologies to nephi for implying his insidership.

This response has been erased.

I've read that the "grep" program was a spinoff of the "ed" text
editor, which has the command

                g/<R.E.>/p

where the <R.E.> stands for any "regular expression" that the user
cares to enter -- "ed" will search its text buffer and display any
lines that match the regular expression.  At some point, the people
involved with developing Unix at Bell Labs decided that it would be
nice to have a standalone command, independent of "ed", that performed
this function, so they wrote such a program and called it "grep"
because of where it came from.

I read this in the writing of one of the Unix pioneers (Brian Kernighan
maybe?), so I give the "global regular expression print" explanation
the most credence.

So . . . which is the better one to use in the twit filter?

This response has been erased.

Of course, if you want to avoid any extra milliseconds' delay, and you also
want mentions of the offending user's name to be suppressed as well as
that person's own words, you could use fgrep instead.

I came across a five page man of "regular expression", which didn't make
any sense to me, probably because they never explained why one would want
one. Can you explain in maybe five lines what's a "regular expression" andw
what good it is?

A regular expression is a methodology for doing wildcarding in text
searches that is similiar to the wildcarding that you can do in "ls"
when you are looking for files. For instance, when you want to find
all the files in your home dir that start with "s" and end in ".c"
you might do "ls -al s*.c".

Regexp is a much more powerful extension of this concept. For instance,
suppose you wanted to grep a file for all instances of lines that had the
letter "S" in the forth column and the line ended with "flarb". You
would do:
    grep "^...S.*flarb$" filename

Explanation:
1.) The regexp must be in quotes to prevent your shell from interpreting
    the "*" character.
2.) The "^" signifies that the search must match starting at the beginning 
    of the line, otherwise the pattern can match anywhere in the line.
3.) A "." means to match *any* 1 character.
4.) The "S" is the literal letter "S" that you are looking for in the forth
    column.
5.) The "*" means to repeat the previous character as many times as necasary.
    Since the previous character is a ".", the ".*" construct means to
    match any and all characters up to the next pattern in the regexp.
6.) The "$" means that the preceeding item in the regexp must be at the
    end of the line. so "flarg" is only matched if it's the last characters
    of the line being searched.

The regexp could be read as follows:
  Match all lines that begin with any 3 characters and then an "S", end
  with the string "flarg", and have any amount of characters between those
  conditions.

Regexp is kind of hard to describe in abstract terms, giving an example
ussually works better. Based on the above you should be able to go back to
the man page and decipher all the other features it offers.

Note: I'm not a regexp expert and have never been able to remember all
the arcana involved in it. There's probably other ways to do my example
above that are simpler.

        You more of an expert than me!

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss