Grex Agorage Conference

Item 13: Projects to revitalize Grex.

Entered by cross on Sun Jul 20 15:13:40 2008:

47 new of 109 responses total.


#63 of 109 by cross on Wed Jul 30 22:57:15 2008:

(That wasn't what I meant.)


#64 of 109 by tsty on Thu Jul 31 12:07:53 2008:

58 was the start of an explanation of    las   (as well as  -xxx) but
there were too many variables as to when each/either works/doesn;t work
between  ft adn bbs but it got WAY messy so i thought i cancelled it
by having an   empty  reponse (no chars) but it seems that ft and bbs
handle    empty   differently as well. no biggie, just quirks all aorund.


#65 of 109 by cross on Thu Jul 31 19:00:46 2008:

Well, so what is las?


#66 of 109 by hera on Thu Jul 31 19:02:41 2008:

LAS is the acronym for the Las Vegas airport.


#67 of 109 by tsty on Fri Aug 1 15:04:01 2008:

in bbs - but not ft -   the    las   command at the rfp prompte
displays the    last   response. there are quirks with it but in general
that is how it works.


#68 of 109 by cross on Fri Aug 1 15:07:01 2008:

Oh, okay.  That actually sounds kind of useful.


#69 of 109 by marcvh on Fri Aug 1 15:33:49 2008:

Note that it's really the "last" command.  It just accepts shortened
versions, including "las" or even "l", but if you try to talk about 
"the l command" nobody will know wtf you are talking about, and if you
change it to "the l word" things get even worse.


#70 of 109 by tsty on Fri Aug 1 16:04:51 2008:

that    L   word again ... /sigh ... how right you are.


#71 of 109 by jep on Fri Aug 1 18:15:19 2008:

What's wrong with lpstat?


#72 of 109 by cross on Fri Aug 1 18:58:33 2008:

Huh?


#73 of 109 by jep on Fri Aug 1 20:11:35 2008:

("l" word... Unix commands... never mind.)


#74 of 109 by cross on Fri Aug 1 20:17:21 2008:

(I got it after the fact.  I was like, "WTF?  We don't use SysV style 
printing....")


#75 of 109 by mcnally on Fri Aug 1 20:55:00 2008:

 See, I thought you were going for "WTF?  SysV style print commands suck --
 everyone knows that!"


#76 of 109 by cross on Fri Aug 1 21:01:41 2008:

(That's a given.)


#77 of 109 by cross on Mon Aug 18 13:51:00 2008:

So I made some changes to fronttalk today....

1) I incorporated bellstar's changes to add a 'respond' command at the Ok:
prompt.

2) I made 'l' work as a synonym for "last" at the RFP prompt.  So, "l", "la",
"las", "last" and "$" all do the same thing there.


#78 of 109 by tsty on Wed Aug 20 07:01:53 2008:

tnx.
,


#79 of 109 by cross on Wed Aug 20 09:12:02 2008:

Ain't no thang.


#80 of 109 by tsty on Sat Aug 23 22:37:14 2008:

umm, i did find a    preserve   command, spelled out entirely.
 
howse about shortinge it to    pre  ?  is that possible?


#81 of 109 by cross on Sun Aug 24 02:47:53 2008:

Maybe.  What's it do, and what prompt is it used at?


#82 of 109 by remmers on Sun Aug 24 15:22:20 2008:

I believe it's at the "Respond or pass" prompt and suppresses updating
the participation file.


#83 of 109 by cross on Sun Aug 24 18:47:37 2008:

I'll look into it.

Jan hasn't responded about any of the patches I've sent him; I'm not
quite sure what to make of that.


#84 of 109 by tsty on Mon Aug 25 09:30:51 2008:

use the telephone ...
  
the preserve command sets 'where bbs starts reading' the next tme bbs
is engaged.
  
for example ...  237 responses, 126 new ... read new .. ok fine.
  
if ther eis bs in some resps but an importent response in 222, then
'preserve 222' will read froem 222 sted 111. 


#85 of 109 by cross on Tue Aug 26 02:03:18 2008:

It looks like that's already abbreviated to "pre".


#86 of 109 by tsty on Tue Sep 2 00:08:27 2008:

correct .. change was made ... tnx.


#87 of 109 by madmike on Tue Sep 16 02:24:53 2008:

RE #25 >>CMSs are "certainly" not the way for Grex to go.

Here!Here! I cringe at the mention of CMS in the context of GREX. I 
have developed sites using both XOOPs and JOOMLA solutions and have 
found both to be an insult to knowledgeable web design. They are 
certainly capable of producing professional results but they strike me 
as very 'Rube Goldburg' in nature. 

The XOOPs site I did only to test the software. But the JOOMLA site is 
a current project. I did a bunch of research on CMS software and 
decided to go with JOOMLA mainly due to it's massive following 
(translating that to mean a greater support community.) I had always 
wanted to try a serious CMS site when my son came up with a website 
idea he wanted to try. He has no web skills at all and I set this up 
for him because at least the administrative functions are logically 
presented and well documented. 

The thing is so overbuilt yet convoluted. Everything was included in 
the basic setup except what you need. I added a "Simple Machines Forum" 
(SMF) forums module which is very slick but It is so much like 
everything else on the internet. If all you want is a forum site this 
is really a nice solution. (Bridging Modules? - OMG!) 

What GREX would do with any of this stuff is beyond me. But trust me on 
this incorporating a CMS into the current setup would be a programming 
nightmare! It would be far easier to rewrite GREX in PHP from scratch 
to do "whatever" than to try to customize a CMS.

I like the new GREX website. The clean cut CSS design fits in well with 
the true GREX tradition (Telnet + ASCII.) I was NEVER fond of the old 
web front. It just never felt like it was promoting the place I had 
known as cyberspace.org. 

Back talk is VERY NICE in that it makes the conferences so easy to 
navigate and contribute to. However, on the telnet side the conferences 
where always just tricky enough to limit posters to folks that I felt 
have paid some sort of dues to participate. I think some of that is 
lost with BackTalk but so much is gained in ease of use, it is hard to 
argue against it.  

One thing I really miss from my old bulleten board days is ANSI support.
We used to have a blast goofin' around with the graphics and sounds. I 
know they where just toys but we could really do some fancy screens and 
menus. We segregated ourselves into SIGs (Special Intrest Groups). I 
always thought the various conferences here where the next best thing 
but there has never seemed to be much purpose to contributing to many 
(most) of those available. 

Here's an idea:

What about getting active groups to collaberate on webpages to promote 
their special intrest and having their conferences only visible to 
logged in members. Keep agora publicly readable, of course. But the "I 
Like Gardening" conference takes place 'behind closed doors.'

For instance the "I Like Gardening" conference would have a webpage to 
promote itself and invite folks to come join the fun. Perhaps allow a 
500K limit on graphics for use on the page. This would reguire some 
limited graphics handling (for reviews and what-not) maybe give each 
participating conference/group 5meg or so of storage to cull their page 
from. Not only would this sort of thing attract attention from the surf-
by visitor it would encourage GREXers to develop their web design 
skills or at least bring to the group an individual with such 
tendencies. 

If we could evolve into a GREX of Website Designers as well as UNIX 
users we would find we could maintain GREX and build it ourselves into 
anything we wish it to be.


#88 of 109 by nikm on Tue Sep 16 06:00:02 2008:

Can I read ft code? Where can I find it?


#89 of 109 by cross on Tue Sep 16 14:06:26 2008:

resp:87 Hmm, interesting idea.  We've been thinking about "fishbowl" 
conferences for some time now; YAPP had the ability to have
finer-grained  access controls for conferences which would, I think,
provide a starting  point for the sort of things you are talking about
(accessible from the  command line, not accessible from the web; up to
the conference's  administration to decide which way to go).  The
problem with enabling that  sort of support in backtalk was, of course,
legacy support for Picospan.   Since we're moving away from Picospan,
however, we might be able to rethink  these sorts of things (fronttalk,
the "new" terminal-based interface for  BBS, is just a frontend to
backtalk).  Anyway, the point is that it's  technically possible,
provided it's something that the community wants to  do.

With respect to the web site, I think the thing to do is keep most of it
 static, with some cron scripts and 

resp:88 Certainly!  Read /usr/local/bin/fronttalk, and the libraries are
in  /usr/local/lib/fronttalk-0.9.2.  Feel free to read whatever you
like; if you  see bugs, or want to make a change, just send email or
post here, or (for  changes) copy the files in question to your home
directory, make a change,  and email or post a patch (diff -u format
works best).  Provided the changes  are reasonable, I've got no problems
incorporating them into the running  version here on Grex and sending an
email to Jan.

For that matter, there are a number of things that need to be
incorporated  into the current code to make it compatible with Picospan.


#90 of 109 by nikm on Thu Sep 18 11:55:50 2008:



#91 of 109 by nikm on Thu Sep 18 12:05:58 2008:

I thought of making some changes to web pages. 
1. Creating common header html which can be included in all the html files.
2. Creating common footer 
3. Creating common sidebar html file

In order to do this I tried copying all the files from /var/www/htdocs to my
home directory. But it looks like I dont have enough disk quota. Is there any
way I can copy this entire folder to my local machine? 


#92 of 109 by keesan on Thu Sep 18 15:09:57 2008:

Do you have wget?  Can you work in /tmp at grex?


#93 of 109 by madmike on Thu Sep 18 15:23:48 2008:

To download the htdocs folder is to attempt to get way more files than 
you need or would even want. There are subfolders to htdocs that are 
actually links to folders elswhere in the system and those probably 
contain symbolic links to other folders as well. It is entirely 
possible you are meeting yourself coming and going - downloading files 
more than once in some cases. Some folders and contents are permission 
based and cannot be accessed. Much of what you can download is no-doubt 
irrelevent to your project but may shed some light on the structure of 
the grex website. 

I have downloaded what I could. I have ommitted the GREX minutes 
documents but admit they would probably be in interesting (& dry) read. 
I've also pruned the stats folder (almost 50MB in itself.) I have made 
these files  available for downloading in a compressed ZIP file at the 
following link.


check here http://www.cyberspace.org/~madmike/GREX/


 I was hoping this might ease bandwith demands on grex in case anyone 
else was curious as to these files and their contents. I havent yet 
checked what all is included but I'm sure you will find what you are 
looking for. 


When I get the time I'll prune this down to the bare essentials. But 
for now I think I'll have a look myself.

STAFF: If you would rather I did not do this let me know.


#94 of 109 by nikm on Thu Sep 18 16:54:23 2008:

resp: 92 Even if I work in /tmp  it wont help because I should be able to see
the result in a browser. 

resp: 93 I am on a very narrow bandwidth. It looks like the size of the zip
file is 3.2 MB.


#95 of 109 by nikm on Thu Sep 18 16:55:39 2008:

Oops I tried downloading. But I am not able to do the same. 


#96 of 109 by madmike on Thu Sep 18 22:05:18 2008:

perhaps this will get it...
http://infinitelyremote.dyndns.org/members/madmike/GREX/htdocs.zip

It is possible that the firewall may be blocking you. I do have several 
large IP blocks filtered. sorry, but if you email me your IP address I 
will be happy to poke a hole in the wall for ya.


#97 of 109 by cross on Fri Sep 19 01:03:45 2008:

resp:93 I don't have a problem with it; the stuff can be easily retrieved
by a web browser; I'm sure lots of it is already stored in various archives and
caches automatically (like most of the web's content).

The Grex web pages (the ones that we actually edit, anyway; not the meeting
minutes, Apache manual, stats, etc) are now in CVS: /var/ncvs/grex/web is the
location of the repository.


#98 of 109 by hera on Fri Sep 19 05:17:25 2008:

madmike is a madasswipe!!! nyah! nyah! HE can't hear me!!! I'll bet he has
sex with geese and wipes his ass with his finger and then sticks it in
cyklown's mouth. 


#99 of 109 by madmike on Fri Sep 19 10:44:45 2008:

Twit Filters are a beautiful thing!


#100 of 109 by mary on Fri Sep 19 11:51:17 2008:

(Mary gives madmike the secret handshake.) ;-)


#101 of 109 by madmike on Fri Sep 19 12:34:38 2008:

Okay then... I have moved the file to a bigtime server for hosting. 
Should be World accessable now. See this page for the updated link.

==== http://www.grex.org/~madmike/GREX/ ====

I've included most of the following folder /var/ncvs/grex/web/htdocs in 
the htdocsII.zip file

the /var/www/htdocs is still available in the htdocs.zip file

re# 100 ;o)


#102 of 109 by cross on Fri Sep 19 17:45:51 2008:

It stikes me that we do allow people to mirror the Grex CVS repositories using
cvsync; it might be easier to just suck those down than getting the RCS file
from the CVSROOT subtree (those don't give you much, really).


#103 of 109 by madmike on Fri Sep 19 19:50:59 2008:

Sounded like a good idea...
Am I doing something wrong?
=================================
[root@myserver grex]# cvsync cvsync://grex.org:80
Connecting to grex.org port 80
Connected to 216.86.77.194 port 80
Socket Error: recv: 2 residue 2
Recv: protocol version length
=================================

(takes about 5 minutes to do above cycle)



#104 of 109 by madmike on Fri Sep 19 21:05:08 2008:

I know what I'm doing wrong...

Trying to do something I have no idea what I am doing. I'll read the 
docs and get edgamacated. (this'll be fun) thanx cross


#105 of 109 by hera on Sat Sep 20 00:36:01 2008:

Idiot. I'm losing nothing by him filtering me. hah!


#106 of 109 by madmike on Mon Sep 22 15:07:06 2008:

cvsync -v cvsync://grex.org/grexcvs/rcs/?prefix=/grex
*******************************
Done (collection grexcvs/rcs)
Finished successfully
Total time: 465.256 sec

now to figure out what to do with these ;)


#107 of 109 by nikm on Sun Sep 28 03:26:10 2008:

I have found two things that is different from picospan.

1) Initially when we get into front-talk it displays help messages which says
that typing "help conf" will display the available conferences. But this
command is not working. I think it should be "help conference".

2) I tried "help conference" and it worked. But there is no pagination for
this command so the list runs out of the screen.

Don't you think changing the initial message and adding pagination will help?


#108 of 109 by cross on Tue Oct 21 02:11:31 2008:

I do; remind me to put it on my list of things to do!


#109 of 109 by politoto on Fri Dec 18 10:26:35 2015:

Today I can see
(type "help conf" for a list of conferences)
above the Ok: prompt. :)

And "help confe" works and "help conf" doesn't. And there is no pagination.


There are no more items selected.

You have several choices: