Re: A _Bunch_ of Article_XXXX commands in _One_ send buffer.
- From: nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jamie)
- Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 18:28:54 GMT
In <Jeff_Relf_2006_Feb_19_E5ZX@xxxxxxxxx>,
=?UTF-8?Q?Jeff=5F=E2=84=9Eelf?= <Me@xxxxxxxxxxx> mentions:
Hi Jamie,
Speaking of perl... Does it have text_Replacement macros like C's #define ?
I love macros, they remove a lot of redundancy and other ugliness.
Not really, kind of if you count source filters, but, I've only used them
occasionaly (just to experiment with them)
It would be nice _sometimes_ I guess. Overall, you're not generally going
to get the same performance out of perl as you would in C or C++.
Places where this has really been an issue is in the scorefile (I'm ripping
out the killfile and replacing it with a score file) and the way newsrc files
are handled.
In fact, I've discovered that I can't KEEP UP with a high speed news servers
XOVER dump. The cache in these cases will actually slow it down. (it uses
compression, on linux compression is fast, but on my mac, compression is a real
bottleneck)
The bright side to all this, is that one could actually design and implement
their own commands or scorefile rules using straight perl if they wanted,
which is like having a macro-language built in.
Thought about embedding REXX, TCL or Perl in your newsreader as a macro
language? REXX is really easy for people to pick up, and it's designed
for this type of thing.
Back when I used to use XOVER, I hated it, because it lacks these headers:
X-Proxy-User, X-No-Archive, Path, User-Agent, X-Newsreader
X-HTTP-UserAgent, X-Mailer, NNTP-Posting-Host, Newsgroups
Newsgroups would have been useful. Has "xref" usually though.
As far as the speed of batch downloading full articles, have you tried
issuing a _Bunch_ of Article_XXXX commands in _One_ send buffer,
...and then waiting for the results only after that ?
Nope, didn't try that. Makes sense though.
For some reason that's much faster than
issuing Article_XXXX commands one at a time.
I could see it, it has to do with the in <-> out process cycle, there
was a big stink about it some time ago regarding how news servers talk
to one another.
I've done a lot of timing tests, and XOVER was slow, I thought,
plus not all NNTP servers have it, e.g. News.ReadFreeNews.NET:119
True. The implementation I have could easily be ported (now that I've stripped
out the News::NNTP stuff and just rolled my own..)
In fact, anything that implements an iterator could be used. (I was thinking
some day of having a "shell command" back end for it, so one could "plumb" it
in to any set of commands that produce tab files and articles. You could "view
news" by running sql queries or whatever this way.
You mentioned that you don't like GUIs... What editor do you use, VI ?
X, my newsreader, mostly just dumps stuff to UFT-16 encoded .TXT files,
it relies heavily on Visual_Studio_2005 and VBA macros for the rest.
Visual_Studio is a kick_ass editor, I think.
I use vim these days, but I was a die-hard emacs fan at one point. I really,
really HATE the way you have to play musical editors. (In fact, it's one
of the things I don't like about web browser textarea interfaces)
X uses Direct_Draw to scroll logs,
repainting up to 50 times per second if need be,
...but zero times per second when there's no activity.
Thats where it's quite a challenge to do terminal stuff, you have to think
about the "refresh" cycle. Terminals (even xterms..) have a baud rate, each
character is sent through a serial interface and then "interpreted" by the
terminal (or xterm). Really makes even basic things like scrolling difficult.
(I don't use curses, since I want it to run on an old machine I've got that
doesn't have the curses module, makes it a bit easier to install)
The good news is, you could use a terminal program from one computer, detach
(using 'screen') and then pickup from a different computer without shutting
anything down. This is handy for work or working from a friends house to your
computer.
Command line interfaces are really, really nice to have as well. Especially
for features you don't often use, no need to memorize keystrokes or navigate
through endless lists of menus, just hitting ':tag-<tab>' will show
all commands beginning with 'tag-' (in this case, commands related to
tagged articles)
The other very Windows_Specific stuff is
the UTF-8/16 routines and Outlook's MLang,
a COM/DLL that handles all kinds of encodings and charsets.
Yea, thats an area I'm a bit concerned about, the UTF crap. In my opinion...
any language that can't be represented in 7 bits is broken, NOT the
software. 2^7 really ought to be enough to represent everything. Languages
that have more then that many characters should consider stripping some of them
out. :-)
UTF stuff would probably depend on which terminal the person is using, but,
I suspect there are a number of warts in Lucy that would crop up if I were
to test it out for UTF.
Jamie
--
http://www.geniegate.com Custom web programming
guhzo_42@xxxxxxxxx (rot13) User Management Solutions
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