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utf-8 regression testing
cf: http://dev.soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1115&cid=27307
See: http://www.w3.org/2004/04/uri-rel-test.html
All of the following were entered using <a href="...">>...</a>
Test 101: http://www.w%33.org/
Should be: http://www.w3.org/
Test 111: http://r%c3%a4ksm%c3%b6rg%c3%a5s.josefsson.org/
Should be: http://räksmörgås.josefsson.org/
Test 112: http://%e7%b4%8d%e8%b1%86.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Should be: http://�豆.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi porta tempus nunc, vel gravida eros. Fusce ac sapien sed elit adipiscing pharetra at vel neque. Cras consequat a nisi vitae interdum. Nulla pulvinar, nisi a varius venenatis, lorem mauris posuere nulla, sit amet venenatis enim mauris quis tellus. Fusce nec ullamcorper lorem. Proin vulputate leo sapien, sollicitudin tincidunt urna eleifend vel. Etiam eleifend nulla id leo egestas interdum. Sed dignissim mauris eget tincidunt fermentum. Sed nec felis et nisl ullamcorper gravida varius in augue. Morbi ac erat quis dolor ultricies pulvinar. Vivamus sagittis viverra leo et sollicitudin. Maecenas at vulputate tortor. Donec ipsum erat, bibendum vel viverra eu, ornare vel sem.
August Slashcode updates
Here is look at the upcoming changes in August update for Slashcode. We anticipate that this will be deploy within the next week or so, as we are finalizing updates to the subscripion plugin.
- Complete Unicode support for all but 4 byte Unicode.
- 4 byte Unicode support as html entities
- Upgrade subscripion module.
- New themes, CSS fixes, and styling of blockquotes.
- Removal of Jouranl themes as incompatible with new theme engine.
- New Zoo icons, new topic icons, and updated logos.
- Removal of most of the annoying comment and submission filters (needed to support Unicode).
- Fix broken web messages.
The majority of the work done in the past two months has been on Unicode support. The Mighty Buzzard was the point man on this endeavor, and almost single handedly bent slash to his will. The amount of code changes need to make this work was large. All of the slash Perl modules needed to be touched to add utf8 support. Our memcache processor had to be upgraded so that it would not mangle utf8. Form inputs had to be sanitized as Perl sometimes can't determine that what it reads in is a utf8 string without being told so specifically.
During our testing of utf8 we discovered many processes in slash that were deliberately breaking utf8. These all had to be tracked down and squashed. Our MySQL database in not set to handle 4 byte Unicode and would take a major change to make it comparable, so we are using html entities to handle these characters as needed. We also determined that the filter on submissions and comments were not coded with utf8 in mind. As many of these would be impossible to make utf8 friendly, we removed them. This will make most of you very happy as you will see very few filter errors from now on.
We are currently doing some ongoing testing on utf8 to make sure it works properly. Many thanks to Bytram who is heading up the QA on this. We are hoping that when we release this we do not break anything permanently.
Late in July we were given a mandate to get subscriptions working. As NCommander was taking a much needed vacation the bulk of the work fell on me. NCommander had indicated the changes we wanted to make would be relatively easy. The old slash subscription code was designed to give users that subscribe ad free pages as well as early access to stories. The majority of our community did not want subscribers to have early access to post, because it was thought that some users would abuse this functionality. Also since we do not have ads, we wanted to change the subscription length from number of pages to number of days. These two changes should have been easy to do.
The problem was that the slash subscription module was missing functionality like many of the systems that we have fixed. The PayPal payment system was missing the back end payment processing code, so although a user could pay for a subscription there was nothing to tie the completed transaction back to the website to give the user their subscription. Being PayPal this code was not straight forward to implement, and as of this writing we only have the real-time component working. The back end processor, which would catch payments that complete but fail to reach our systems due issues on redirect, is being hammered out right now by The Mighty Buzzard. It is its own little web engine in Perl that listens for PayPal transactions, verifies, then processes them.
Other subscriber bonuses were also added to the code. One of the biggest is that subscribers will not be throttled by slash's formkeys. They will no longer get the "Slow down cowboy" messages. Another bonus was already in the code and just needed to be turned on. This bonus allows the user to see their entire comment history on their info page. This was a Easter egg to me as I was unaware that it was available until I read the code. The final community requested feature was the ability to turn off the subscriber indication. This was a * that was beside a user name next to a comment. It is now a star and goes well with our new Zoo icons (see below). But the indicator status was stored with the comment at the time it was made. I had to rewrite the code so that the check would happen at display time and it would check the author of the comment to see if they are a subscriber and they do not have the hide_subscription status checked.
As work was being done on the swag store with a bunch of versions of the SoylentNews logo, we noticed that the main site logo on the Wiki was a nicer version than the one on the main site. We used the newly obtained logo source files to update all of the site logos with cleaner ones based on the Wiki logo. This also lead us to pump out two quick site themes. Bada55 and Black IcIcle are based on the two colors used in the logo on each #bada55, and #1c1c1c.
We also had some new topic icons made by user rand. We used some of our original icons, some of rand's, and some that I made, to get our new set of topic icons that are all transparent png files so they will work on the dark themes. This made our Zoo icons (Friend and Foe) look bad, so a quick trip to the internet, to find a free set of similies that would look good at 15px x 15px, fixed that issue.
So as The Mighty Buzzard would say, thank The Mighty Buzzard it you like the changes and blame paulej72 it you hate them :).
exec / SedBot2
exec now supports a reserved <startup> alias, which at the moment executes a script that triggers a sequence of aliases related to starting SedBot(2) in #Soylent and ##.
the <startup> trigger fires when the bot attempts to identify with nickserv, and like other reserved aliases can't be triggered from irc.
my intention is to make scripts to enable easy management of the current sedbot.awk script, unless FoobarBazbot returns beforehand in which case he'll be able to take the reigns.
the advantage of the <startup> alias is that if exec is disconnected temporarily, sedbot will restart when a connection is re-established.
a test was performed by pulling the network cable out of the machine hosting exec and leaving it unplugged for a while. when the cord was eventually plugged back in, exec came back up and restarted sedbot without any intervention.
https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc.php
https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc_lib.php
exec (irc bot) update
bot admins now have a little more control over scripts that are executed
to see a listing of running scripts/processes:
~ps
this will generate a list in the format:
[$pid] $shellcmd
to kill a process listed by ~ps:
~kill $pid
if the bot is restarted (~restart) or quits (~q), all processes (including any children) will be killed
bot source code is here: https://github.com/crutchy-/test
Bug #59 tests
This is fodder for testing https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/59.
Nested "blockquote" and "q" elements:
test1: zero
one two three
four five six
seven eight
nine.
Nested "blockquote" and "em" elements:
test2: zero
one two three
four five six
seven eight
nine.
exec (irc bot) new feature
if you would like to log an irc channel, you can /invite loggie.
as a backup, exec also has a logging feature.
you can /invite exec to a channel, or if you're not op, go to another channel with exec already in it and do '~join #yourchan'
then if you want to switch logging on, do '~log on'. you can switch off logging using '~log off'
logs are publicly accessible here: http://irciv.us.to/irc_logs
if you want exec to go away, do '~part' from within channel, or '~part #mychan' from any channel with exec in it
Blame the sleep deprivation^W^Wexhaustion
"At least he's a loon with balls."
"Does that make him a balloon?"
Found it hilarious when I thought of it, needs sleep badly.
irc sed
everyone uses and abuses poor ol' sedbot in irc, but currently it's only working in #soylent. its also in #test but isn't working there for some reason.
for anyone who just can't live without sedbot functionality in other channels, you can do "/invite exec" and then "~sed on" to enable (or if sedbot makes a grand entrance you can do "~sed off" to disable). if you're not a chanop, you can do "~join #chan" from any other channel with exec already in it (usually #soylent).
works similar to sedbot. doesn't do vowel replacement or regex though.
RSS/Atom feeds wiki page
Check out http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Feeds for a trial concept in article summary development.
Thanks go to prospectacle for his ideas.
Eventually feed sources will be read from here: http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Feed_sources (currently read from a file on the bot host).
For the curious:
Bot script: https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc.php
Feeds script: https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/scripts/feeds.php
Wiki script: https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/scripts/wiki.php
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
For future reference I'm going to repost my reply here. Feel free to link it whenever somebody whines in favor of Al Gore or against the joke. Instant cluebat.
Here's the reply:
Snopes just doesn't get it, neither do you, even when it's staring them and you right in the face. No, you didn't have to be there, you should be able to understand what happened.
Snopes quotes Al Gore:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
Seriously the idiots are those who can not cope with mocking "authority" when it targets someone they feel favorable towards. The idiots are those who take the humble and non-confrontational attitude of their betters (like for example Vint Cerf being extremely diplomatic to the point of upsetting some of his peers) as implicit approval of errors when instead it's simply an act to avoid boring uninteresting drama caused by politicized whores. Because this kind of shit happens all the time, most politicians could not survive without doing it.
It gets worse when their reasoning is based on falsely hurt pride caused by entrenched political groupthink with no semblance to reality or rational thought and which displays above all a total lack of knowledge of the decades of work and development, the multiple thousands of hours of several dozen people most closely involved and the billions of hours spent by other people in order to build and connect the network.
Then after all that and before a lot more two (Two! Not even only Gore!) politicians write a bill, a fucking bill, to make the inevitable "happen", and one of them shoots his mouth off as he does with everything and you can't handle the ridicule?
Gore was invited to the ARPANET anniversary celebration but wisely declined. If I recall correctly better and incomparably crucial people had already passed away from natural causes. He knows what he did and the good news is that he has a sliver of shame, not because he's better than other politicians but because he goofed so badly as to cause a lasting joke being mentioned every time he tries to speak on a related subject (and sometimes when it's unrelated as well as he deserves).
The joke is his badge of shame, it's good if you're not laughing, it's bad if you don't get it.
It was obvious what Gore was trying to do: take an incredible amount of credit he didn't deserve. Him making such statements is fact but the content of the statements are not at all factual because it would have happened anyway (thus he was not "instrumental" anything or "initiative" anything or "initiative to take initiatives" anything) and it could have been any goddamn politicians and I'll repeat myself: it wasn't just him among the politicians but those other people made no such grandiose claims, the co-sponsor didn't, those voting for the bill didn't, the people who voted the representatives into power didn't, even the people who actually "took the initiative in creating the internet" didn't make any such grandiose claims about themselves, does the point get through your skull and the skull of those who defend Gore? Can it?
