🚀 go-pugleaf

  - hi; in dipspc article, <1191428399snz@nospam.demon.co.uk>,
            pete@nospam.demon.co.uk marvelled [0]:
>                    "ppint. at IMT" writes:
>>        pete@nospam.demon.co.uk observed & enquired:
>>>                  "ppint. at IMT" writes:
>>>>  pete@nospam.demon.co.uk up and announced (in parts):
>>>>>
>>>[snip utf-8 stuff]
>>>>>Off to investigate Unicode now...
>>>>>
>>>>	- that took me a bit by surprise, that did - and then it
>>>>	wasn't possible to connect to demon by dial-up a] reliably,
>>>>	b] on 08440416662, c] on 08440996662, and/or any other way
>>>>	from 015395-624xx and/or 01524-3821xx for...
>>>>	                 [it still isn't :-((]
>>>
>>>I trust it's better now?  Since I came back from hols (which is 
>>>my excuse for the tardy response) things here seem to be back to 
>>>"normal" re: authentication and routing.
>
>How suddenly things change...  I haven't been able to get through 
>to any number I've tried between 0800 and 1800 (from 0118979xxxx). 
>Methinks I'll take a visit to www.demon on the XP box and check 
>that the SDU numbers haven't been changed while I wasn't looking.
>
>>	- ummm; from 01524-3821xx i can connect via 08440416662 to
>>	anchor-du-22, 23 or 24 (iirc) approximately one dial-up in
>>	two; the other attempts give what i believe to be the sig-
>>	nal for "engaged" or "line busy"; this is not entirely sat-
>>	isfactory, but is a *vast* improvement;

	- for approx. four days now, war1-du[32,33,34] 've all been
	responding ok to being dialled from 01524-3821xx, and i've
	not seen a trace of "britain's favourite butter" - but who
	knows what tomorrow may bring?
>>
>>	- from 015395-624xx i cannot of late reliably comment:

	- i'm beginning to believe the 56k modem got fried at the
	same time as whatever-it-was-that-happened-to-i-m-t-at-home;
	i hope not, and i'll try swapping some more stuff around -
	though i suspect the 1,200 modem won't work with demon's du
	gear these days...

	- if i should need a new modem, i s'pose it'll be time to
	bite the bullet & move to broadband - is anyone actually
	using ka9q/pcoak/snews successfully with broadband out there
	in the big wide world?

	- anyway, neither positive nor negative experience to report
	from 015395-624xx, through lack of working gear.

>>	paypal & other sites that use procedures 1.90 gpl arachne
>>	cannot [- yet? -] handle.)
>
>Think I read somewhere recently that there was a newer version of 
>Arachne available.  Not that is will necessarily solve the https: 
>issues, but even if it did most websites these days are not usuable 
>over a narrowband dialup.

	- *nods* but if i need to buy a new modem to use dial-up,
	i suspect i may as well move to experience the delights of
	broadband - if i can...
>
>[..]
>[utf-8 stuff]
>>>>	- um, any update on the ease (or otherwise) of tackling
>>>>	this [] awaited with interest (but i cannot promise bated
>>>>	breath).
>>>
>>>Still "work in progress"[].  I might get to take a look this w/e 
>>>and see how simply ignoring the top 8 bits of the Unicode char 
>>>works (or most likely doesn't...)
>>
>>	[..] an occasional dribblet of news, or else the periodic
>>	"nothing yet" from time to time... ;-)
>
>Well.  There is a teensy-weensy problem: the Unicode characters 
>were (I thought) 16-bit, but it appears that they are getting 
>wider than that.  But no matter; even 64K characters are beyond 
>the capability of DOS -- where we have only 256 at a time :-(
>
>However, all is not lost.  I've thrown together some ugly^H^H^H^H
>elegant code which pretends that "charset=UTF-8" is "charset=ISO-
>8859-1" (which is I guessed what most of us Eurotypes are interested
>in) and mapped the common Unicode punctuation code points (U+2000 to 
>U+206F) to the nearest ASCII displayable equivalent.  Everything 
>else gets mapped to an inverted question mark ('�' or U+00BF).  
>Seems to work, where "work" is relative rather than absolute :)

	- "it's doing something, captain - but we're not entirely
	sure what..." - ?

>At least it renders the article slightly more readable, and 
>consumes only a few hundred bytes of memory.  If there is anyone 
>maintaining the JLW Snews (are you listening, John?) who would 
>like to see my code with a view to implementing it, just let me 
>know. [My Snews is based on an earlier GeK version and is so 
>different from the JLW one that this task might not be as 
>straightforward as a copy&paste job...]
>
>>>>	- your next task, "should you choose to accept it", is to
>>>>	identify the simplest way of allowing the use of regexps
>>>>	in the news kill file... *g*
>>>
>>>Which version of NET are you using?  I'm using the latest 
>>>official GremNOS here, and notice that my news kill file contains 
>>>regexps -- well, the simplified regexps that wildmat() handles 
>>>anyway like '*', '?' and '[...]' sets.  Seems to work for me.
>>>
>>	- i am, i believe, using pplt_03d.zip (unzipped), kindly
>>	crafted for me because some lowlife's taken to targeting
>>	postmaster at my d[e,o]m[o,(ai)]n...
>
>Ah yes -- I remember now.
>
>>	       - occasionally hundreds of time a day.
>> 
>>	- it certainly gives the impression of not understanding
>>	regexps to the extent that, by contrast, work in mailkill.
>>	  most recently, i've been a little dismayed to discover
>>	that trolls & spammers placing an extra space in between
>>	the From: and the overt poster is sufficient for them to
>>	evade all my news killfile rules testing this line. :-(
>
>AFAICR the main restriction is that news killfile entries cannot 
>start with a regexp -- the first character must be 'a' to 'z' 
>(not sensitive to case).  FWIW here are a few examples from my 
>killfile:
>
[snipped, but retained in another place]
>
>Note the lack of <space> after the colon; spaces or tabs will be
>gobbled up with the '*'.

	- point. i had been simply copying From: lines from the
	headers of persistent offenders' news articles, so their
	white spaces were carried forwards. [quick shuffle around]
	that should fix _that_. 

>Note too that "keep" [!] rules take precedence over "kill" rules

	- *nods* yup - the disview file is explicit wrt this;

>(thus ensuring that I still receive comp.risks postings) and that
>the order in which keep/kill rules are specified does not matter.
>
>HTH,
>
	- yes, immediately - thanks; and your phraseology in some
	of your other rules may well prove useful in the future.

	- now all i have to do is work out how to survive a year
	in which no first years'll've been able to see IMT for at
	least the first month of the academic year, even if they'd
	heard/seen notice of it; nor gain safe and unencumbered
	access to the shop, and they had noticed it in any case...

	(well, there are a few other things i need to be doing; but
	most of them are minor trifles by comparison. and i should
	take some lps, and a couple of cd transfers i just happen to
	've come across, over to blades street tonight [or tomorrow
	night] before i drive home, too - but that should be simple
	enough. getting derek to understand he needs to look after
	the lps, though - that's a whole different kettle of fish.)

	[0] - thanks again for finding world enough, and time to help; 

	- love, ppint.
	  [the address from which this was posted bounces e-mail;
	   please change the "f" to a "g" and drop the "v" if you
                      wish to cc. or e-mail me.]
-- 
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