rweir's Journal: Lameness what?

I tried to post the following as a reply to this message. Originally it was just the command line and the count undeerneath it, but the lameness filter decided I was unworthy. Here is the story of my journey to defeat the lameness filter:

Hmmm...

mv a m bb 1 ba
abcde fgh ijkl mno pqrs t
15 key strokes, 0 mouse clicks.

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Goddammit.

Well, now I have to fill in this space to try to get the lameness filter to stop complaining. I'm not sure what else there is to say, however, so I'm just going to have to continue talking crap like this.

Dear God it's still complaining. Has anyone look ed through the Slashcode source and figured out what the ratio of `junk characters' to plain text triggers this error? It would be interesting to know, but I'm too lazy to look for myself right now.

Arrgggghhh. We won't it let me post? I've been a good boy, my Karma is `Totally Excellent, D00d!', I've only ever got one Troll moderation against me (and I still dispute that one). The funny part is, I'm writing off-topic drivel to get around the lameness filter.

Mommy, why won't Slashdot let me post? My point (if you can remember that far back) was good, and my intentions honest. And now I'm reduced to writing paragraph after paragraph of crap, in some vain attempt to get my message posted. I don't even care about my message now, I just want to defeat the lameness filter.

How about I tell you about my day? I got up, drank a huge cup of coffee, got on the bus, came to Uni, found my friends, then came down to this lab to work. Of course, I had to tcheck Slashdot first, and now I've wasted 15 minutes trying to post my bloody message.

That lameness filter really doesn't like me. It doesn't like me at all.

I've managed to get a +1 bonus, without any blatant Karma-whoring, and this is how I'm repaid? I metamod most days, I use my moderator points wisely, try to stay away from the God-like Overrated and Underrated mods, and now I can't even post a pointless message.

I'm tired...I'm so very, very tired. I just want to post this message, so I can go do something useful. How are `^' junk characters anyhow? What sort of ASCII pr0n can someone come up with using only a single character?

Please Slashdot, please, let me post! I should sell the movie rights to this: lonely teen tries to post an Interesting and Insightful[0] message to Slashdot, only to be thwarted by the evil supervillan `Lameness Filter'. His heart is good tho, and he is finally victorius!

Are there any non-MPAA production companies out there who would like to buy my story: it has all the important elements of a hit. Action, adventure, friendship, and pending Natalie Portmans' availability, perhaps even romance.

And still I toil...Look upon my works and dispair, or somesuch. Bloody oath this is getting on my nerves. I swear, Taco, I'm not posting ASCII art! I'm just trying to point out something mildly interesting, to share a little of myself with the world.

That's it. I'm going to find a way to make someone pay for this. I'm going to *kill* you! Kill you all! /me begins laughing maniacally.

Ok, now I'm just going to post stuff from this age to fill in space, alright?

Important Stuff:

• Please try to keep posts on topic.
• Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
• Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
• Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
• Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate,
• Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)

Hmmm...where's GiS gone, by the way? It was a good way to waste time every now and then. It also gave me hope: if guys this geeky can get hitched, maybe there's hope for us all. Tho, I don't have any stock options, or a pile of cash from the Andover buyout, but still...

Fine then, how about big quotes?
The 10th time is something like this:

                          Given directory foo with the following files:
                          a.txt
                          1.hlp
                          bb.doc
                          123.wpd
                          memo to smith
                          lunch meeting
                          dog.jpg
                          cat.gif
                          homepage.html

                          Move cat.gif, "memo to smith", bb.doc, and 1.hlp to directory bar.

                          In a gui, you hold the ctrl key down and it takes about 7 clicks total. From the command line, there's not much you can do to make it fast since the files have nothing in
                          common.

                          This comes up pretty frequently for end users. For sysadmins the story is different, but most end users don't have files that lend themselves to regular expressions or
                          something that makes the cli efficient. The file names and contents are almost random, so there's no efficient way to group them.

Er, how about poems?
title: My love...
author: Corwin Corey Amber

  Were I to cup your cheek
  Within my hand,
  And warm my frigid flesh
  Upon your skin,
  I wonder... would you
  Open up your heart
  Enough to let a part of me
  Creep in?

Nice one, eh?

I conceded defeat and changed from `^'s under the keystrokes, to `l's. Now
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

Please Slashdot, let me post:-(

How about if I switch from `l's to [a-z]? Let's give it a go.

That doesn't help. Maybe if I paste in some more text they'll let me post?

Here's RFC 1149, for your viewing pleasure.

Network Working Group D. Waitzman
Request for Comments: 1149 BBN STC
                                                                                                                        1 April 1990

      A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

Status of this Memo

      This memo describes an experimental method for the encapsulation of
      IP datagrams in avian carriers. This specification is primarily
      useful in Metropolitan Area Networks. This is an experimental, not
      recommended standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Overview and Rational

      Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low
      altitude service. The connection topology is limited to a single
      point-to-point path for each carrier, used with standard carriers,
      but many carriers can be used without significant interference with
      each other, outside of early spring. This is because of the 3D ether
      space available to the carriers, in contrast to the 1D ether used by
      IEEE802.3. The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance
      system, which increases availability. Unlike some network
      technologies, such as packet radio, communication is not limited to
      line-of-sight distance. Connection oriented service is available in
      some cities, usually based upon a central hub topology.

Frame Format

      The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in
      hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff.
      The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier.
      A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The
      bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and
      paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A
      typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed.

      Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the
      datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable
      form.

Discussion

      Multiple types of service can be provided with a prioritized pecking
      order. An additional property is built-in worm detection and
      eradication. Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss
      of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-
      regenerating. While broadcasting is not specified, storms can cause
      data loss. There is persistent delivery retry, until the carrier
      drops. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be
      found on logs and cable trays.

Security Considerations

      Security is not generally a problem in normal operation, but special
      measures must be taken (such as data encryption) when avian carriers
      are used in a tactical environment.

And now I'm back to using too many junk characters.

How about the story of the first test of this RFC?:
The informal report from the RFC 1149 event.

          Finally, rfc 1149 is implemented! On saturday 28th of april 2001, the worlds very first rfc 1149 network was tested. The weather was quite nice, despite being in one of the most rainy
          places in Norway.

          The ping was started approximately at 12:15. We decided to do a 7 1/2 minute interval between the ping packets, that would leave a couple of packets unanswered, given ideal
          situations. Things didn't happen quite that way, though. It happened that the neighbour had a flock of pigeons flying. Our pigeons didn't want to go home at once, they wanted to fly
          with the other pigeons instead. And who can blame them, when the sun was finally shining after a couple of days?

          But the instincts won at last, and after about an hour of fun, we could see a couple of pigeons breaking out of the flock and heading in the right direction. There was much cheering.
          Apparantly, it WAS our pigeons, because not long after, we got a report from the other site that the first pigeon was sitting on the roof.

          And finally, the first return pigeon arrived. The packet was carefully removed from the leg, unrolled and scanned. After manually verifying the OCR and correcting the few mistakes
          (gocr is quite good, but it *did* have problems recognizing F's in my end), the packet was accepted as a valid packet, and there was much cheering about what we saw:

          64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms

          The remaining pigeons arrived simultaneously. Two of them didn't have any IP packets, though, it turned out that things had been so busy at the other end that they forgot to shut the
          pigeon cage, and the remaining two pigeons escaped without an IP packet. There was only six return pigeons, thus we got four ping replys, with ping times varying from 3211 to 6389
          seconds. I guess this is a new record for ping times...

          The implementation was declared a success. Now, we're waiting for someone to write other implementations, so that we can do interoperability tests, and maybe we finally can get
          the RFC into the standards track...

Still too many junk characters. Where? I just don't understand.

How about the latest KC KDE:
                                              Kernel Cousin KDE #44 For 9 Oct

                                                            Editor: Zack Rusin

                                                By Leif Jensen and Zack Rusin

Table Of Contents

    * Standard Format
    * Text Format
    * XML Source
    * Introduction
    * Threads Covered

        1. KMail Roadmap
        2. 14 Oct - 15 Oct (11 posts) New GPG frontend
        3. KDE 3.0.4 out
        4. Kopete rework almost finished
        5. 17 Aug - 18 Aug (3 posts) Qt GStreamer bindings announced
        6. Dev. Newsflash

Introduction

Welcome to KC KDE!

After a short break KC is back. Juergen, who was the editor during the last
several months left us (please, remember to thank him for all the work he has
done) and in between coding, finishing my degree and trying to find a job, I
will be doing my best to fill the void. I decided to add a new section to our
KC entitled 'Dev. NewsFlash' in which I'm planning to present information that
somehow relates to KDE, like XFree86 news - in this KC you can read about Keith
Packard's XCursor and Jim Gettys' RandR extensions. Our main topic this week is
KMail. Without further ado:

    * Big, big changes coming to KMail near you
    * New GPG frontend
    * KDE 3.0.4 out
    * Kopete rework almost finished
    * Qt GStreamer bindings announced

We hope you enjoy this week's summaries!

1. KMail Roadmap
Topics: KMail
  Archive Link: "KMail Roadmap"
Summary By Zack Rusin

As some of you may already know, KMail is undergoing a major rewrite - I'll do
my best to summarize what's going on with KMail.

First of all we have three KMail development branches

    * HEAD - which is frozen for 3.1 and to which only bugfixes are committed
    * kroupware_branch - created and managed by our friends from the Kroupware
        project
    * make_it_cool - which is devoted to fixing all architectural problems in
        KMail, while at the same adding some new and exciting stuff, managed by Don
        Sanders, myself and Aaron Seigo

So what does it all mean for KMail? Well, here's a quick summary of things that
either are already present in one of the branches or expected to show up very
soon:

    * VFolders - Don Sanders is working on implementing virtual folders, or as
        Don likes to call them "search folders". Big portions of it are already
        finished in make_it_cool.
    * Reworking dialogs and GUI - Aaron J. Seigo became the GUI maintainer for
        make_it_cool branch and he's planning to switch dialogs to use Qt Designer
        and make numerous GUI improvements in this branch.
    * Displaying custom headers - code already present in make_it_cool, Aaron
        will be working on the GUI for it.
    * System-tray notification - already present in make_it_cool, Ryan Breen did
        a great job, after reviewing his code he told me "my next goal, aside from
        whatever cleanup needs to be done, is to play around with the old passive
        popup notification patch that Richard Moore had kicked around a while ago.
        I would like to add expand the old patch so passive notifications
        (containing sender and subject) pop up from the systray icon on new mail."
        Great work, Ryan.
    * New mailing list handling code - you'll be able to subscribe, unsubscribe,
        get help, goto archives and do all kinds of funky stuff. The mailing list
        held in the folder will be detected automatically. I'm working on that and
        it should be in make_it_cool sometime this week.
    * HTML/RichText/Vim composers in KMail - Mickael Marchand (KVim author) coded
        the initial KTextEditor support for KMail. In the coming weeks I will
        expand KTextEditor interfaces to support rich text editing features and
        with the help of KOffice developers I will create an advanced KTextEditor
        component similar in behavior to KWord. Just imagine seeing the quoted text
        colored the same way the KMail reader windows colors it, while being able
        to embed images right into the text and of course composing HTML mails *
        cough* never ever do that though *cough* ;). It will go into make_it_cool.
    * KMail as KPart - most of you probably saw recent announcements of Kaplan, a
        completely plugin-based PIM application embedding KMail (you are free to
        choose what plugins Kaplan will embed - address book, notes, KMail, etc.)
    * Cached IMAP support - our friends from the Kroupware project have it
        working in kroupware_branch. Finally, you won't have to download the same
        emails from the IMAP server each time you want to read them.
    * KOrganizer integration - we have two approaches for this one - in
        make_it_cool we let applications like Kaplan handle it. In
        kroupware_branch, guys from the Kroupware project integrated KOrganizer
        right into KMail

Besides those changes, don't forget that an incredible amount of bugfixes goes
into KMail HEAD on a daily basis. Remember to visit us on the KMail mailing
list and let Ingo, Marc, Carsten, Michael and the people already mentioned
above know how much you appreciate their work.

By now you probably wonder how those branches are being synchronized,
considering that at the moment they contain almost completely different email
clients. Well, developers are spending a large amount of time merging and
porting changes from respective branches to the others. Stephan Kulow does a
fantastic job merging patches from HEAD to make_it_cool (thanks a lot Stephan,
I really appreciate it), I'm merging changes from HEAD to kroupware_branch and
others are helping us in whatever ways they can (thanks Aaron, Karl-Heinz,
Kalle and Daniel).

All in all, we are all very excited and hopefully you will enjoy the next
version of KMail as much as we enjoy working on it right now.

2. New GPG frontend
14 Oct - 15 Oct (11 posts) Archive Link: "New GPG frontend"
Summary By Zack Rusin

y0k0 made an announcement on kde-devel mailing list saying: " I am actively
developing a GnuPG frontend for KDE :Kgpg (http://kgpg.tripod.com). I think it
could be nice to have it included in a kde package (kdenetwork for example), as
several user asked for it. I don't know who is making the decision, so i am
asking here. "

A couple of people responded. Carsten Pfeiffer said " IMHO a gpg frontend for
managing keys is very much needed in KDE. Maybe you want to develop it in
kdenonbeta for a start, to let it mature? " Piot Szymanski asked : " Isn't
geheimnis a better one than kpgp? And AFAIR it works with kde3...
(geheimnis.sf.net). " But the developers agreed that Geheimnis is far from a
usable state and it seems that y0k0's Kpgp will become the default KDE PGP
handler in a near future.

3. KDE 3.0.4 out
  Subject: "KDE 3.0.4 out"
Summary By Leif Jensen

For those not testing the KDE 3.1 beta full-time, there is a new release in the
3.0 series to upgrade to. The new KDE version 3.0.4 includes two security fixes
an added translation to Basque and numerous smaller improvements as well.

The security fixes affect the personal file sharing utility kpf and the
kghostview postscript and pdf viewer. Advisories were released, and users
should avoid these programs until installing the upgrade.

So go to the mirrors or to your distribution's site and enjoy the latest stable
version of KDE!

4. Kopete rework almost finished
  Subject: "Kopete rework almost finished"
Summary By Zack Rusin

As some of you may know, Kopete (http://kopete.kde.org) is the new KDE
multi-protocol instant messager. A new version 0.5 is almost ready to be
released.

Continuing the work started for version 0.4 to cleanup the internal API, Kopete
went through an almost complete rewrite of the contact list handling for this
version. A lot of other things changed and improved as well. The upcoming 0.5
release of Kopete supports the following protocols: Aim (Toc and Oscar,
although Oscar is still a work-in-progress for this release), ICQ, Jabber, MSN,
IRC, Gadu-Gadu, and WinPopup, while work on the Yahoo protocol is finally
progressing as well. The Oscar and Yahoo plugins are expected to be ready for
general use in the next Kopete release.

So please checkout, compile, test Kopete and report all problems to us (http://
mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kopete-devel) .

Also, If you use the Gadu-Gadu protocol, KDE, know C++ and would like to become
the new maintainer of the Gadu-Gadu plugin, please email me (mailto:
[e-mail]) because I'm having serious problems finding enough time to work
on it nowadays.

5. Qt GStreamer bindings announced
Topics: Multimedia
17 Aug - 18 Aug (3 posts) Archive Link: "Qt GStreamer bindings announced"
Summary By Zack Rusin

As some of you may know GStreamer (http://www.gstreamer.net) is a development
framework for creating applications like media players, video editors,
streaming media broadcasters and so on. GStreamer will be the core of the new
multimedia architecture on GNOME desktop environment.

Thanks to the work of Tim Jansen it looks like GStreamer has a good chance of
becoming a part of KDE desktop. In his email to kde-multimedia mailing list Tim
said:

        I have written wrappers for GStreamer (http://gstreamer.net). Most classes
        and functions have been translated 1:1 to C++/Qt. This should be almost
        everything that you need to write GStreamer applications with a Qt'ish
        feeling. You can find the code in KDE CVS, kdenonbeta/gst (http://
        webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenonbeta/gst).

Thomas Vander Stichele, one of GStreamer developers was one of the first to
respond saying: " This is great news ! You made my day ;) I have been thinking
lately about how we can interact better with KDE developers and discuss the
possibility of using GStreamer as the multimedia framework for both KDE and
Gnome applications, and having actual code that shows GStreamer from a KDE
point of view is the first step ! So I'm really happy. "

6. Dev. Newsflash
  Subject: "Dev. Newsflash"
Summary By Zack Rusin

    * XCursor in XFree86 CVS - XCursor is a new XFree86 extension written by
        Keith Packard. Its sole purpose is to provide a colorful, animated and
        transparent pointer to your desktop.
    * RandR extension - the famous Jim Gettys got his RandR extensions included
        in XFree86 CVS. RandR allows one to change the resolution and depth of your
        X-server without having to restart it. Hamish Rodda already wrote a
        KControl module to control RandR, for a very early screenshot of his work
        look here (http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/~meddie/patches/randr.png) .

Still too many junk characters. Well, I must say, the lameness filter is certainly helping here. It's improving the quality of the discussion immensely, and keeping me on topic and non-flamey.