[geeks] News help

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 06:19:25PM +0100, Chris Byrne wrote:
> I was thinking of something along those lines myself. I saw something like
> that idea done once by some emacs god. He had several different servers set
> up and could fetch a message from any of them, read it, and it would ignore
> that same message when he updated his news from another server. I have no
> idea how he did it except that it was coded in as part of his EMACS
> operating environment. He was one of those guys who generally only used two
> programs, bash and EMACS.

I'm thinking he probably just grabbed some existing hashing code,
translated it to elisp,  and kept a list of read hashes.  If you are
familiar with elisp (which I'm not really), it probably isn't that hard.

However, I would rather do a full blown gui program.  Probably in python,
but a C/Guile combination has increasing appeal.  The problem is that
every program I've been able to find since Netscape 3 has bugged me
endlessly, but it isn't practical to try and use Netscape 3 in this day
and age, plus there were a few things it wouldn't do (like authorize
messages for moderated groups).
 
> This same guy also built a computer controlled weather reciever that would
> give him meteorological info as email (this was a few years ago before you
> could get websites to do the same thing).

Cool.  I have a single board computer here (well, at home reall since I'm
now at work) which has some sensors on it, plus plenty of avialable
serial lines.  It doesn't seem to work, but I think I've arranged to get a
replacement around new years.

It is meant to be part of a robot kit (which I also have all the parts
for), but the robot is only about the size of a Sun 411 case.  I can't
figure out what I would want with a robot that small.

So, I'm thinking that I could either make my own Lisp workstation out of
it with a serial port on some of the IO lines, or perhaps I could set it
up as a data collection device.  Haven't figure out what to do with it
yet...

One interesting thing about is that it has no OS at all.  You flip a
switch, to download code to it's memory space, the flip the switch back to
reset the CPU.  

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd