Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew
From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: re-hmmm
Message-ID: <778NX2w163w@mantis.co.uk>
Date: 20 Feb 91 14:17:05 GMT
References: <9102192241.AA03111@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu>
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.
Lines: 45
Approved: news@mantis.co.uk

newton@ARISTOTLE.ILS.NWU.EDU (David Newton) writes:
> The rest of you stupid, juvenile, would-be "hackers"--I'll respond in kind.
> Get a fuckin' life.  Surely you MUST have better things to do than try to
> impress people.

Nobody is seriously claiming that the self-moderation feature of alt.hackers
is an means of keeping out non-hackers. Nobody is claiming that it is a means
to impress people.

Take a look at this word, and tell me if you've ever seen it before:

                                  j o k e

No?

Well, I suppose there's no hope of getting you to understand... You're
clearly _not_ a hacker, so why don't you go away and read something else?
You've said yourself that you don't like this newsgroup. What keeps you here?
Are you some kind of netnews masochist?

And now for the hackery...

I seem to be able to fritter away almost limitless amounts of time on Usenet.
In order to avoid wasting unreasonable amounts of time at work, I set up some
UUCP and news software on my machine at home.

Now, being a low-paid hacker, I don't have a modem and can't afford one. I
decided, therefore, to set up my feed on floppy disk.

I wrote myself a set of programs to munge the UUCP spool files. The machine
here (mantis.co.uk) is a DOS box running Waffle; the machine at home
(mwowm.mantis.co.uk) is an ST running Mercury UUCP. Both have different ways
of mungeing the standard UNIX UUCP spoolfile names to be eight letters plus
an extension.

As well as mungeing the name, I made the program strip and re-write a few
header lines; it turned out that it was easier to bypass Mercury's BATCH
program completely, and read the files which Mercury had spooled in its
internal format and convert them to standard UUCP batch files.

So now I have my own news site, with a GEM newsreader, and as much bandwidth
as I can fit in my pocket.


mathew.