Subj : Nodediffs & db:s
To : Jan Vermeulen
From : Jesper S�rensen
Date : Tue Jan 07 2003 12:44 pm
JV> Have you ever done serious work on nodelists?
That depends on what you mean by serious work. I've written several nodelist
processing tools, including a flag checker, a CC utility (to "mail bomb" all
downlinks of a *C) and some half working MakeNL clones in both C++ and Java
(maybe I have some Pascal code left too?). The most recent work I did was to
write some simple scripts in Awk and Perl to convert the nodelist into SQL and
XML so I think I know what I need to know about nodelists. Do I pass?
JV> The nodelist entries have no line numbers either. Their line
JV> number is their offset in lines from the start of the list, prolog
JV> included.
That's what I meant.
JV> You get a new diff each week to update last week's nodelist. As
JV> long as you have kept your records in order (and why shouldn't you?),
JV> you move them to an auxiliary base record by record, inserting the new
JV> nodes as per the diff telling you Axx, copying where it says Cxx and
JV> skipping where it says Dxx. Then kill the old file and rename the new
JV> one to the old one's name.
It would be interesting to see you actually implementing something like that
with SQL. Do that before you tell me how easy it is.
JV> Easy, ain't it? And that has been invented only eighteen years
JV> ago. It's just come of age...
I'm not saying that it's difficult if you're only working with files, but I'm
not.
js>> If you know of a magic way to convert the nodediffs into SQL
js>> insert/update/delete commands please tell me how, but if you would
js>> try this yourself I'm sure you'd see the problem.
JV> I'm not going to look backwards, Jesper. All I can add here is to
JV> advise you to do some serious low-level programming. It's refreshing.
Low level processing of diffs is super simple but that's not what I want to do.
I want to update the nodelist in my db which I'm using from my Fidonet client
right now.
JV> Do you know there is even elegance in writing assembler?
Almost all kinds of programming have their elegance (well, maybe not VB ;-).
I've written some assembler (for Motorola 68k and Intel 8088 processors) but
that was 10-15 years ago. It has its charm but it's not very suitable for
anything "bigger" if you ask me.
The fact that I nowadays mainly use Java doesn't mean I don't know anything
about lower level languages. I use Java because I like it and because it's very
suitable for the kind of software I'm currently developing, not because it's
the only language I know.
Jesper,
[email protected]
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* Origin: Singularity/2 - Swedish Internet Backbone (2:204/255)
