ThePanda

I have a bunch to write about a recent surge in python use for me, some of the cool things I played with, and using Python for testing weird C programs. But it is late, and I need to get to sleep soon, so I am just going to put something less harmful, and less likely to require me to figure out legal tangles.

I have been working on something involving NNTP, mostly a minor project to create a few very simple command line NNTP tools, in part so I can pipe these together and create some sort of a NNTP-IMAP bridge, and perhaps a NNTP-RSS bridge, I preffer the IMAP idea, but well this is a little more in the future. Anyways, I spent some time creating a monitor, that I am not going to post quite yet, since I want to improve it a little, and one of my pet peeves with the python lib was that it provided fairly good NNTP support, but no NNTPs support, and it is sort of hard to extend the NNTP class itself to provide NNTPs support, because <i>init</i> seems to call on a few receive methods before returning, and this leads to some problems with where to put the ssl initialization code. Now seeing as Brown’s news servers, something I use pretty frequently because of internal newsgroups, runs on SSL, this was something which was bugging me. So I sort of took the library as it existed, and modified it to do NNTPs, and these are fairly minor changes, and my version of the library is completely backward compatible with nntplibrary’s current non-ssl functionality. There’s a patch submitted on sourceforge, but seeing as that’s going to take some time I am putting a tar with both the library (nntpslibrary, so I don’t have to worry about overriding someone’s nntplibrary) and a test program which doesn’t do much, but shows the basic steps for connecting.

This code is not covered by the Creative Commons license for the blog, and is distributed as is, without waranty, under the Python 2.4 license.

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