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Wikimedia telnet interface

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Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#61

Post by cgriswald »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #32

It's case sensitive :-( That's worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia's archaic capitalization constraints, so it's neither going to be the "official" case-sensitive name of the page nor the Title case, you could very well need to do SomeTHING like_THIS to read an article.... and then it gave me the German version for some reason? I wish it had search. >>> easybcd easybcd Sorry! Could not fetch "easybcd" for you. N…

Interestingly, the first character doesn't seem to matter. "easyBCD" and "EasyBCD" return the same results. And for some things all lower case appears to work:

"USB", "uSB", "usb", "Usb" all work, "usB" does not. I agree that case sensitivity is pointless here.

> and then it gave me the German version for some reason?

It probably associated your location with Germany. It gave me the English version.

Try:

:use en.wikipedia.org

> I wish it had search.

My first lookup (which I've already forgotten) gave me "results" but it could have been a disambiguation page.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#62

Post by nullc »

Much faster than the web interface. Even over Tor! The fast disconnections are a bit lame, would be a bit better if it used curses so that it would start scrolled up.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#63

Post by nickpsecurity »

salgernon wrote: post #49
nickpsecurity wrote: post #40

Great stuff! A bit like the old BBS days albeit not as great an interface. Someone with a sniffer should see what traffic size is during article load on Telnet vs web version w/ cache cleared. I'm curious if it's more or less efficient. On a related note, I was digging up info on old systems. OpenVMS this time. One company that still supports terminal ("green screen") and web apps had interesting things to say. http:…

I keep reposting this comment, but whenever telnet is mentioned (fun simulation of 1980s): telnet telehack.com .... . usenet I with they had trn installed.

Naturally I did some googling on "telehack" before typing it into the terminal. ;) So, I run it and see some familiar things. Talking to Eliza is a trap. I try StarWars expecting a banner or game. What I find... the movie rendered as text art... is awesome. The level of detail and compromises they made were great.

Thanks for the link as I'm sure I'll find more interesting stuff on here. :)

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#64

Post by d-crane »

salgernon wrote: post #49
nickpsecurity wrote: post #40

Great stuff! A bit like the old BBS days albeit not as great an interface. Someone with a sniffer should see what traffic size is during article load on Telnet vs web version w/ cache cleared. I'm curious if it's more or less efficient. On a related note, I was digging up info on old systems. OpenVMS this time. One company that still supports terminal ("green screen") and web apps had interesting things to say. http:…

I keep reposting this comment, but whenever telnet is mentioned (fun simulation of 1980s): telnet telehack.com .... . usenet I with they had trn installed.

Huge telehack fan here, glad to see it get mentioned -- this immediately reminded me of TH.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#65

Post by cesarbs »

digi_owl wrote: post #39
zeveb wrote: post #26

What's funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, 'funny': it's actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates. This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware". Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher. I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the…

> It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

Spot on. I find myself frequently and increasingly frustrated with how slow most software is nowadays. Every app in my phone takes 2-3 seconds to load. Lots of websites/webapps take several seconds to load before they are readable/usable (Google Sheets is particularly offensive here).

Years ago I had a lot less hardware than today, and the software I use had less features, but I remember response times being much faster. I hope we're able to reverse this situation soon.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#66

Post by hyperion2010 »

halotrope wrote: post #30
tangue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what you're looking for is Emacs

Never got along with emacs. More of a vim person. I might misjudge of ignorance but emacs seems too heavy and complicated and this do it all attitude hits my as not very unixy.

That's because it's lispy!

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#67

Post by jandrese »

digi_owl wrote: post #45

hrmf, for some reason it disconnects me seconds after giving the prompt. Edit: Never mind, was using an overly "clever" terminal emulator...

I was immediately kicked off when using real telnet, but it worked fine with netcat (nc). I think this service gets confused if you send it the telnet control stuff.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#68

Post by digi_owl »

jandrese wrote: post #67
digi_owl wrote: post #45

hrmf, for some reason it disconnects me seconds after giving the prompt. Edit: Never mind, was using an overly "clever" terminal emulator...

I was immediately kicked off when using real telnet, but it worked fine with netcat (nc). I think this service gets confused if you send it the telnet control stuff.

Could be. but using a "dumber" terminal seems to allow the connection to last longer...

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#69

Post by pavel_lishin »

zxexz wrote: post #12
pavel_lishin wrote: post #8

I'm actually incredibly disappointed that this isn't a thing. I had a screensaver that would curl a random wikipedia page and display it - but it always looked like hot garbage, due to a bunch of extraneous stuff that I didn't want to bother filtering out. This would have been pretty great. :/

Have you not tried it? It's working great! EDIT: With the exception of the connection being closed on the Wikipedia end relatively often.

Sure, but will it be up on April 2nd?

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#70

Post by cscottnet »

dingaling wrote: post #36
ComputerGuru wrote: post #32

It's case sensitive :-( That's worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia's archaic capitalization constraints, so it's neither going to be the "official" case-sensitive name of the page nor the Title case, you could very well need to do SomeTHING like_THIS to read an article.... and then it gave me the German version for some reason? I wish it had search. >>> easybcd easybcd Sorry! Could not fetch "easybcd" for you. N…

> It's case sensitive :-( Also IP-protocol sensitive :( $telnet -6 telnet.wmflabs.org telnet: could not resolve telnet.wmflabs.org/telnet: Name or service not known No AAAA RR.

Sadly, this does seem to be a limitation of our labs infrastructure. :(
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