This is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this:
<Swan/+report> test to see if infoserver is echoing
messages to group +war. well all this info is probably old.
The iraqis caused an oil spill 8-10 miles long and a
couple miles wide. It's 12 times the size of that caused
by the exxon valdeez. It's not known if wells are actively
pumping into the gulf right now, or if they just dumped
stored reserves. If they're pumping at max capacity, it'll
get bigger by a factor every 3 days. in other words it
will be 13 times the size of the exxon valdeez in 3 days,
14 in 6, 15 in 9. (I realize I said that wrong). That's a
worst case. It's not possible to overstate how concerned
Bush seemed by this. I think he aged a few years last
night. the spill is not military significant, but
ecologically its a nightmare of course. There is some
concern about water problems, the oil might threaten
desalination plants. Yesterday the weather was much better
over iraq, so they set a record for the # of sorties in a
single day. 2700 I think. they launched 2 missiles at
saudi arabia today, and 7 at israel. (scuds). One hit in
israel, lightly wounding a bunch of people, killing 1. 1
person died in saudi. Patriots knocked out a whole bunch
of them. I just heard from Cheneys mouth that Bush has
something planned to deal with the oil spill. --mcneil
lehrer
An air strike was conducted against the pipeline that was the most significant contributor of the spill, however there were some other sources as well. It ended up being several times larger than the Valdez spill, a lot of it ended up on the beaches of Saudi Arabia, and it was never cleaned up, so it's still causing a lot of ecological damage.
Really? You never saw photos of all the oil-covered birds? I thought it was pretty well-known.
Also, it wasn't an air strike against the pipeline, it was the Iraqis dumping oil to prevent US marine landings (from what I heard, they were planning on setting it on fire if there were any ships there? Game-of-Thrones-style).
The air strike was to prevent further spillage:
On January 26, three US F-117 fighter-bombers destroyed pipelines to prevent further spillage into the Persian Gulf.
IRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.
Fun thing is: It's 512 bytes for everything, not just the part you typed. So this includes the command and channel, the trailing CRLF and I think when routing through different servers the server name gets stuck in there somewhere, too. Which means that a client has no idea how long the actual message is that it's going to be able to send.
Worse, because the server doesn't bounce back your own messages, most clients provide no indication that your message was cut off - it appears whole to you, but doesn't arrive in full at others' clients.
Most clients that do attempt to split long texts into multiple messages get one of these wrong:
- They miscalculate the number of bytes available for payload, because they don't check with the server's idea of their hostmask (which can change during the session e.g. due to authentication) to calculate the length of the preamble as seen on the receiving end.
- They count characters and ignore the number of bytes they actually encode to (either in the message or the preamble, or both: there are some networks like the Korean Ozinger that allow Utf-8 nicknames).
KDE's Konversation does both correctly (it also has some other nice visualizations of server/protocol-imposed limits, e.g. when you try to change the channel topic it'll color text past the server limit in red, again taking into account character and formatting code encoding).
With ircv3 the actual limit is 1024 characters, but it is has to be enabled with the capabilities negotiation extension.
Though it's 512 characters for tags, and 512 for the message.
IIRC at least znc crashes, other clients like xchat start having rendering issues and some (I think irssi) completely disregard content after the 512th byte
Comments
This is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill
An air strike was conducted against the pipeline that was the most significant contributor of the spill, however there were some other sources as well. It ended up being several times larger than the Valdez spill, a lot of it ended up on the beaches of Saudi Arabia, and it was never cleaned up, so it's still causing a lot of ecological damage.
I don't think I'd heard about this until now.
Really? You never saw photos of all the oil-covered birds? I thought it was pretty well-known.
Also, it wasn't an air strike against the pipeline, it was the Iraqis dumping oil to prevent US marine landings (from what I heard, they were planning on setting it on fire if there were any ships there? Game-of-Thrones-style).
The air strike was to prevent further spillage:
Yeah, that's what I meant -- I just didn't word it right.
ca 1991, I hadn't gotten interested in world news yet. I would've been 12ish years old.
This message seems to be way too long for IRC.
edit: I really don't get why people are downvoting this, the message appears to have at least 1298 characters.
consecutive lines from the same sender are collapsed into a single message, double spaces are where new lines should be.
Makes sense, though I don't think that's the standard log format for any client.
Explain please?
IRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.
Fun thing is: It's 512 bytes for everything, not just the part you typed. So this includes the command and channel, the trailing CRLF and I think when routing through different servers the server name gets stuck in there somewhere, too. Which means that a client has no idea how long the actual message is that it's going to be able to send.
Worse, because the server doesn't bounce back your own messages, most clients provide no indication that your message was cut off - it appears whole to you, but doesn't arrive in full at others' clients.
Most clients that do attempt to split long texts into multiple messages get one of these wrong:
- They miscalculate the number of bytes available for payload, because they don't check with the server's idea of their hostmask (which can change during the session e.g. due to authentication) to calculate the length of the preamble as seen on the receiving end.
- They count characters and ignore the number of bytes they actually encode to (either in the message or the preamble, or both: there are some networks like the Korean Ozinger that allow Utf-8 nicknames).
KDE's Konversation does both correctly (it also has some other nice visualizations of server/protocol-imposed limits, e.g. when you try to change the channel topic it'll color text past the server limit in red, again taking into account character and formatting code encoding).
Most clients don't even try at all though.
With ircv3 the actual limit is 1024 characters, but it is has to be enabled with the capabilities negotiation extension. Though it's 512 characters for tags, and 512 for the message.
Most clients will break it up into multiple messages no?
IIRC at least znc crashes, other clients like xchat start having rendering issues and some (I think irssi) completely disregard content after the 512th byte
On the receiving side, yes, but iirc xchat will break up messages on send.
Oh, I just assumed that it was multiple submits concatenated to make the log readable for a news article.
The success of the patriot missiles was a huge propaganda coup for the US. It turns out that the success rate of the missiles may have been as low as 10% or even zero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Success_rate_vs...