Not Going Crazy
I got into ARPAnet while in college at Purdue. There was no such thing as the web and http: protocol - it was telnet, ftp, and a few new things like gopher, archie, etc. And there was newsgroups. I loved the newsgroups. They have since really been replaced by web logs and news sites, but in my day they were the place to find all your questions answered, you could buy and sell anything and know that it was a decent, honest, person on the other end because they had figured out newsreaders, after all. Yes, back in the day, it was an entirely different place.
Still, I'm not ready to let go of newsgroups - so I have always tried to keep a newsreader up and going on at least one platform I was near. For the time I was working out of my home office it was
RadicalNews on NeXTSTEP which is an incredible newsreader given when it was written and the hardware it runs on. Really impressive. Then I changed jobs and started carrying my Linux notebook and started using
Pan. Not bad at all. Multi-threading meant that this guy could do things that RadicalNews just could not. It could load all the articles on the subscribed newsgroups so that I could read them on the train. This was nice since I didn't have the time to read it in my office anymore.
Then I got my iBook and started carrying it. So I needed a new newsreader on Mac OS X - none of this Classic for me. I looked at
newsreaders.com for all the OS X readers and went through them one by one. I had to be able to run in OS X natively, and needed to be able to do online as well as offline reading. While I don't mind paying for some software, a newsreader is not one of the things I was willing to pay for. It's just a little quirk about all the news reading on terminals with rn and the other Unix readers. I don't mind working on freeware/open source, so if I had to help build I was ready to do that.
After my search and playing with what passed for demos, I settled on Halime as it did all I wanted to do and had a nice icon to boot. I have been using it ever since. But when I downloaded the 1.0b1 version I noticed that it no longer seemed to be reading the articles from my newsserver. I pulled out one of the other readers I'd tried and sure enough, it looks like the server has the articles, so am I crazy or what?
I spent a day and a half recreating the subscriptions from the massive group listing, trying to fiddle with resetting the article numbers, but in the end nothing I did seemed to matter and I was beginning to think that I was crazy.
So I wrote the author and mentioned my problems. He suggested I crank up the debug level and see what it was saying. I did it and BINGO! I saw a ton of error messages - looked like one for each article header it was trying to read. Ah... I could relax. I wasn't going crazy.
Now I'm waiting for a message from the author who's been a really nice guy about other questions/issues I've had in the past. I'm guessing it's something with the newsserver that I'm using. Probably changed the length of some field or something and that's causing the problems. So I hope that soon I'll get an email about an update to fix the problem and I'll be back to reading news.