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News (17.Oct.2006) - v0.6.0 released
v0.6.0 features major feature enhancements, mainly the support
for downloading all those naughty web image galleries through
index sites providing links. The links are browsed only if they or
their description matches a given regexp keyword, so you reaally get
just what you want. Yay! Also, files can now be tagged and
viewed with keywords.
Open posts: Debian package maintainer. If you're using
PIMPPA and could maintain the Debian package, please email. As
the PIMPPA releases do not happen too often, the job would mainly
entail fixing the few naggings at bugs.debian.org. The upstream
(that is, me) is willing to fix problems that are caused
by the original source code if I'm personally informed of them.
Introsuction
PIMPPA is a tool to loot binaries from newsgroups (and ftp sites,
but the ftp support is probably deprecated). PIMPPA
tries to achieve
complete "hands free" -operation where possible. The system is best
suited
for the Connoisseur, the Collector and the Worshipper of the Mighty
Crond.
Current features
- Attempts to skip duplicates and spam before downloading actual
messages.
- Further duplicate discarding based on filenames & MD5
-checksums.
- Allows user-definable, content-based pruning scripts for even more involved discarding.
- Intelligent multipart handling, downloads only complete
postings.
- Supports multiple newsservers.
- Filename-based sorting of accepted files to proper
directories.
- Can be used to hunt known file series, extensions or
message subject patterns and skip the rest.
- Supports automatic file integrity testing and
transformation.
- Several tools and scripts for file maintenance and
viewing.
- Knowledge is kept in SQL database, making it relatively
easy for you to write your own custom scripts and utilities.
- Cronable: come back next week to check the filtered catch.
- Optional Gnome GUI (shell-use recommended).
- It's free! - GPL'ed Open Source.
Downsides (its not perfect)
- Software requirements. A bit on the heavy side.
- The GUI could be better.
- Installation and use. You might actually have to
read some of the documentation.
Download
To see whats new, check ChangeLog.
Several key functions of PIMPPA have been delegated
to external, well-performing packages. You will need
to install them before installing PIMPPA.
Required components:
- MySQL to maintain the database
(v5.0.18 or newer).
- Suck
to download newsgroups (v4.3.2 or newer).
- Uudeview to
decode the news (v0.5.18 or newer).
Optional components:
- wget for WWW
image fetching through image gallery index sites (v1.10.2 or newer
should be ok).
- fget for FTP
support. It must be patched to work with pimppa. (v1.0.3 and v1.1
can be patched).
- GNOME for GUI. PIMPPA
operates and compiles well without a GUI, though.
Documentation
Mailing lists
There's three PIMPPA-related mailing lists. Currently they have
really low or no traffic. But the more, the merrier.
- pimppa-devel
- List for those who are interested in developing pimppa.
- pimppa-leve
- About the experimental IRC fserve dl component Leverlåda.
- pimppa-users
- General discussion list for all users. Quite quiet.
Links
Other applications that might be of interest
- Binary News Reaper --
This news downloading program might be preferred
to PIMPPA. It appears to have lots of similar features
with a better user interface.
- GNUnet --
Anonymous file sharing with trust based economics.
- Freenet --
Similar to GNUnet, but coded with Java
- KLibido --
A news downloader for KDE
- brag
A commandline tool to download and decode news.
- ubh --
"Usenet Binary Harvester."
- Napnews --
Gnutella-compatible tool to leech news binaries, with
bandwidth control & multiple server support.
- GIFT --
GNU Image Finding Tool, an open source content based image
retrieval system. Imagine how nice such functionality would be
in pimppa. ;)
- imgSeek --
Another package to do content based image retrieval in
a local database. Unfortunately it doesn't usually do
semantically meaningful associations.
Contact
I encourage you to send all your ideas, thoughts and criticism to the
pimppa-users@
mailing list mentioned above, so we can discuss them.
Bug-reports, patches etc.
are most welcome and can be sent straight to the head honcho.
In any case, pour 'em in!
Email: iwronsky(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net
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