All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Even less TPJ

pudge on 2001-03-22T15:57:44

KM writes "Out of curiosity, I went to visit the TPJ homepage to see if it had news on the status of TPJ. To my dismay I ended up seeing this message, which states "The ITKnowledge sites were shut down permanently on February 28, 2001. The content from the sites has been taken off-line and will not be made available on any other EarthWeb site." So, now not only the print version isn't available, but we can't even re-read the past issues online! If anyone knows of somewhere else where these may be online, please share.
EarthWeb--"

What about subscribers?

unimatrix on 2001-03-22T16:20:26

Well, no message has been sent out to subscribers (either via email or snail mail); and surely publishers of the Perl Journal will act responsibly when dealing with their subscribers. If it were the case, however, that TPJ has been shut down, I expect at least the electronic archives to be available, if only to subscribers.

I trust either or both of this will happen without delay.

Re:What about subscribers?

_bitwise on 2001-03-22T16:51:48

Actually, you can still get to TPJ.

http://www.tpj.com

I can still log in and read articles.

TPJ back up

perlmonkey on 2001-03-22T20:58:10

Apparently tpj.com came back up either Tuesday
or Wednesday. There is a brief TPJ dicussion
over on perlmonks also.

Response from TPJ

dredd on 2001-03-23T00:15:21

I got "official" word from TPJ, although it doesn't say much. This was included in the reply to a request for information and address change I sent in a month ago (only got the reply a week ago, give or take)

>As of Dec 26 2000, EarthWeb has announced a strategic reorganization of its
>businesses. Essentially, EarthWeb will focus on Career Solutions, and will
>shed its content business. At this moment, the status for The Perl Journal
>is unclear.
>
>Issue 19, Fall 2000, was the last issue sent out and it is not clear if
>Issue 20 will ship. As soon as there is more information available all TPJ
>customers will be notified. If the magazine is discontinued, refunds will be
>issued for outstanding subscriptions.

I thought this might happen

clintp on 2001-03-23T19:10:03

I do have a complete mirror on my hard disk made about two weeks ago using a borrowed TPJ account. This after I discovered that my account (which should have worked) no longer allowed me to log in.


But what to do with it? Putting it online somewhere is going to get someone in hot water. And I'd rather not see that happen?


Suggestions? Post a followup.

Jon Orwant is working on it...

tagg on 2001-03-24T15:14:14

I (and 49 other random subscribers of TPJ) just received a form mail from Jon Orwant - "once and hopefully future editor of TPJ" - trying to verify the accuracy of the EarthWeb subscription database. Apparently this is in preparation for "trying to find an new home for TPJ", so meybe TPJ has a future after all!

/tagg

Re:I thought this might happen

schalker on 2001-03-26T09:09:12

How did you create the mirror? Since the site is apparently still online, you could describe how to mirror this in a convenient way (LWP::UserAgent, HTTP::Cookies ?!).

Then all the subscribers could follow your instructions and everybody is happy... How does this sound?

Re:I thought this might happen

clinton on 2001-03-26T15:28:45

After talking with Someone Who Knows, I'd just like to caution that putting TPJ on the web would cause serious harm to ever seeing it revived again in some other form.

However, it's possible to mirror a site like this for your own private use. In case things go terribly wrong. Easy? I dunno. I hardly ever do things the easy way. Here's what I did:

  1. Get out a copy of ngrep, tcpdump, or whatever your favorite TCP sniffer program is. Mine is ngrep at the moment. Fire it up, capture http sessions.
  2. Surf to TPJ, log in with your browser. Go to a "secured" page somewhere.
  3. Grunge around in the captured data for the Cookie header. Cut and paste that to somewhere safe.
  4. Fire up wget and use the --header= option and attach the cookie that you squirreled away from the previous step.
  5. Fight with the shell's quoting of the special characters in the cookie.
  6. Use your favorite wget options and start the mirroring.
  7. Get a coke. Munch on a burrito.
  8. Run out of disk space because you started the mirroring in /tmp.
  9. chdir to a larger partition, start the mirroring again.
  10. Finish burrito
  11. Enjoy your local TPJ mirror.
Don't share it around though. It's YOUR mirror for your own private use. Remember, this is still copyrighted material (to hell with the "information wants to be free" propaganda). TPJ may come back but not if you make things worse.

Re:Jon Orwant is working on it...

unixdown on 2001-03-26T19:51:21

Be sure to make submit a post when they decide to start doing business again. I finally got fed up and got a full refund last Friday. Told them I'd come back when they re-introduced some compentency to The Perl Journal project. Sounds like its not far off.

Re:Jon Orwant is working on it...

pudge on 2001-03-26T21:32:20

Don't worry; as soon as we get word what is going on with TPJ, we'll publish a story.