[General Topics] Menneisyys:
4pda.ru, in addition to XDA-Developers, is one of the best sources of Windows Mobile-related hacking information. It was in there that, for example, I’ve found the hacked, 1023 TAO Midlet Managers, on which, then, Risidoro has built on his latest (1036) TAO releases at XDA-Dev, along with a lot of other info never published in English. Myself not being a businessman traveling in Russia all around or watching / reading / listening to Russian-language literature / music / movies, I would never have thought I would find my knowledge of Russian useful in my professional life – now I have :)

Should you not know Russian, I’ve created a tool that greatly helps in reading 4pda forums. For this, you will, of course, want to use Babelfish to translate these pages. Just enter the URL (in the case of the MIDlet thread, http://4pda.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=1333 ) in the Translate a Web page text field, select “Russian to English” in the lower “Select from and to languages” drop-down list and click the bottom Translate button.

After a while, you’ll notice that not everything is displayed – after about 100 kbytes of source HTML, posts are cut and you can’t make the final part displayed in any way, as can also be seen in THIS screenshot (see the “<<<<<<<< snip >>>>>>>>” at the bottom – it shows Babelfish won’t translate more).

The wrong approach you can take in these cases are as follows:

you cut and paste the text in Babelfish in the upper, direct text input field. It’s a very awkward and slow solution because you can only have some 2-3 kbytes of text translated at one time

save the original Web page to your local PC, edit its HTML source (cut out the first, say, half of the original page) and upload the edited version to any Web server so that it becomes visible to Babelfish. This also involves a lot of additional work.

Unfortunately, the print mode (clicking the “Версия для печати” link, which takes you HERE – HUGE page!) doesn’t help much. Much as it (to some degree) cleans up the code and removes the, for most quick translations, unnecessary stuff (avatars, number of posts, links to other pages, ads), it returns the article as one big file, which is, with longer threads, well above 100 kbytes. This means you won’t see most of the newer posts translated either.

The right approach, of course, is using my tools ;-). I’ve created a program that automatically downloads the contents of an entire thread, sliced to small HTML pages named following an easy-to-autogenerate-links-to naming convention. What is more, I also release the source (available HERE) for it so that you can see how it works. You’re also free to modify it to download other forum content in a much more Bablefish (and, for that matter, also PDA/ mobile) -friendly format.

Usage

if you haven’t already done so, install a Java environment on your desktop PC (free JDK download HERE)

download the above-mentioned source file

enter the “javac ForPDAruSimplifier.java” command in the same directory (from inside, say, Total Commander) so that the source is compiled

enter the following command:

java ForPDAruSimplifier 30 1050 1333 "4pda-"

where the parameters are as follows:

30 is pretty much fixed for 4pda.ru (but different with other sites; this is why I’ve made it an easily modifiable parameter) – the number of posts displayed on a forum page

1050 is a product of 30 and 35. 30 is the above-introduced posts-on-a-page parameter; 35 is the number of thread pages. (Now, the MIDlet thread has 35 pages.)

1333 is the number of the thread itself; it can be very easily found. For example, the 1333 for the MIDlet thread can be very easily spotted if you take a look at the URL of the thread: http://4pda.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=1333. Yes, it’s the number after “showtopic=”.

Finally, "4pda-" instructs the tool to save the target files with the “4pda-“ filename prefix. You can use any other prefix.