World: r3wp

Having a little trouble getting AltME to work in Ubuntu Breezy.  
I'll need to go back and make a note of specifics, but double-clicking 
the icon does nothing (rwe all checked), and running from the terminal 
gives me an error.

I had that error to under Breezy and I believe some one else too 
(check the Linux group). It helped when I upgraded to Dapper

Because AltME is not visible to the googlebots, it's also not visible 
to google ads .. think of the potential income a chat room could 
earn!

No Graham, no!

I use Altme on a share partition, but between 2 Windows install. 
No problem.
Dunno with different OSs.

Altme seem to be taking much longer  to start up recently,  other 
users of  my world are noticing as well. seems to be in the world 
lookup phase

I experience that too

is somthing overloading your servers down there?  getting denial 
of service?

Nope,  not that I can see.

We are working on updates for AltME, and we really want to nail this 
dot bug.


It is hard for us to see, so anything you can tell us about it will 
help.

Your connection type and platform being key.
Mine is T1/Windows MCE


One of the key questions is, when you start up a world, AltME syncs. 
 When the bug happens (which I assume means you see no groups turn 
red), did you see it sync?

Do you see anything odd happen bellow the line that says "Rebol3 
as <name>"?

Does the progress bar (the vertical space to the left of the icons) 
fill with red?

If we can see a pattern, we can nail this.

this may not be relevant, but right now I'm on 56k because my broadband 
is down. the broadband antenna can let me ping probably 0.1% of the 
packets correctly, so I can't do anything, but AltME allowed me to 
connect anyway (amazing I think, when ping hardly works!). but everything 
of course stops right after logging in, e.g. just before syncing 
with the groups being greyed out.


I also get funny errors, such as that the "REBOL3 world doesn't exist", 
when trying to log in.

this is mostly a comment on how AltME performs on an almost dead 
connection :-)

:)

I'm still seeing you connected to Synapse chat though!

not for long :-) I'm about to close down the modem

<<When the bug happens did you see it sync?>>
Very hard to say.

You notice the effects of the bug when a group suddenly disgorges 
many old messages or when looking at the webmirror of the public 
groups.

But that may be much later than the point at which the sync went 
askew.

A not about the other big big bug...the recycle bug.  when I set 
my may messages to 100, I simply never see that bug.  I left my settings 
at over 1000 recently, and I knew it because I started seeing the 
recycle bug.  If this is true for others, we will change our defaults 
to start.

I have my settins at 1000, and I see the recycle bug once in a blue 
moon.

I usually see this happening when connecting for the first time, 
and clicking on a group area while AltME is syncing.

Yeah, I get it even when moving from group to group fast.  But when 
I say I don't see it at 100, I mean I see it zero times.  Which is 
good.

Fast event switching trigers the problem. Maybe the GC gets called 
two often in those situations.

Timing? switching groups is expensive. maybe async does not like 
to big delays?

I don't think AltME is async.

<<when I set my may messages to 100, I simply never see that bug.>>
Good tip.  I hasn't seen the recycle bug for a while.
Then, last week, I upped my message limit.
And started getting recycle crashes.
And failed to make the connection :-(

could it be a buffer overflow related to an older View bug? I've 
seen older View versions crash sometimes if a layout gets too big

might fix itself if encapped against a newer SDK

There's something deep-down that is wider than View.

Run enough CGIs under Core and you'll get what seems to be the same 
sort of error.

Which is weird as each CGI is a separate incarnation (when not using 
fastCGI, anyway).

When I saw the dot bug then most of the time a lot of the groups 
were syncing correctly and there was one or two groups that just 
didn't sync completely like it got some bad packets or something.

On the Recycle bug,  I often leave my message limit at at least 1000 
I've turned it up to 5000 a couple times because messages I was searching 
for were more than 1000 messages in the past.   If I leave it at 
5000 and then don't log in for about a week then I almost always 
get a recycle bug by logging in and clicking on the first group to 
sync while it is syncing the rest of the groups.  Waiting for syncing 
to complete will usually avoid the Recycle bug.  The number of unread 
messages in the group your switching to while it is syncing seems 
to affect whether or not you see the bug, more unread messages seems 
to increase the chance that you will see it.

On the dot bug, on our desktop that's connected to the LAN by wire, 
I nearly never notice anything, then on my laptop wirelessly (weaker 
connection) it seems to just lag, then give up.


I haven't seen the recycle bug in AltME ever since I left the number 
of messages at 100.  I saw it twice in a span of several months, 
though, with it set at 500 messages.

Daniel, yeah, seems 100 is the magical number.

There shouldn't be magical numbers. After all this is computing, 
which for this case should bring deterministic behaviour.

Maybe it has to do with that text clip bug that was found mentioned 
recently ?

(when the text is larger than the face and has to be clipped. After 
many faces it lead to a crash. ... Who posted that... )

Jaime, Altme is using quantum computing methods .. so it's no longer 
deterministic!

Reichard, 

1) can you try an artificial delay in group-switching? no 'wait, 
just a big delay-loop? to test if the big delay affects networking?

2) no delay, but trigger a recycle? but create a lot of garbage which 
will likely trigger a recycle the next time?

Ideas are: 

1) timeout could create an error, leaving some resources in wrong 
state. A lot stuff in the input-buffer could trigger an buffer-overrun.

2) processing in /awake (if you use that) could not be correctly 
registered in gc. either gc misses some reference, or finds some 
reference on the return-stack which is not actually a reference. 
because the gc expects a call from a rebol-native and is instead 
called from a normal c-one.

<<There shouldn't be magical numbers.>>
Absolutely!

But there is an intractable bug that appears not be be determinate; 
or at least not amenable to reason at the mezzanine level.

The message-level hack is a useful work-around for those best by 
the bug.

Better low-level diagnostics -- so we had something better than just 
a "system crash" message -- would help.

There shouldn't be magical numbers, if you run with different data, 
and have c-level memory-bugs. Because then the memory-layout differs, 
and then the same bug hits different data. i had those bugs, perfectly 
repeatable. Disappeared when i changed the filename a bit. I guess 
different length -> slightly different memory layout. Hmm, slightly, 
sounds like an of by one in that case, or alignment?

There shouldn't -> There should

Guys...when I say "magical," I'm speaking of testing.  I can save 
our in-house testers a lot of time if I can simpy say "set one machine 
high, one machine low. and start reducing the problem."  giving them 
a number to start with saves a lot of time.

Reichart, what is the future of AltMe ?  Are you planning a new release 
in the next 6 months ?  Thx for your answer.

Yes, in fact we have been adding a lot of new features.   We have 
fileshare almost done.

thanks for simply asking.

filesharing? isn't that illegal? :-) sorry, couldn't help myself

Actually, not in a darknet.

In fact the membership aspect of Qtask and AltME protect us, but 
we have to be careful.

file sharing is different from file transfer

In response to Graham:


Yeah, I got that, and I'm saying your full of it for calling it buggy. 
 And more so, I'm saying you are mischaracterizing the issue, as 
well as what he said.  This is a pet peeve for me with you.


For the record: Carl said "they seem to work pretty well"  and they 
do!


Calling AltME buggy is simply untrue in the context, or in reply 
to what he wrote.  


It has a few bugs, but it is far form buggy.  Tomb Raider for example 
shipped with 3,000 known bugs, 280 critical crashes.  FireFox has 
more categories for bugs that AltME has bugs.  


We do agree the key bug here isn't even AltMEs, but Rebol's.  AltME 
still crashes less than any one of the other apps I run every day. 
 Thunderbird crashes twice a day on me.  I stopped using outlook 
all together.  Word has a hissy fit about 4 times a day on me.

Let the ad hominem attacks begin.