World: r3wp

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.

to avoid useless flames, can we just settle this to the fact that 
there is a *perceived* lack of development?

OK I had to look it up. New Latin, literally, to the person
1 : appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect

2 : marked by an attack on an opponent's character rather than by 
an answer to the contentions made
So I now have my word of the day.

Mike, for the record, this is a gray area.  I am in fact saying Graham 
is full of crap, but for a subjective opinion.  To actually be an 
attack of him as a person (ad hominem) I would have to say something 
about him, as opposed to about his method.  This is a rather meta-argument 
because the very thing I'm attacking is his debating skills. 


I happen to treat software as people (my own quirk), since it embodies 
the spirit of the creators.  As a result a consider some statements 
attacks.  I'm fine with a factual statement. But if I do not call 
attention to this, it becomes lore.


Gab, there is not a perceived lack of on-going development, there 
has been in fact almost no development for long stretches of time 
on AltME.  That simple.   Does not address the issue, and a disagreement 
is not a flame war.  I have too much respect for Graham to flame 
him.

if there has been development or not is not that important. i think 
that perception is much more important here. because, this also applies 
to rebol itself.

it's the perception that we need to address, because that is what 
matters. your rebolcentral would be a big step to address the problem, 
it would make people perceive rebol as alive.

Agreed.  


But if I did not engage Graham, I would be ignoring an important 
part of our relationship, which is "aside" from the point you describe. 
 


You know guys……………its OK to disagree about stuff, have deep discussions 
about them, and even walk away disagreeing to the end.  Perhaps it 
is a cultural difference that causes people to worry about "upsetting" 
people.

of course it is ok to disagree and discuss, but if we get on the 
problems too then it's even better. :)

Graham, be careful or you'll find yourself on the outside of Qtask, 
looking in.

That's okay Terry, I've started work on m Qtask clone :)

Yeah? Me too.

Hey, you can hook up synapse, and have a Qtask/Altme clone.

I used to run altme all the time at work until they clamped down 
on all firewall and proxy ports. I found it to be the ideal program 
to log progress on tasks I was doing but now it wont connect. I only 
need it to do the do name or world resolution as the server would 
be running inside the firewall too. No data traffic needs to flow 
outside the firewall. Reichart - is it possible to have a local name 
world name server our enable the name resolution to be proxied through 
http, and I could just plug in the corporate gateway/proxy?

No, not yet.  We have not locked down how we want to resolve this. 
 Piracy and all.

What aspects of piracy? I just want to be able to run a world and 
clients behind the wall.

well, I'm OK with AltME. When using AltME, IRC, ICQ and Jabber, AltME 
is usually the one that connects first in a low bandwidth situation. 
But the killer feature for me is persistent chat logs, which has 
the side effect that if I post a problem, I can get response within 
minutes or hours. It's simply convenient to have running.

Colin, so, let me get this clear, you don't see how piracy becomes 
an issue if you don't need the name server?