World: r3wp

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?

Guess not. What I want to be able to do is start a world inside the 
firewall and then only have clients inside it connect. The clients 
would need to know how to resolve the world name and IP address thru 
some mechanism that doesnt require going out of the firewall to do 
so or allow the name resolution and server declaration protocols 
be proxied through http. I think that should pass through most corporate 
firewalls.

We agree teh HTTP part is a possible solve (something we are looking 
at).  But the other way around, allowing no name server offered by 
us means instant piracy at the very level where the only market that 
pays would do so.  No?

Hey, all I want is resizable text in the client. And maybe an OS 
X client. Everything else about AltMe has been roses. I haven't even 
seen the issues or bugs mentioned by other folks.

As the team gets older on AltME, we ALL need bigger fonts.  We will 
get to this.

:)

hehe. Yep, that's the issue exactly. I've been blaming the fonts 
and the high resolution of my monitor, but we all know the real truth 
:)

For the record, the three bugs we are building heavy test suites 
for are: 


1. Synch bug.  We are going to move AltME over to the newer version 
of Rebol, this is a big move, with lots of testing, but we are gearing 
up for this.  


2. Dot bug.  We have no idea. That simple.  But we are going to try 
a brute force method that might fix this.


3. Dial Up: Loosing connection for dial up users.  We have some ideas, 
this is just slow testing.  Will eat up several days of a couple 
of programmers.

Reichart, am I still the only person who ever indicated problems 
running multiple worlds and having the world all of a sudden become 
inaccessible?  The only thing I can relate this to on my computer 
is possible the world server getting mixed up with the multiple worlds 
I was hosting from my old win98SE box.  Since I have been only serving 
one world and not the three as before I have not had a reoccurence 
of this problem.

We have had one other compaint, but differnt conditions.

So its a matter of control then. You want all the worlds and clients 
to call home. Thats fair, its your business model but I also thought 
that you mentioned that there would always be a free version of altme 
so I didnt think it mattered anymore if a small community, because 
of infrastructure constraints, prospered within a firewall.

The concept of "free" and the concept of "piracy" live in seperate 
models of the product.  This is the part we are working out.

perhaps a small  limit to the number of users that can connect to 
a world not using your name sever

that  allows test behind forewalls but not enterprise wide ussage 
and the small potatoes skate