AltME groups: search

And yes, tex looks confusing.

IIRC pdfmaker has some hooks for pagebreaks. gabriele has something 
which makes tables across multiple pages, and rows are keept together. 
And seems the basics are inbuild to pdfmaker. Maybe Gab can step 
in?

Would you have enough time to answer a lot silly questions? I forgot 
the whole api and everything, but could do the coding.

Question: Has anybody written a log-file analyzer tool in Rebol? 
I really must say, that I have looked into a lot of those tools but 
never found a good one. All spit out some information but not the 
one I'm mostly interested in. And I just get reports but can't do 
any trend analyzes etc.

ok, thanks for the pointer ... two weeks before we go into our first 
providing Billingo.com is closing, damned. And we already told customers 
they will have portal, where they can log, and see the statistics 
of their per day/month usage :-)

folks did very nice system called billingo - you could rent it for 
very few bucks even for cz folks to afford, you defined your price-list, 
data-limits etc. logic and then even your secretary could add new 
person to the network ;-) Such person had portal sub-page available 
to log into, to see its traffic, graphs etc. It did also invoices 
for you. Very nice. Today they announced they are closing, because 
of low demand for such service. But it was excellent service, which 
would save me plenty of time ....

now how I am supposed to prove our new customers how much data they 
downloaded and when and show them logs :-)

I will have to find a way of how to study it - it is very late here 
and I just looked into archive size - 1.6 MB  archive - oh my ... 
so - if there is no simple way of how to wrap it, I will go my own 
way, as usual, even with limited featureset - I don't need fancy 
javascript/java/whatever graphing - if I go View way, I will have 
to develop AGG based graphing anyway ...

Advantage of mikrotik is, that I don't have necessarily to depend 
upon snmp - It has good router scripting, and I can prepare my own 
format (even rebol blocks ;-) of output ... and some folks do so 
with the router scripting language available ....

typicla problems: line-endings with windows->linux. upload as acsii. 
forgetting to make something executable, both exe and cgi must be. 
(its linux/apache)

what tag do you use for templates? Is it comment tag? I can see e.g. 
<!--[snih_tabulka_zacatek]--> and some other <% ......> I would like 
to know (dis)advantages of both. Thanks a lot

I tried making a low-level version (with TCP), but the data it wants 
is inside Port/state/inBuffer, when sent in the browser.. and simply 
setting it in the Port doesn't seem to work

My online bank account uses ASP to generate monthly statements, which 
works fine from Opera, IE and Safari - but fails under FF with a 
"Could not open xyz.asp"; so I figured it had a problem with ASP 
pages in general.

It could be detecting the browser (possibly poorly) and generating 
a different page. Maybe compare the page sources.

Very interesting. I never had a problem with my bank and Firefox.

Firefox has been crashing multiple times a day for me as well.  Mozilla 
isn't an option as it is just too bloated and slow.  I keep thinking 
of  using Opera but it seems to have issues with a lot of sites. 
 In general it is a little faster than most browsers but it has its 
own collection of problems.  It's amazing to me how problematic the 
web is.

We just point out our PCs crash with FF, and you accuse us of the 
same!

I'll go back to IE and tighten down security before I go back to 
Mozzila simply because of the speed issue but before I ever go back 
to IE there are plenty of Mozz spin offs that don't share Mozz's 
bloat

FF is good idea, but I am not sure. I was used to have mail + web 
under one roof. And I did not like the need to download usefull extensions 
for FF ...

We've got 3 Outlook damaged mailboxes in last 3 years, we moved ALL 
of our pop3 to mozilla format. You know why? Because it is plain 
text and there is NOTHING to corrupt ...

I'm using an AMD Athlon64 3.4 GHz with 1GB RAM and its just too damn 
slow.

I  some two years back heard my friend telling me it is slow, for 
me, it was real time, for him, it was slow .... he was former amigan 
... I asked him what is fast, and he told me nothing under Windows, 
so :-)

As for correctly displaying, I would break hands of ppl still using 
IE crap ... those are the reason why web is being held backwards 
... and I would break legs of those developers, preferring IE :-))

yes, maybe it is impossible at all, with what HTML and related technology 
bloat evolved into ...

I use Opera and Mozilla each equally, and they work fine for me.

Firefox, I like the look of, but I had some trouble with -- but there 
are some good reports that the latest release fixes their main memory 
leak problems.

how, we have been trying to put Opera on Mac, and nothing but problems. 
 After 5 tries, have not even been able to download a full copy. 
 The website hangs, very odd.

Oops, sorry that was for a dif group.  I like choice, and I need 
to DL Opera so we can make sure we are compat, but it is really fighting 
us.

guys, you are unbelievable bashers of Mozilla
 I'm not! ;)


I've been testing four different browsers on my Mac (Safari, Opera, 
Firefox and Firefox PPC - http://www.furbism.com/firefoxmac/) and 
while the PPC build is 9.5MB compared to Opera's 5.5MB (which also 
includes M2 mail), it is noticeably faster than the other browsers 
and has not crashed once since I installed it 2 weeks ago. The only 
problem I've encountered is with my !@#$%^& bank's IE-only site (even 
with Opera I have to change spoof modes depending upon which particular 
page of the site I'm at, and Safari works fine except when the site 
tries to open a PDF statement within the browser using an Adobe Reader 
plugin – never mind the fact that Mac handles PDF natively ... !@#$%&).

I mostly use Safari on Mac these days. It works with my bank too. 
:-) When I'm on Windows, I mostly use Opera. I used to use Mozilla, 
and I still use Firefox from time to time, both under Windows and 
Mac. I very very rarely use IE. Safari can be used for 99+% of the 
sites, I visit. Today I had a problem, because I wanted to watch 
the 2 danish Superbowl updates, our reportes sent from the US. And 
a danish tv channel TV2 Sputnik require IE6 under Windows to run, 
and only that. Argh!

Has anybody experimented with emulating web continuations in Rebol 
? some info on ruby approach is here (http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?Continuations) 
and Factor (http://factorcode.org/cont-responder-tutorial.txt)

The technique came from Scheme. But for this technique to work you 
need that the language suports continuations them natively. REBOL1.0 
was able, but continuations were removed in 2.0, maybe 3.0 will have 
them again. We hope to be able to incorporate them in Orca, with 
addition of tail recursion, and other goodies ;-)

Yes,  we took them out. REBOL ran a lot faster as a result.  I used 
to be a huge fan of continuations 20 years ago. But, continuations 
do not provide enough benefit for the performance hit on evaluation 
speed and memory usage.  (Stop and think about what is required internally 
to hold in an object for any period of time the entire state of evaluation.) 
 It's more of a programmer play toy than a useful extension.

I believe this the paper with the original work. 'Modeling Web Interactions 
and Errors'

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/kfgf-model-web-inter-error/paper.pdf

Do whatever you want with Orca, it is just that when I mentioned 
continuations few years ago on ml, Carl got on steroids and posted 
something like being-there, done-that, don't try to teach me how 
should I design language :-)

Geomol, the real advantage of continuations is for handing web forms 
and to ensure the users get a consistent experience. Check the paper 
Jaime points out

The approach I have is that  every session has a cookie and disk 
storage associated to the cookie. When I define a web form, the action 
method gets a continuation id as a cgi parameter, so if at that point 
you clone the browser window, you as a user have to continuation 
ids

This  approach is not very scalable, it's just a start waiting for 
better ideas and input

When the user posts a form ,  the form cgi stores the continuation 
id and a rebol block with name-value pairs

If you post the second form also (something you would do e.g. when 
checking flights in a reservation engine, as Jaime's reference paper 
suggests) a second continuation id and rebol block would be stored 
for the same session

So basically the continuations are ensured by using both the cookie 
and associated storage and the continuation id that is added to the 
links as a cgi get parameter

Joe you are asking a question that finds its answer in a completely 
different model.  It reminds of the joke "What I meant to say, was, 
Mother, would you please pass the salt,' (look it up).


The answer is to throw away the brochure (page) model of the web, 
and move to web 2.0, where there is a cohesive (continuous) model.


The UI is complete separated from the backend, and the UI is a single 
entity, that is persistent during the session.  Everything else is 
simply a pain.


Most sites are horizontal (shallow) as opposed to vertical (deep). 
 And most are still modeling on the brochure (page) as opposed to 
the space (like a desktop).

I'm administrating some pages where is a lot of text articles published. 
And because 50% of the trafic is done by robots as Google crawler, 
I'm thinking about that I could give the content of the page in Rebol 
format (block). Robot will get the text for indexing and I will lower 
the data amount which is transfered with each robots request, because 
I don't need to generate designs and some webparts, which are not 
important for the robot. What do you think, should I include Rebol 
header?

That's a form of cloaking. Google does not like cloaking, even "white 
hat" cloaking of the sort you are suggesting:
http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=745


Better to respond to Google's if-modified-since header -- it may 
reduce total bandwith by a great deal:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html


Also consider supplying a Google Sitemap -- and that can have modification 
dates embedded in it too. It may reduce googlebot's visits to older 
pages
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Some of them are just bad -- ban them with a robots.txt


Some (like MSNbot) will respond to the (non-standard) crawl-delay 
in robots.txt: that at least keeps them coming at a reasonable speed.


Some are just evil and you need to ban their IP address by other 
means...Like flood control or .htaccess

REBOLorg has a fairly useful robots.txt
http://www.rebol.org/robots.txt

Yoy could try that as a first step:

-- Create a robots.txt to ban the *unwelcome* bots who visit you 
regularly .

-- Many bots have a URL for help, and that'll tell you if they honour 
crawl-delay....If so, you can get some of the bots you like to pace 
their visits better.

If that doesn't work: you have to play tough with them.

Having REBOL formatted output is / can be a good idea: REBOL.org 
will supply its RSS that way if you ask it nicely:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/rss-get-feed.r?format=rebol

But *automatically* supplying a different version to a bot than that 
you would show to a human is called cloaking and the search engines 
don't like it at all.

If they spot what you are doing, they may ban you from their indexes 
completely.

So, it looks like 3 flags, one of which may be set afterwards, and 
some ranges. Either that means some really interesting math, or a 
4096 byte lookup table :(

So, you do BCD arithmetic by using binary arithmetic on BCD values 
and then using DAA to fudge the data afterwards?

No, you can do it. The main reason that you have to branch back to 
the beginning of your interpreter at every step is because the next 
step might have been modified by the previous. You can speed that 
up though, by realizing that the only statements that really need 
that paranoia are memory writes and branches - other opcodes can 
by combined in your interpreter, like looking more than one move 
ahead in chess.

It would require a more complex state machine, but since you wouldn't 
be starting over with every opcode it would execute less tests and 
branches per step than not combining. Think of combining opcodes 
as a kind of loop unrolling.

so in fact it could be performed by a static analyse of the code 
before ther real execution, and will result in addition of new byte-opcodes.

Perhaps you could specify your operations in a table and then go 
through it with a dialect processor like BURG - REBOL is good at 
that sort of thing. Then you could generate your interpreter from 
that table.

Few of the groups are. If I had to guess, it would be to avoid the 
reputation of vaporware. It has been a while since they have done 
a version of REBOL with rebcode, and it had some significant shortcomings. 
There may be no reason, though.

Fortunately you can call the natives with the apply opcode and get 
the best of both worlds.

and if more flags was handled

could the T flag be set after a locial operation like AND ?

for example, if i want to test the 7th bit , i do
and  var 128
ift [ do the job]

instead of doing
and var 128
eq.i var 128
ift [ do the job]

It sets the T flag based on the contents of a variable. I think it 
sets T to false if the var has 0, none or false, and sets T to true 
otherwise.

and var 128
sett var
ift [do the job]

Cool. So SETT can replace ZERO? and NONE?, which otherwise don't 
have rebcode equivalents.

Or rather NOT ZERO? and NOT NONE?, but the effect is the same.

i don't understand usage of ext8 and ext16

Perhaps some of those and x 255 operations could be put off until 
the value is written to memory.

but you see, the 8bit registers are often combined into 16bits registers, 
so i should perform AND 255 before to translate them into 16 bit, 
i'm not sure  there is a real gain

That combination of 8-bit values into 16-bit registers has got to 
be a common code pattern. Are the 16-bit operations distinct from 
the 8-bit ones? This is the kind of code pattern that you could combine 
and optimize. Internally, do you need to have the 16-bit registers 
be a combination of the 8, or could they be seperate and have their 
values transfered over if it would be faster?

At the very least you should have seperate macros for 16-bit reads 
from and writes to memory, rather than a combination of 8-bit ops.

and you need to build a binary data

for example to write 01 and 02 , you need to build the serie #{0102}

Yeah, that is likely slower. You are likely to have to do some bytewise 
reads and writes internally. You would be faster if you had seperate 
read/write macros for the 16-bit load/store instructions.

I wonder if there would be a fast way to cache the 16-bit values 
in _HL, _BC and such, and writing them quickly.

It might save on some AND x 255 statements.

so i could remove some and var 255 from my code

This would be so much easier without self-modifying code - then we 
could just compile the code and be done with it.

BTW, don't forget the ROTL and ROTR opcodes. They may help with 16-bit 
combination registers.

I am asking if operations like ADD can add values directly to/from 
memory like it can on x86, or does it have to load first and store 
after?

plus lost of time due to the syncronization between 16 and 8 bits 
registers

in C it will not be a problem, 8 bits registers and 16 bits registers 
will share the same space adressing.

More time than the combination of a load to a register and an add 
from that register?

Wow. It's the same amount of work, in fewer instructions, and it 
takes more time. How does that happen? Microcode?

one for the operation opcode and 2 for the address on 16 bits

I'm going off docs and memory here.

I'm thinking that you may be able to efficiently store your 8-bit 
registers in your 16-bit registers and break them out when you need 
them.

because it's more compact and faster

and many operations occur only on 8 bit registers

and bit manipulations

Well, there is no reason to change that balance - the code expects 
it. 16-bit operations can be sped up using a few tricks if necessary, 
like temporary registers that are used internally. You can even name 
those registers _bc, _de and _hl if you like :)

yeah or i could build another instance of the interpreter and swap 
them

so, to conclude this session, Rebcode needs union handling and swap 
instruction.

I was thinking vectors and opcodes to handle the struct! type, but 
a swap instruction would be nice too.

Steeve <BTW, why rebcode thread is not on rebol.net ?>

Technically, it is because the group's description does not have 
"[web-pubiic]" in it.....Add that text to the description, and the 
last 300 messages will be on REBOL.net in around 10 minutes.
***

I suspect no one did that either for the reason BrianH suggests, 
or because no one has thought to do it.

I don't see any reason why it should not be a [web-public] group, 
but I'll leave the changing of the group description to the active 
participants. (hint: right-click the group name in the left-hand 
side list of groups)

Why not to write down your logical conclusions and throw them at 
RAMBO?

2 bugs found: poke doesn't work with tuples and when we poke an image 
with a  RGB tuple value , RGB channels are mixed in a strange manner.

hmm, but nice anyway ... Steeve - if you find anything what could 
improve rebcode, discuss it with Brian eventually and put it in RAMBO 
:-)

speed improvement of http://perso.orange.fr/rebol/galaga.r

all video routines have been translated into rebcode, but it' s not 
so fast than in my dreams.

- Added a button to switch Draw randering between bilinear and nearest

yeah and now u can try i with sound (same adress)

warning: sound port is really buggy and destroys your samples over 
time.

I had success with external library interface and FMOD audio library, 
but it's not cross-platform (or open source).

The good work is to find a nice little open-source audio library 
for playing samples and try to integrate it into rebol.

i think if i let the sound like that, RT peoples  will have a headhash 
and will implement a correct sound port  soon.