AltME groups: search

which are the ones that make it..? and why?

Boring things like Microsoft Exchange. They are well known, and work 
-- or at least, the bugs get fixed, eventually.

Exchange Server has no decent backup of messages, and files.  I attended 
M$ classes  to be sure what they were up to nowadays, and what they 
presented was pathetic.  No organization that wants to preserve their 
information should use that system.

IOS works perfect on low bandwidth connections.  I have used and 
depended on it even on 2G wireless, which is effectively 9600 BAUD.

real tired....since they need to deal with worms, virus, spam, patches 
and more patches

Thanks. i try my best, but Altme and IOS are minority products, so 
they've got to be better than good to get to a shortlist..
Altme has at least three ways of losing data.

And having to rename the world every time there is a server crash 
doesn't make this group a useful reference site.

I do think this is a golden opportunity area, care-free backups, 
and I have some solutions in the works

We're now on REBOL3 world.....Two crashes of REBOL.net, each need 
to create a new world and abandon the old one.
Not a great advert for the x-internet.
 What needs to happen to ensure we never need a REBOL4 world?

Rebol2 was created cause Carl take the oportunity to flush all messages 
and start with an "empty" word. He changed the name just to allow 
us using old "Rebol" world off-line for old message.

DideC has the right idea with the Rebol# Worlds.  There was nothing 
stopping us from using the old worlds.  I have seen a couple of times 
now how nice AltME's system is in restoring a user's system that 
has crashed, simple reinstall AltMe and all data is resent - trouble 
for a big world or a dial-up modem.

If AltME allowed you to choose a date to start the restore from, 
and allow the search feature to retrieve previously unretrieved messages 
- it would be a very nice system.

and if someone had altered their local copy?

distributed means that all nodes are equal. and with the right measures, 
a few nodes failing are not enough to cause a data loss.

Another answer is use Raid Drives, and back up once in a while (daily).

That's one layer of security Reichart.

But (given that failed for whatever reason -- human laziness in doing 
backups;  tsunami; all kit stolen in break-in; whatever), what's 
the *next* layer?

Secure systems need more than one layer -- as we've discovered with 
REBOL-->REBOL2-->REBOL3.

*All* the data still existed, distributed amond the many users. But 
we threw it away and started a new world.

It's not a a good case study to write up for prospective Altme users.

that is, they worked the day before, so i just backed up, then started 
the mailer and figured the files were broken

And *test* your backups! Did a medium-size system for a big bank. 
Ran great for 3+ years, they changed the network, glitched something, 
went to the backup and found that the archive software was set to 
remove all blank space (e.g. nulls) from files. Every backup for 
3 years had "compressed" the DB files in a way that made them useless.

interesting things that banks do.. would have thought that they have 
in place process to test and make sure recovery is possible

banks are also supposed to do money legitimately, but USA proved 
that doesn't work that well, us citizens had to bail out the Savings 
and Loan industry some years back after their illegitimate handling 
of money.

I totally agree that AltME could be built in such a way that the 
peers can suppliment the data back, you might as an example simply 
check the integrity of everyone's copy, and accept data when three 
or more people agree on the data.

Actually it has not been suggested that I remember.  Every once in 
a while I go through here and cull features though.

Interesting...  When did the WorldMaster dividers get updated?  I've 
had AltME set to use WorldMaster dividers but it only showed All 
Users and All Groups.  I just switched to No Dividers and back to 
WorldMaster.  Now all the dividers are there...

Actually, I would like to see an ALTME that is like a cross between 
PHPBB and MSN messengers interactivety

Right now we have discussions on forums and its almost like chatting

well, send me a spec that is simple...not a long list, and what you 
want that AltME doesn't offer.

I turn around and look back and everyone is replying so fast

like Jim Carey when he gets to play "God" for a while and answers 
6 biliion emails, right?

Just give me bullet points of what you want, and I will tell you 
if I can take it on or not.

Moved Linux and Core.

These logs should merely just be html filtered and posted with a 
cron job then.

MASLOW'S MOTIVATION THEORY

The eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow postulated that people are 
animals who continually want.  No matter how many needs they have 
satisfied at any one time, they constantly struggle upwards to reach 
higher levels.  He classified these needs in a sequence of five levels 
the he referred to as "the hierarchy of human needs".


The FIRST LEVEL is the lowest and most powerful.  Maslow describes 
first level needs as the physiological needs, which include hunger, 
thirst, sex, air and rest.

SECOND LEVEL: Safety and Security - Shelter, clothing, protection 
from enemies.

THIRD LEVEL: Love and Belonging - Acceptance, friendship, lovers, 
family.

FOURTH LEVEL: Esteem - Recognition, respect, achievement, prestige, 
independance, importance, attention and appreciation.

FIFTH LEVEL (Highest): Self-actualizatoin - To develop or achieve 
one's full potential.

So I am suprised log posting and search have yet to be added!

Log posting and search?

and with the fact that you have plain text files you could create 
any kind of filter you want to only publish the messages that you 
want published...

Very good question, and one I've been asking myself for quite some 
time now...

Yup, it is a sublt way to give you a hint who is and is not part 
of a private group (that you are in).

Ok, I still have a problem. I can connect without problem to REBOL-HQ 
while my personal firewall is running. I can't connect to REBOL3 
while it's running. If I disable it, connect to REBOL3 and than enable 
it again. It works.


To me this looks like there is a difference in the login/connect 
process between REBOL-HQ and REBOL3.

OK, so I'm trying Altme once again ... and here are two ideas which 
might make altme even better
- get a special notice on private messages
- possibility to add a "personal homepage" to a user account

Reichart is resistant to the first idea .. has been made many a time 
by me and others

About notice on private messages, we have alerts, that pop up a window. 
And if you use dividers, the "All Users" dividers will turn red, 
when you get a private message. So there's the notice, you asked 
for.

Reichart is resistant to the first idea .. has been made many a time 
by me and others


Uh, no........I love the idea.  I love the idea so much that when 
we were building our other product the first thing we did was put 
this feature in.  However, on AltME, that is not at the top of the 
list of what we are doing next.

Is there a way to make a horizontal scrolling forum?  Altme should 
do that and become revolutionary.  I think it could be pulled off.

I remember those days vividly - spitfire, majorbbs, gtpower, vbbs, 
wildcat, and so many more

Hello. I just created this account here and I have found one problem 
with AltME. It's definitely nothing major seeing as it only applies 
to less than 7% of the people in the world but here it goes. I am 
red-green deficient (partially colorblind) so it's very difficult 
for me to tell which groups have messages that I haven't read yet. 
The red and black almost look identical. Like I said it's nothing 
major but, for the next version would it be possible to change the 
unread messages color? It would help me and just a few other people 
out.

and does it allow to create an view of the world, in real time, or 
is that something which can already be done with the altme client 
version, when running a world?

Feature Request:  I'd like a one button push or automtated/timed 
solution to bring up the "Getting Started Window" OR remove focus 
from all groups.  Why?  If you aren't actually using AltME (it's 
running in the background), and you get new messages, the messages 
in the group you are currently 'in' aren't highlighted as new.  Which 
can make it confusing when the tool tells you a new message has been 
received, but you don't see a hightlight on any group (and don't 
check the time on the messages in the 'current' group).

Do you have stats on things like the number of worlds 'active' and 
how many you host and how many are hosted elsewhere?

Knock your socks off?  No, perhaps just get rid of a lot of deep 
bugs completely, and enable us to move on to the next stage (applets, 
and applets written by people other than us).

Well, it will be interesting.  I'm now an advisor to the company 
"fellows" on collaboration and other issues.  So, I hope to be able 
to contribute some info some time to the management.

Paul, I help people do that quite often...so if you need ammunition 
to blow them away...I'm only a 4 hour drive away...;-) (I pitch AltME, 
IOS, and other REBOL based technologies...and my road-show is ready 
at a moment's notice)

Yes, I'm aware of thanks :-)    I only advise and stimulate the Fellows 
members thinking.  If they come back I can always refer them to you.

things like automated notifications and such are very handy when 
tracking procedures which are automated by computers.  This usually 
gets done in mails, but is rapidly ineffective, as people get inundated 
by mails...

we could stop using mails when tracking renders and stuff like that.

something like a altme:// protocol loadable within rebol, similar 
to the mySql protocol by Nenad, would be really effective.  reading 
your post from a file browser and saving new posts to it from ANY 
rebol app.    :-)

This is a GREAT feature, and you are talking directly to how I think.

Please write this up and send to feedback for one thing.

All products and people win when we open up hooks so everything can 
communicate with everything else.

Some more ideas:

write altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME/ "message"

Resolved of the first url here to the second url
by the Rebol3 world (local distribution):

altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME/239
is resolved to:
altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/151/239

151 is the set-file number for the !AltME group, and
239 is the message id.

read altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME
;== [set-number 151 first-available-message 1 last-message 242]


So it returns some group info, not the content of all the messages 
!

To get a message:

read altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME/239

;== [(date) 9 (colour) [font [fg 0.0.0 bg 240.240.240]] "We are working 
towards that."]

To find a user name by the set-number:

read altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/9

;== ["Reichart" [reichart-:-safeworlds-:-com] (membership) (dates etc..)]

can be a disaster, if someone gets password and will script and flood 
channel :-)

Actually, since Von Neuman, code is treated as data. You load it 
into memory and process is as a special kind of data.

Maxim thats not completely true. What you want to say is that you 
can manipulate code as it was data at  runtime, and the modifications 
will affect the program next time there is an eval.

eval are trigger by function evaluation, do, reduce, parens and few 
others.

In fact, in any programming language, code is just data that is executable. 
Some languages allow that the code-data be processed as any other 
date. Rebol is not the only one. And I do not believe that this is 
it's main characteristic. The fundamental characteristic of Rebol 
is that it is a language for exchanging data over networks, be it 
information (data) or programs (code) so that is can be used and 
executed (if code is passed) on any computer connected to the network.

Yes denismx, but that is not the only approach possible. Erlang passes 
byte code, and it is very good at distributed computing, same with 
Termite.

What is amazing is that the interpreter is so small and yet permits 
so much.

Regarding small footprint I think this is just proper coding, and 
avoidance of bloat.

and Basic was pretty small too. Guess I'm getting to used to bloated 
stuff with the years :-)

Most interpreter machines are small. What makes the big is all the 
libraries and IDEs that they add to them.

Before I go this is the shortest intro to scheme and functional programming 
that I had found. It will get you up to speed in this model in one 
day http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html

I'm sure it does, but my impression is that I don't have any problem 
with that concept. I programmed in Logo and Prolog (for teaching 
purposes, not commercialy). The idea that I can build Rebol statements 
in blocks and evaluate them, all at runtime, does not phase me. But 
I'm always willing to learn more of anything. It never hurts (much).

ball part figure, I'd say basic I/O and core series handling.

Well, I've just manually extracted the rebol functions from my latest 
script demo-virtual-face.r (as posted in the View group), so I'm 
looking at those. I've excluded layout and draw dialect keywords. 
The order in which the functions appear is interesting. I have some 
duplicates. So now I'm analysing..

To create the above list, I just read my source script file and wrote 
each word as I came across it, manually, into a new script file. 
Then I ran the following code:

- maybe examine multiple scripts, and count in how many a word is? 
Then 'view would count high, even if used once. Words occuring in 
every script are important.

- "choose the task instead" - good idea. Make a list of tasks and 
list required   words. could be in that 15-30-range

the better way to gauge useage is not by frequency within one script 
but by useage amongst many scripts... where useage within that script 
many times still only counts as one.  I'd use the rebol.org site 
to scan scripts from any given group and put usage from them.  Thus 
networking would score view as almost 0 where gui would place view 
as the most used word (in every script)

and using rebol.org you could even classify by advanced, and separate 
words being used more often in 'advanced or intermediate work.

I was looking for a good and simple data set to organise.

(I have been REBOLing full time for a while and yess many things 
are moving ahead :-)

we can have each atom of information relate to any other atom based 
on rules we define... once the dataset is parsed, then you end up 
with a complex modeling of all related data which you can query and 
search trough quite quickly.

I'll give a shot at sorting out all of rebol.org once I get basic 
capabilities going and report back here, when its done.

Although the "choose a task first then learn what needs to be used 
to code it" approach is fine in many circomstances, in a 45 hours 
course, the student ends up knowing how to code a few tasks (hopefully 
more than one, but not necessarily), but often has a very hard time 
transferring this knowledge to other tasks.


So I think a better "generalist" approach would be to categorize 
generic tasks, like "file manip"', "math", "iterations", "series", 
"network sharing of data", ... and identifying just a few native 
words category that are enough to solve all or most problems given 
in those categories.

Example problems I would give my students to solve would look like 
(to be adjusted according to the native word set retained):


Using iteration, draw a 19 line isoceles triangle (concepts of looping 
not obvious for beginners, but essential to grasp early)


Find all prime numbers lower than a given one, using previously found 
primes in the process to speed up the search.


Given a list of adresses, get the files and identify which ones have 
a given information on them (elementary parsing)


... Things like that. Diversified enough to give a good feel of what 
programming can solve while gaining basic skills (data stores, interation, 
maybe recursivity, various control structures - not necessarily all 
of them, operators, native functions and user defined functions, 
input and output, ...)

I think it depends a lot on your audience. You said they had no previous 
experience in programming, but are they computer science students 
or humanities, or engineering?


Their are many things to teach at once; computer science concepts, 
Rebol concepts, how to program, etc. I guess you would also have 
to settle on a single programming paradigm to start with. If your 
audience are hunamities students then the not so simple concepts 
such a "programming language" and "program" (leading to "syntax", 
"semantic", "type") are very important to understand properly first. 
Then you have "expression", "evaluation", "subprogram"" etc. (leading 
to "values", "binding", "function"). I think all this can be done 
through meaningfull practical example built russian doll style.

There are about 270 in View but the op! are duplicates of some natives, 
and some natives are for efficiency and can be rewritten using the 
other native words. I guess I like looking at Rebol as a Forth language 
with very good and standard I/O support.

Jean-François: one of the courses I teach is an introduction to programming 
to science students. Some of which will follow two more courses in 
programming, in the same language. Over the years, I've done this 
in Fortran, Pascal and now C++. At one time the first two courses 
were given in Python and the last (which I was giving), in C++. We 
decided that it was better to give all 3 in the same language. I 
didn't think Python was a good choice.

I'm now giving the first course (and maybe all 3). I'm exploring 
the possibility of opting at some time for Rebol, if I can break 
down the language into subsets that are "easily" learned and that 
offer useful tools for some large category of problems. I did'nt 
find any tutorial that seems to be quite there yet. 

Of course, the language is not the only thing taught. Basic programming 
and computer science concepts are also taught. But these can be taught 
independently from the choice of the language, for a large part. 

Rebol is my preoccupation. Some languages need a very lot of reading/learning 
before you can start to use it for solving problems with them. Maybe 
this is the case for Rebol. But I'm not sure yet. My hypothesis is 
that nearly everyone has learned Rebol by reading the Core manual 
and looking at examples in tutorials. It's ok to do it this way if 
one chooses so. But the teacher is expected to devise smoother paths 
for the learning process.

I agree, starting with polygons and graphics is great for instant 
visual feedback at the beginning.

Denis : You should maybe contact Gerard Cote on the mailing list. 
I believe he has been using Rebol in teaching introductory programming 
for a while now. He might have interesting pointers.


Also I would be curious to know if you have ever considered using 
Scheme for your courses. There are great ressources such as PLT Scheme 
and their book "How to design Programs" or "Simply Scheme" by Harvey 
and Wright. I think the content could be adapted to a curiculum based 
on Rebol

tks for the link Graham. And there is a mention of Gerard Cote in 
there too, Jean-François.

Actually, I'm not trying to figure out how to introduce programming 
concepts, or computer science in general. I already have a lot of 
stuff on that since I have been teaching this for 20 years now. And 
I'm not looking tor a "better" language to teach, even though I have 
given a look to Scheme.

What I want to develop is a "better" approach to learning Rebol, 
for non-programmers mostly. I'm really focusing on Rebol, and not 
what should be learned before, nor what could be a better option.

Then reading data somewhere and some simple parsing techniques: find 
a string, extract from one point to a second and saving the data.

I have the feeling that would be a very good starting point. I'm 
a little hazy on what is offered for parsing in Rebol at the moment. 
I'll look into that next. I think that once you have read a file 
into memory, it is in block form and you can use natives like "first", 
"next", "find" and so on on it. If so, then I would be going that 
way for sure.

Strings and blocks are both series, so first, next find etc work 
on both, but when you load you get a block and the units are values. 
When you read, you have a string and the units are characters.

When you load, the file has to be LOADable by rebol, which means 
everything in it must be parseable into rebol values.

When you read, the file can be absolutely anything. I usually have 
to read web pages and parse a string, for instance.

How about that old way of starting with a text-adventure? Write a 
framework and let the learner add some special item?

actually denis, for introducing looping I'd use foreach before while. 
 while is rather hard to grasp in the begining, cause its easy to 
bugger up the end conditions and end up in infinites loops.

Volker: good idea. "old way"? I've never seen this approach used 
before (and I'm not young). But I think it would be very motivating 
project for these students. I'll use this suggestion.

I've talked to one of my colleagues about Rebol and he's checked 
into it. He's interested also. So it is becoming more probable we 
will switch to Rebol to introduce basic programming concepts as well 
as to empower them with a programming tool to build very small applications 
to complement the scientific software at their disposal.

you may look into RebGUI project - consumes less memory (mostly non-issue 
on PC), provides more styles, resizing, more proper behavior to styles, 
try to go thru demo AND look into tour.r source - you will see how 
nicely readable the gui part is - you don't need to go into internals 
too much ...

RebGUI, something new to me. In fact, we probabably just need an 
interface to enter data and start some process and show the results. 
Maybe draw a graph with the results - that would be great. Will look 
into it. Tks.