AltME groups: search

when? Wouldn't it be just a hour of work or so, to encap using View 
1.3 SDK?

I completely understand your reasoning,

But, in our universe we:


1. Make change systematically from a giant list of features and bugs. 
 The means multiple people checking in code that is often changed 
several dozen times and overlapped by different people.


2. The once compiled, an array of computers and operating systems 
are cleaned (often reinstalled from ghosted images of hard drives) 
and sent through a complete test suite.  


3. If anything fails…the team has to be taken off what ever they 
are working on at that moment.  Then repeat the test cycle.

This is what we release as Alpha or Beta.  Gamma is a nightmare.


These realities are interleaved with all the different products we 
work on.  It means that before we do a release candidate of anything 
we have to weigh our test-team's schedule, confirm the majority of 
developers are available.  And not just for the release, but everyone 
has to hang around for the next couple of days because after release 
there is a high chance someone will find something.

Wouldn't it be just a hour of work or so
 

No…

We have a very low bug rate (we have won awards for it.)


We take it very seriously.  On one side it means things can be a 
pain in the ass (especially for us).  On the other side, what we 
do release is much better.


One thing it does cause though is for everyone to focus and gather 
up all the things they want to change at the same time.  Sort of 
like knowing that you have to put all your stuff on one boat every 
day to set sail.  If you miss the boat you have to wait a day.

I'd like to see a metric that measures the success of a world .. 
for instance, the number of posts per logged on user per unit time.

Hmmm.  Interesting.  So people that get on, post, and get off produce 
a higher number?

no, perhaps more a ratio of active users to messages then

in terms of societies .. I think this place looks more like a communist 
society than a democratic one.  Need to spice it up a bit more.

Ok, I'm bored ..and admit it.  But a growing society this isn't ...

Would a web front-end (with similar functionality to AltME) increase 
accessibility? Or can the functionality of AltME be subsumed into 
QTask? (which is already web-based and has messaging, calender, to 
do lists, etc)


I've seen first hand how readily people will "try out" something 
online (forum, wiki, members area, etc) but shy away when asked to 
"download this software to get access". I think part of the problem 
stems from most Windows users fear of installing any software that 
is available over the net (they still trust and prefer CDs from "reputable" 
companies).

Yup.  We are working on that too.  We will make a formal statement 
about everything soon.  It is actively being worked on.

Out of the blue: how can I browse to links published on AltMe, without 
having to type then over? A left clik on the link does not do anything, 
a write click  copy the link, but is not passable into the browser, 
and the link is not selectable...
I'm using Linux Mandriva 10.2 and Firefox.

middle-mouse-button pastes from a different lcipboard. with moz that 
works here (debian)

with others (konq) i use a launcher-script: http://polly.rebol.it/test/test/linux/icewm/app-launcher.r
launches apps with value from clipboard.

Where I am, left button attempts to launch a browser (and fails -- 
but probably due to my messed up settings). Right button copies link 
to clipboard.

Question to go with my dual boot Q. in 'Hardware' -- can AltME, running 
under respective OSes on a dual boot system share the same data?

Hmmm....I don't know for sure.  I can't think of a problem with that 
actually.

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.

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!

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

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

<<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.

<<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.

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

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?

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.

Actually, not in a darknet.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Yes, that was considered.  We have a list of about 20 models.  Our 
next AltME update (being tested right now) will start the process 
of creating seperation form the free model.

AltME is being worked on, but the big features we are working on 
(as opposed to lots of little ones) will take a while (there is a 
complete rewrite going on).
Reichart Jan-19-05

IIRC Ubuntu had some other problem too, with a missing printsomething. 
Somebody said upgrading helped.

There is a package-manager! :)

Sadly sometimes better. must be because Carl is a winemaker.. :)

Yes, AFAIK that was somehow deprecated. found a bug-report from another 
app somewhere.

But Kaj or someone said with a newer ubuntu that was gone. dont know 
all this ubuntu-names.

It looks to me like new people who join this world are not automatically 
made members of private groups. In fact, they probably won't even 
know what private groups exist,

But, equally, the members of private groups have no easy way of telling 
who the recent world members are, so it is often hard to review them 
for potential membership.
Is there a way to resolve that?

It has been a couple of years but I think I just tarred the whole 
directory tree moved it to a new machine

I just got a console message saying "Show on face in closed window". 
When I closed the console window, AltME quit. The only window I remember 
having open during that session was the alert window.

Why is ALTME not messing up my screen when I manualy resize the screen? 
Where when a simple 'resize in /view Does!??? What does ALTME do 
differently? Is it a more dircet /view access ???

Well i mean that when i start ALTME in i.e. 500x500 and then resize 
with mouse I dont see any screen stripes while resizing, but when 
I do this with a simple window under rebol I do see lots of screen-stripes 
during resize untill I loosen my finger from the mouse button...

Maybe RT was trying to see if they could get continual resize events 
processed by rebol, so they disabled a default refresh. But then 
it was probably found that rebol refresh is not really fast enough 
to keep up ? Not sure.

There might be a way to do it using the system port, but then that 
might be platform specific (ie. probably Windows-only) for now.

Ok, after all my complaints about font sizes in Altme on newer monitors, 
it looks like the next windows will deal with this... a quote.. 


 Don't you hate it how, when you increase the resolution of your desktop, 
 everything gets smaller? With widescreen LCD monitors sporting resolutions 
 of 1920x1200, and even laptops with screens that high-res, the icons 
 and text on your PC can become absolutely tiny when you run at the 
 native resolution. Enabling large fonts and trying to scale your 
 desktop icons in WinXP only sort-of works, and it breaks as many 
 things as it fixes. With Vista, your plug-and-play monitor can tell 
 your PC what size and resolution it is, and then Vista can scale 
 everything appropriately. 12-point fonts will actually be 12 points, 
 regardless of whether you're using a 1280x1024 19
 LCD or an ultra-high-res laptop."

More to come. Also, OSX works, but a few small bugs still hanging 
around. See notes on that page.

Is there a way to remove all the reds from every user and group ???

Grham ..Is it a coinsidence that I like FileSharing very much in 
your Chat Applet and its now inside Altme ? ;-)

Well almost complete this filesharing... If there would be a nice 
Password protection possible on shared files (Like the SHA exmaple 
from Carls Cookbook) the filesharing would be complete upto the level 
of privicy ...

You'd think there would be a "clear-all" button.

I must request a feature to create source files directly within the 
filesharing area. if it works how I think it works, this could be 
used for a form of collaborative editing

Yes That was a feature request frmo 2 years ago from me too, Clear 
all unread messages with 1 click..

I Wish I wendy I wanda.. there was a linux beta ;-)

at the bottom possibly? how about making room for a button panel 
just below the list of groups. I think some of the options related 
to editing that list are a little too hidden

Carl,  the Clear-All button could go in the "list options" though 
that's a bit hidden.

There are a few other gotcha libs in the mix like. 
libXaw7.so.7

You could also have a clear + date (up to ) feature.

I've got a new debian distro that came in yesterday... let me see 
what it's got going. Back later with info.

a very nice example when programming on different linux distributions 
is to keep an Eye dies days on the "MALLOC_CHECK" environment setting 
or auto_make/config prebuild releases, this can cause lots of debugging 
pain because its able by default to supress core dump while it should 
not, and thats not always mentioned in the distributions your working 
on. ..any.. offtopic..

seems you can't just build one linux version and claim liniux as 
a supported platform

Hmm.  I quit normally, but when I logged on just now a whole bunch 
of groups came up red.  Each of these groups, the messages are yellowed 
indicating that theyre old ie. no new messages.

Yes, what is the advice on that ? The beta download page:
http://www.altme.com/beta.html
advises:

# Both your AltME world server and clients need to be updated.
They 
both must be running the newer code. If you only use the newer client, 
but not a newer world server, you will see very few changes.

So is safeworlds running a new beta server for the beta clients to 
test with ?

Is there a list of changes coming up?

anton, I made a little test world to play with, if you are curious 
to see the file sharing working

I see Altme has an open folder icon, and this uses a system call 
to open up the local folder.  I can see the dos box open up temporarily.

One thing that always annoys me about AltME is the connect/disconnect 
handling.

Everytime I get disconnected from the internet (which happens several 
times a day), I drop out of the group that I am reading, and have 
to acknowledge that I read the message that I AltME "isn't able to 
connect at the moment". Of course, when I go back to the group I 
was reading, the markers for new messages have already been cleared.

Same when I try to reconnect "Do _really_ want to reconnect to rebol3????" 
Of course not, what do you think why I clicked there? And then I 
drop out of the group ...

I'm getting a lot of  "invalid data type during recycle" messages 
in the new Altme.  I got them like 4 times in a row when trying to 
click on the !Altme world and then decided to click another world 
and then come back into this one and was finally able to.

you need to create a new work to work with filetransfers

Paul: this altme still uses a 1.2.10 REBOL, so that crash is still 
there.  The OSX has 1.3.2, which means that a 1.3.2 for Win32 is 
not far behind.

A linux build is still planned for soon (but there is a reason I 
did not captialize the L in linux in this sentence - it's on my bad 
list this week)..

Small files autosync. There is a threshold.

the filesharing thing, is that kind of a module? if so, will it be 
possible in future versions to write your own modules?

Altissimo, Rebol 3.0, new AltME build ... what a news are leaking 
:-)