AltME groups: search

lol, you guys are right!  If the user can't even make sure the printer 
is on he or she is too dumb to use a computer.

Another question: what is required to use view-request.r with enface? 
I keep getting an error message:

** Script Error: sky has no value
** Where: context
** Near: color: sky size: 2x2
** Press enter to quit...


I just want a calander to pop up to request a date.  Is another source 
module required besides view-request.r?

Are there any documentation for calling the rebol.dll, which functions 
are exported  etc?

Has anyone tried to build a Win service with it or to use it with 
Apache?

Thanks! I had recalled him saying that he had posted a link to a 
header in the plugin group, but at the time I had the whole history 
and there was no link. I must have missed it in REBOL2 or something.

Thanks, I will have a look at it.

But I guess either I check the meaning of the parameters by try an' 
err' or I will have still many questions.

what is the latest enface version? REBOL/Encap 1.2.0.3.1 ? Actually, 
I just ordered a SDK but my app doesn't work once enfaced while it 
works with REBOL/View 1.3.2.3.1...

I think it's request-download makes reference to a user-prefs object 
which should be included in the main view sources.

I am trying to find out if I can have an application monitor for 
updates and auto-transfer the latest version.  Can an encapped app 
monitor for a new version of the application using the header attributes?

or any recommendations on a good way of doing this?

SURFNet detective does this. I don't know how they do it, but when 
I've done this kind of thing, basically, there's a server process 
you can ping to find out the latest version, or just a place you 
can download files and you can check timestamps and sizes, to see 
if there's somethnig new available. 


Also, consider if you need to download the whole app, or if you can 
structure it so the main app is just a kernel, and the parts that 
are likely to change to loadable modules. That's how AltME works, 
and the Detective as well. Then, of course, you want to sign the 
modules to make sure nobody spoofs you into loading malicious code.

Do you look for a return value from those scripts to make sure it 
went okay?

Is there a file that included everything?

Is there a proxy setup ?

Ok, now I have a related problem. Zone Alarm won't allow my encapped 
program to access the Internet.  I think it is because the program 
is not a view program, and therefore ZA cannot recognize it as a 
program separate from the rebol interpreter. Is there any way around 
this?

Can it read a web page ?

Can it read a web page ?  I don't know, but it can't send email.

I see a strange bug with the REBOL/View included in the latest SDK 
of 5-Dec-2005. The following code produce a linear gradient in earlier 
versions of View (as it should), but it gives me a radial gradient 
in the SDK View:

To be more precise: is it a bug?

if replacing the actual values works, i'd say it's a bug.

'radial is default (it seems). I indicate 'linear in the FillType 
object, and it does linear gradient, if that't the only value, I 
use by reference. If I have a second value by reference (FillType/startpos 
in stead of writing 20x20 directly), then gradient change to radial.

Gregg, yes, if I do a compose as in:

compose [pen none fill-pen (FillType/grad-mode) (FillType/startpos) 
...

then it work correctly. So that is a possible work around. It must 
be a bug, and I'll report it to RAMBO.

It's also worth noticing, that the bug is only there, is the 2 variables 
(grad-mode and startpos) are inside an object. If they're defined 
as stand-alone variables, it works too. So it's a problem with combinations 
of objects and DRAW.

I'm trying to use the 2.6.2 version of enface from the SDK to encap 
a Rebol script I used to encap with rebolve, but I get the following 
error:

Just curious if the sdk package located at http://www.rebol.net/builds/sdk/
requires a newer license.key file?  I already own SDK but this one 
seems to tell me to put my license file in the correct directory 
when I try to run it and I have dropped into every directory I can 
think of.

If it requires a newer one then anyone know how much it cost them 
to simply upgrade their license file?

Jan. 14, 2002.  But I used to work at RT so I may have a different 
license key than what you purchased.

It was a strange problem I think.  I think I had a pro key and an 
sdk key - that is my only explaination for the problem because Cindy 
sent me a copy of my original SDK download and that key worked on 
the newer one so I think I may have been using the wrong key file.

louis, my guess is that the encap version you are running is older 
than the version that code is expecting. (bind allowing objects is 
a rather new thing)

JeffM wrote in Core:

Can REBOL/SDK define functions that will be called from C and passed 
to a C function? For example:


c-logger: make routine! [ "Define the callback function for error 
tracking."

    logger: [string!] "using string! since a function ptr is just a pointer"
    return: [integer!]
] my-lib "C_Logger"

rebol-logger: func [s] [ print s ]

c-logger :rebol-logger

The rebol function must complete before the C function tries to call 
it again - or there will be fireworks. Even a short rebol function 
can take 40ms to complete (for example), and if the C function tries 
to call it every 20ms that will stuff up the rebol interpreter.

okay. this is good to know. thanks, guys. something else i couldn't 
find in the documentation was a method of getting a values returned 
by a pointer. for example, void get_value(int field, float *value); 
In this case, "value" is an output parameter. Does REBOL have a method 
of correctly passing a buffer and having it get filled in?

I've already tried the following:
foo: 16#{00000000}

C_get_pointer: make routine! [ "Returns pointer to structure."
	dummy [string!] "Pass 'foo' here"
	return: [integer!]
] my-lib "c_get_pointer" 
foo: 16#{00000000}


I know this is a trivial example. In this one, calling c_get_pointer 
with foo does in fact fill foo in with 4 bytes of data (presumably 
the correct address), but all calls to other functions which make 
use of that pointer crash. I can only assume that the pointer is 
wrong (byte swapped perhaps) or that I'm doing something not quite 
right?

(ignore the second foo: 16#{00000000} -- it was a pasting error

I've been reading the docs both for the preprocessor and for the 
newer include.r script but I'm a bit confused, I wonder if someone 
could help clear it up for me. Here's my situation. I have view and/or 
SDK installed on a PC and a script sitting on my desktop. This script 
needs one or more library scripts which are available from web servers. 
How do i write the start of the script so that I can do all of;

1) Double click and have it run in view

2) Run the preprocessor so that I have an all in one script ready 
to run/copy somewhere

3) Encap it by dragging and driopping it on encmdview.exe or similar


I want to be able to do this without changing a single character 
of the script. I want to access the library files from a web server 
because here at work I often write scripts on various different servers 
and prefer to keep one copy of the libs centrally and not downloaded 
onto each machine.

about include files being on a web server, the official prebol does 
not support that; i think that Ladislav's INCLUDE does, and I have 
a patched prebol.r that does support including from urls too.

(#include is a preprocessor instruction, so it is being preprocessed 
usually)

hmm, files/1 may be a file! even in case the source was preprocessed

...and if won't be a file! in case the source wasn't preprocessed

(I mean whether you want to write a section describing how to do 
the same in Linux)?

i would try a bash-script and do the same as with the windows-shortcut.

If I made a typing mistake above it wasn't in the original, as you 
can see I get an error including the file via http, that same file 
works perfectly when i do it ...

Someone reported this error .. "The file "...exe" contains more than 
one data stream, but the destination volume does not support this 
feature.  Some data will not be preserved as a result" .. what does 
this mean for encapped apps?

hmm, i think you can safely ignore it. i don't think rebol has anything 
to do with it. NTFS allows for multiple content to be associated 
with a file name, but almost noone is using this feature i think 
(like for links); so something on that system added a data stream 
to the exe file.

i don't know much of how this works - a Windows expert may be of 
more help.

Graham, multiple data streams are how Mac files are stored on Windows 
servers. Also, some antivirus programs use the extra streams for 
storing checksum data, some viruses for storing their payload, the 
system for storing file metadata, and various applications for obscure 
reasons. Any file copy program that ignores multiple data streams 
does so at the user's peril. Since there are few such programs written 
in REBOL (Carl's recent blog post notwithstanding), the lack of data 
stream support in REBOL isn't much of a problem for now.

that must be a trap for anyone writing a file replication tool.

Well, REBOL supports file forks on Mac in a way that you can use 
the same code between Mac and other platforms - the other platforms 
just pretend to have a data fork. However, alternate data streams 
on NTFS are not supported by REBOL so you can get tripped up there.

Well, it's nice that they are semi-supported through a filename hack 
that is actually in the underlying APIs that REBOL calls internally, 
but it is not supported through the actual mechanism REBOL uses for 
supporting that kind of thing on other platforms, and so is not portable.


Try get-modes %file 'forks or the /custom refinement to open, read 
or write with the [fork "forkname"] parameter. On platforms other 
than Mac there is generally only one fork ("data") but if the code 
you write is fork-aware it will be portable. This is the method that 
REBOL should be using to support streams on NTFS or any equivalent 
feature on other OSes' file systems.

But does Rebol have a way to determine what the FS is on a partition 
without calling Win API ?

Not really. As it is, there are certain characters that shouldn't 
be in Windows filenames and the colon is one of them. Screening for 
them is a good idea.

There is no reason to let that weird NT file-stream-name syntax infect 
REBOL file! syntax if we can avoid it, especially since we already 
have a mechanism for dealing with this kind of thing (and I use the 
term loosely - the underlying semantics are different on every platform).

By the way, the quickest way to determine the characters you need 
to screen for on Windows is to try to change a filename in Windows 
Explorer and type one of those characters. A baloon help message 
will pop up listing the characters that you shouldn't use.

what strategies do people use when you have a few mbs of source, 
and the encap dies due to unmatched brackets ... how to locate the 
offense easily?

just a joke. is it impossible to backtrack the change in the sources 
or did the error not show up until you tried to encap?

load each of the files on each own, using 'load and a loop? 'load 
should fail on unloadable things.

But it would be nice if encap gave a line error instead of just complaining 
it can't load

(well, if a ] is missing then will give the end of file of course.)

Doesn't the Official Guide have a "debug loader" that islotes the 
missing bracket to the nearest object/function?

you can also use just parse for brackets, almost a parse one liner 
:) but the accuracy depends on what bracket is missing. if it's the 
closing bracket, you can only guess by indentation.

A one liner?? Let's see :)

if you know that the problem is [, just count up on [ and down on 
] and stop when count < 0. or you can just print only the lines with 
[ or ] in them so you get a "compressed" view of the source and look 
for the missing bracket visually.

The problem actually turned out to be Leo ... and the way I was using 
it.  I commented out a block of code using ; when I should have used 
@, and @c .. so it only commented out the first line of the included 
block :(

I was assuming there was a way to do this using encap, yes

Maybe it's some sort of cache, I haven't tried a reboot

I recall (poorly perhaps) that you need to recalc a checksum for 
the whole EXE.

Nope. You just need to make sure that your icon replacements are 
the same size and bit depth. You can then put your replacement icons 
in a .ico file and automate the build process with code like:


 call rejoin ["c:\rebol\bin\ResHacker.exe -addoverwrite " encap-exe 
 "," encap-exe "," to-local-file ico-file ",ICONGROUP,REBOL,1033"]


You can also do the same thing with Company/Version info and a .res 
file:


 call rejoin ["c:\rebol\bin\ResHacker.exe -addoverwrite " encap-exe 
 "," encap-exe "," to-local-file res-file ",VERSIONINFO,1,1033"]


The "switching icons" problem is a Windows thing. Highlight your 
newly created .exe file and select View|Refresh from the file explorer 
menu. This should cycle the Windows icon cache.

Josh: what you see is a Windows icon cache. as long as the program 
name stays the same, windows won't update the icon. i think there's 
a way to force it to flush the cache but i don't know how.

Fedora Core 1 is a bit old...

most likely you just need a symlink from your version of libstdc++

I have not tried it yet, but I tried to load a library .....

Yes, it doesn't make sense for a normal script to be able to lower 
the security simply in the header :)

I've have a script that works fine when executed with rebol but errors 
after being encapped. I know one is supposed to #include source and 
I suspect something is not being included. Is there a quick way to 
find out short of  adding them all. In case you ask...
** Script Error: Cannot use path on none! value
** Where: insert-event-func
** Near: insert system/view/screen-face/feel/event-funcs :funct
:funct
Thanks in advance.

Is there a method to "dump" the contents of a sqlite db for back-up 
purposes using the the driver?

Robert, Well, that's what I do do now but I was wondering if there 
was also a command.

Thanks Gabriele. I was looking for a programatic way but I think 
I'll stick to just copying the file.

well, that is programmatic. .dump is a command for the sqlite utility. 
if you want to do it from REBOL, you have to code it yourself, as 
it's not a SQL command.

Is this an accepted method of populating the fields of a view form 
or is there a more precise method?

btn-next: func[][
   if (counter  < (length? db)) [
    counter: counter + 1
    lname/text: db/:counter/2
    fname/text: db/:counter/3
    spouse/text: db/:counter/4
    email/text: db/:counter/5
    hphone/text: db/:counter/6
    cphone/text: db/:counter/7
    addr/text: db/:counter/8
    city/text: db/:counter/9
    state/text: db/:counter/10
    zip/text: db/:counter/11
    
    show window
    ]
]

you can wrap the fields in a panel and use:

set-face my-panel [db/:counter/2 db/:counter/3 ...]

And, I have abstracted this idea in that a function walks over the 
set-words of an object and use these as columnnames.

003. Unfortunately, it's moving too slow. I won't have any time to 
do updates for a while.

There is no standard I know of for mapping data to faces. A number 
of us have rolled our own systems over time, each with our own critieria 
and design aesthetic.


As a simple starting point, consider setting up declarative mappings 
and driving a data-exchange loop. e.g.

face-field-map: [
    lname 2 fname 3 spouse 4 
    email 5 hphone 6 cphone 7 
    addr 8 city 9 state 10 zip 11
]

foreach [face-name field-index] face-field-map [
    set-face get face-name  pick db/:counter field-index
]

Thanks Gregg, as a newbie I was just trying to get an idea as to 
how others are handling this.  I was thinking that there had to be 
a more concise method than the one I was using.

IIRC, the latest SDK purchase gives you a license for every platform. 
 might be worth upgrading (50$ is like not going to restaurant once... 
your wife/girlfriend will get over it  ;-).

Rebol and DSL's are hand and glove. Is there a SQL dsl anywhere? 
I found the driver from dobeash. Is there more?

I'm not sure if that would be worth the effort, SQL can get fairly 
complex and if a REBOL SQL wouldn't implement everything (even specific 
databases prorietary extensions to SQL) that wouldn't be a noticable 
gain in simplicity. Wouldn't it still just be SQL written in REBOL's 
syntax? Actually, I think it's more like SQL already is a perfect 
example of a DSL on it's own (not implying here that SQL is perfect, 
just the example is).

And this is a snippet:

do %sql-protocol.r
    db: open sql:my-db
    insert db {
        SELECT * FROM a, b
        WHERE a.c2 = b.c1 AND a.c1 = 1
        ORDER BY 1, 2 DESC
    }
    foreach item copy db [probe item]
    close db

Isn't this better than working with strings?

I have a REBOL/View application where I am doing SQL calls in a face 
timer to update the face. I am having an intermittent issue where 
the result of one face's SQL statement is showing up in another face. 
I am doing a copy of the result set based on what I've read in the 
Dobeash docs.


It appears that the face timer code blocks and another timer event 
occurs and does a SQL call. Does anyone know how to make a timer 
function finish before another one triggers? I may also be using 
the driver incorrectly.

For now, I've wrapped the SQL calls with "busy" flag logic and that 
seems to work -- but it is a hack. The fact that a SQL function call 
inside a face timer event returns a dataset from a different face 
is shocking to me. REBOL should handle this properly in the background. 
My mental model of single-threaded event handling (rooted in classic 
VB) leads me to believe that this is a bug.


In addition to returning data to the wrong face, the SQLite shared 
object will also sometimes seg fault. It working fine now, though, 
with my busy flag hack.

It does sound like a bug.

Best way to get it looked at / resolved is to add  a bug report to 
RAMBO (the R2 bug database):
    http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/rambo.r

Graham, yes, I am triggering queries using timer events, and the 
sql results are being returned to the wrong calling function. My 
classic VB way of doing things doesn't work. How exactly are you 
doing your queries? Putting them in a queue to be serviced by a single 
function? For me that would also require including the face, so it 
can be updated when the sql call completes.

Here is Gabriele's response to my bug report (RAMBO ticket # 4411)


This is not really a REBOL bug. The SQLite driver is doing a WAIT 
1 in the DO-STEP function; calling WAIT inside an event handler (such 
as a face's timer event) is not really supported by REBOL and should 
be avoided. If you can't avoid it, you must be prepared to handle 
other events happening during that WAIT call, and you need to be 
very careful with blocking requesters (SHOW-POPUP, INFORM etc.) as 
they're likely to mess things up (they call WAIT as well).

My suggestions are:


1) File a bug report with the SQLite driver. There needs to be a 
way to avoid the WAIT, though I guess this is going to be complicated 
in R2.


2) Disable other events while you're using the SQLite driver, eg. 
clear SYSTEM/PORTS/WAIT-LIST and restore it afterwards.

3) Use a "global" flag like you're doing.

-Gabriele

As Gregg said, it still needs to be a block! otherwise WAIT will 
complain (IIRC).

most likely, you'll only have the event port in the wait list, so 
it's just a matter of removing it and adding it back later. I can't 
guarantee this works 100% because I haven't tested it.

another alternative could be:


4) don't use face timers, but rather replace do-events with something 
like:

    forever [
        wait 1
        do-your-sql-calls
    ]


You'll still have other events happening while you're doing your 
sql calls in this case though, not sure if that can be a problem. 
The cleanest solution would be to change the driver so it does not 
wait, but I don't know SQLite so I can't say how easy that would 
be.

and has a driver for sqlite I think

Thanks, Graham. I'll take a look at that option.

Is there a way to force sqlite to release a database. 


I get a currupt db now and again and I want to automate the process 
of re copying an older version over it once I detect it is currupted 
using a try block.


But once the database is accessed it won't let me delete it or disconnect 
from it. Anywayaround this?

I haven't yet seen a corrupt sqlite db so far. I am having like separate 
1000 databases "running". On what OS are you seeing this?

I"d bet it's being used on a desktop ....

Not sure on the version? (you are talking about the dll? or .r?)
Pragma setting? Not familiar with this.


Yes, my script is running still. That's my problem. I wanted to over 
write without having to close script down...I worked that out with 
a restart...good enough for now.

I'm referring to the SQLite version. The current is 3.7.5. You can 
check the synchronous setting by executing the following query -- 
pragma synchronous. It will return a 0 (off), 1(normal) or 2 (full). 
See http://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous.


I've had database corruption before because I didn't backup the files 
correctly. It's best to use the backup API and not just copy the 
files.