AltME groups: search

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.

I have to think about it for a while .....

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 ...

hmm, will have to study a mrtg a bit ... not sure how fast I would 
get to at least few percent functionality .... look at Cacti for 
e.g. http://www.cacti.net

;copy exe somewhere, make it executable, write a cgi:
#!/where/is/rebol -cs
rebol[]
print "content-type: text/plain^/^/"
print "Hello cgi"

How can i get rid of the border around a link-image? http://polly.rebol.it/test/test/index.html

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 used to know how to do this... but can't remember it anymore - 
how do I perform a POST to a webpage?

Wasn't it something like    read/custom http://www.Whatever.com
 [Post {This=That}]

Hmm.. for <form name="def" id="def" action=planet.cgi?1213&adr method=POST 
autocomplete=off>, the server doesn't seem to like   read/custom 
http://www.territories3069.com/3.x/planet.cgi?1213&adr[POST {ddr=1212}]

It gives a 405 error (Method not allowed)

All the arguments are there (I checked with a reb-proxy, the page 
itself is very ugly)

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

I think I make post a string or literal     i.e   [ 'POST

... but it doesn't seem to have worked correctly here.  But it's 
a step in the right direction, at least

since it's a dialect it should be [ post ... ]

but if you need to evaluate the contents of the block, it should 
be 

reduce [ 'post post-contents ]

Good news / bad news

The good news is that MS are beta-ing Internet Explorer 7, so it's 
a good chance to see how well your website may look in that browser 
(like it or not it is liekly to become a dominent browser)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/default.mspx


The bad news is  two-fold: they have fixed most of the well-known 
CSS hacks; if you use the hacks your site may not render properly 
in IE7.  Second, it is not easy to install IE7 alongside any existing 
IE version -- it's a reversible upgrade (in theory), so you might 
want to try it on a spare partition/machine.

Windows only at this stage, of course.

I"m having lots of crashes in FF .. so I'll likely give it a go.

crashes with FF? :-) I run Mozilla each day, heavily with tons of 
tabs, windows, jumping here or there, never seen a crash for past 
year or two ... I would not expect FF being worse in that regard?

Could be latest update, I got a crash today. Shortly afterwards a 
notification of a new bufix release.

Does FF handle ASP pages? Out of the box, or is a plugin required?

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.

I use a number of sites which don't work in FF.  Annoying.. but ASP 
.. not seen that one as opposed to a site problem.

Are you sure that's not just a transient problem ?

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

I figured out a fairly fast compare method using my text editor.

I know there is (or was recently) a plugin to easily set the spoof.

A new webpage pops up at addons.mozilla.org,  search for "spoof"

I have to occassionally access websites that make heroic efforts 
only to work in IE. Banks mainly.

They sniff the user-agent  ID string....If you try faking that they 
feed you javascript that crashes other browsers.
Somehow, they think insisting on IE is safer.

Means I have to manually set their sites to the most restricted set 
of IE settings possible -- after all, why should I trust a bank that 
thinks that way?

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

You've got a modern bank!

:) no no, not a piggy-bank either - an actual, governement-backed 
bank.

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.

The web standards annoy me.  They are supposed to help make things 
more compatible but this isn't the case.  It is easy to build a webstandard 
complient web site that doesn't look ANYTHING like it should according 
to the standard in ANY browser.

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.

Which is as good a reason as any to be happy that there is more than 
one browser to chose from.

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.

As a backstop, you could try getting some older versions of Opera 
from a browser vault:
http://browsers.evolt.org/?opera/mac

Maybe then an old version of Opera will update itself to the latest 
for you....

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!

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 am not asking for native continuations but a way to emulate them 
in web applications.

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 problem I trying to solve is strictly for web programming, e.g. 
ensuring there are no inconsistencies in a shopping cart, etc ...

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

What you are doing Joe is what we old-timers call pseudoconversational 
processing.

Usually, you can kick much of the complexity upstairs if you have 
a TP monitor supervising the show. Sadly, most web apps don;t (a 
webserver doesn't quite count).

People have been doing this sort of thing for decades in languages 
without continuations support; so, though it's a nice-to-have feature, 
it is not a show-stopper.

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.

The bandwidth is not such a problem now:) I was just thinking if 
it could be used somehow to make Rebol more visible.

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.

Yes.

If you clicked the link I gave above, then you saw a page served 
as text/html  [probably should be textplain -- so I've changed it]
If you try format=rss then you get a page served as text/xml


In both cases, the output is not meant for humans: one format is 
for REBOL and one for RSS readers.

(I should not write in such a dark:) now = not  readed = readers 
:)

Kudos to Yahoo!, who today released two pieces of goodness into the 
commons. The first is their UI library, and the second is their Design 
Patterns Library. The UI Library is a collection of DHTML/Ajax/Javascript 
(pick your favourite term) controls and widgets. The Design Patterns 
Library is "intended to provide Web designers prescriptive guidance 
to help solve common design problems on the Web". 

- http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/
- http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/

read/custom - can it send more than one cookie at a time ?

Hi ... I have following task to acomplish ..... my friend who is 
doing college in archeology, is working on her thesis. Part of the 
thesis are images of various ancient goods. So we've got photos from 
our digital camera. I will produce small View script, which will 
allow her to enter comments for each image. Now I want to do a template 
(table?), with various layouts, mainly two images per A4 page plus 
comments under each of those images. Can I influence table cell size? 
My past experience was, that the cell got resized according to image. 
Are there also various methods, how to "stretch" the image in cell? 
thanks a lot for pointers ...

You mean HTML tables?

The cell has a height and width, and the image has a height and width.

You probably need to set both height and width on both the cell and 
the image.
Probably easiest with CSS 
Remember to set the padding and margin to zero.

And remember that IE6 and lower handles this differently to other 
browsers, so it's not easy to get pixel-perfect borders and so on.

uh, the photos - there is much more - some 230 photos ... mostly 
two per page ... you don't want her to do it manually in Word, right? 
:-) That's why the atutomatition - imo a good job for rebol :-)

what a fight for novice like me to get damnes stupid two images with 
two text descriptions under them to print on one A4 ....

last week we finished upgrade of SAP after 5 years .... I saw some 
initial doc done in XML, XSLT etc. .... Firefox was not able to display. 
Imo the thing is, that SAP supports IE only ... what a world ....

Browsers aren't meant to display things pixel perfect.

They are designed to pour the content into the shape the user wants.

If I have a 180x360 monochrome phone, I should still be able to see 
HTML-mediated content in a reasonable way.

PDF is a way of replcating what a sheet of paper does. It does it 
well, but it is an outdated concept.

Of course, browsers are also full of bugs which doesn't help.

browsers actually do a good job of pixel-perfect, but printers don't 
do pixels.  using real-world css dimensions, like cm or pt etc. will 
translate between device contexts.  Anyway.  I don't envy the task. 
 


Anyway, I have been messing with embedding REBOL in client-side code, 
which is working pretty well: http://eisic.ws/ext/r/Document2.plugin.r.html


I need to figure out how to keep REBOL from bailing out on me, though. 
 generally, if the console pops up, I have to refresh the page.  
For instance,  any print will pop up the console, and I would really 
rather not pop up the console from the page, because closing it destroys 
the REBOL instance.

I thought I've seen a cgi script somewhere.

!!! Cookies-daemon script now allows to post data as a multipart 
!!!
do http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/cookies-daemon_latest.r
;sending single file:

read/custom target-url [multipart [myfile %somefile.txt]]   ;== same 
like <INPUT TYPE=FILE NAME=myfile>
;sending normal fields:

read/custom target-url [multipart [field1 "some value" field2 "another 
value]]
;sending multivalue:

read/custom target-url [multipart ["field[]" "some value" "field[]" 
"another value]]
;sending file with field value:

read/custom target-url [multipart [myfile %somefile.txt field1 "some 
value"]]


Source files (with modified %http-patch.r) are in this archive:  
http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/cookies-daemon_latest.rip

As it's part of the cookies-daemon, it should deal with the cookies 
automatically.


The script is trying to detect content-type of the file which you 
want to upload calling get-content-type function, which is not part 
of the cookies-daemon (at this moment)

I am putting up a new web site. It works fine on my own computer, 
but when I send it to the remote server it fails to load one of the 
jpg files. The jpg is one the server. All the other jpg files load 
fine. Any idea what might be wrong?

just as a test, might try replacing src to    src="http://<domain>/<path-to-image>/dayspring.jpg"


(replace <domain>/<path-to-image> by what is needed to reach that 
image)

Thanks :o)  It's merely a revision, mainly fixing paragraph/heading 
margins.

Anyone got a direct apple.com link to download Quicktime 7 Firefox 
plugin on WinXP ?

Yes, I shouldn't have assumed it was needed, but I gave them a Yahoo 
email anyway, so no drama.

Question to HTML / CSS gurus
I have to display Rebol code in an HTML page. I use <PRE> tags.

Problem : whatever I use (Cell, Div, Pre) the wrap only occurs based 
on the window width, not the one I specified in the tag.

So, how to force PRE text to wrap in a specific width ?

I don't think, you can force a wrap at a certain place. It's in the 
nature of HTML, as it's not wysiwyg.

From http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32

A few user agents support the WIDTH attribute. It provides a hint 
to the user agent of the required width in characters. The user agent 
can use this to select an appropriate font size or to indent the 
content appropriately.

It's not the width of the line.

<pre> literally means "as written" -- if there are no line breaks 
in the text, then there will be none on the page.
***

Some lines in <pre> tags can be accidently enormously long, and need 
to be wrapped by hand.

That's one reason REBOL.org offers you a user-setting for the point 
at which you want Mailing list messages to be forcibly wrapped:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/cpt-update-profile.r

(See Appearance and settings / Point at which Mailing List Archive 
messages will start to wrap.)

Dideir, yeah we ran into this recently in allowing people to escape 
code inside our Wiki.  We allow Rebol, HTML, etc.

At first it seems counter intuitive. But this is the way of HTML.


Aside from the straight forward concept as Sunanda mentioned, if 
you are willing to process the code a little you can count the characters 
of the longest line, and scale the text to match the final output. 
 A couple of points dropped on a font stil are readable, and many 
sentences still fit.


Another is to encode the whole thing, in other words convert all 
the "<" for example to escape sequences.  Now HTML will wrap everything 
automatically.

I have tried "Overflow: auto" (I just had a look to makedoc anywhere 
result to see how it handles that),
but fall on the I.E. inconsistency.

Another option is to show in a textarea and set the rows & columns

I would like to have something like a face, where you insert image 
top-left corner, but it uses aspect effect, that once it reaches 
particular width or height, it is drawn to the face, but the other 
axis stays as-is, so the aspect radio is kept correct. With above 
definition, it simply scales image to defined width-height, and I 
have to properly cut image in xnview, counting pixel ratios .... 
and that is very boring job :-)

Pekr: 

1. I don't know if i understand correctly, but if You give only one 
size (f.e. width), image will be scaled with aspect ratio to that 
size. You can set .photo size too of course (so it will not ruin 
Your layout)

2. Text under the image - I can't identify the problem. Can You give 
a link to it?

Petr: give the text container a fixed width, then set both left and 
right margins to "auto". this should center it.

yes. sadly lost a lot stuff when the previous host shut down in the 
same week as my hard-drive died. I had to retrieve what I could via 
the wayback machine, and too few CD backups.

a question - I have Windows app in cp-1250 encoding. Then I generate 
some html, which is server from Linux. When I look in Mozilla at 
the page source (http://www.jablunkovsko.cz), the browser displays 
some czech chars encoded, e.g. &aacute. But when I save the page 
locally on my Windows machine, I get correct czech chars ...

Due to a very slow Internet connection, I need to make the FTP module 
of my website builder script more efficient so I don't send files 
unnecessarily. What I have in mind is:


1. Delete all the files in the website directory on my harddrive 
to eliminate all unused files.
2. Build the website to the website directory on my harddrive.

3. Download a list of the file names and creation dates from the 
website (all are in one directory).

4. Read the list of file names and creation dates from the directory 
on my harddrive (all are in the one directory mentioned in 2 above).

5. If a file is on the hard drive but not on the server, send it 
to the server.

6. If a file is on the server but not on the harddrive, delete the 
file on the server.

7. If a file on the harddrive is newer than a file on the server, 
send it to the server.


Has anyone already done this? Am I forgetting anything? Any pointers 
on how to do this?

Sorry about the CRLF ..... you don't want to be checking the timestamps 
on the server with a slow connection. Just hold the last updated 
value locally and if it changes then transfer the file.  Same for 
deleting ... else you spend all of your time checking on the server 
over a slow connection.    You could check the timestamps or hash 
the local value ... then if  the hash value of the source changes, 
transfer the updated version.     There's some code to do some of 
this in build-sie.r  http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=build-site.r
 but it's a rebol-ish task.

if you are on an unreliable or slow connection, you might experience 
timeouts which will in turn cause network errors. I recently worked 
on a similar system and you have to basically wrap all code that 
access the internet in TRY and do a lot of error trapping and possibly 
some retrying to ensure that uploads and downloads of entire filesets 
are done correctly. The code in build-site.r will not do that, so 
you have to restart the upload if it fails.

Graham, if a file upload fails somewhere in the middle, will you 
script restart the upload where the failure occurred so that the 
first half of the file does not have to be downloaded again?

I found various FTP servers report dates differently. Also the dates 
may not include the timezone, so you would have to assume it is in 
the timezone of the server and get the timezone from the server another 
way. Because there are so many variants of FTP servers you would 
have to do a lot of research to make this reliable, and then you 
wouldn't be 100% sure it would not fall over with some obscure FTP 
server.

Louis -- a couple of pointers about uploading files to a server using 
a slow FTP connection:

(I do it myself with REBOL.org -- most of the development takes place 
on my machine and is uploaded to RO via a 56K modem, so this is based 
on real experience.)

-- If you are uploading a large live file, that file will be available 
and/or "broken" during the course of the upload. Best to upload with 
a temporary file name, and then rename when uploaded.

-- That won't work with CGI scripts under Apache/UNIX as the rename 
won't leave them with the right file permissions to execute. But 
it will work for all other files, including scripts that are DOne 
by your CGIs.

-- We have a checksums file that the uploader uses.  Before uploading 
a file, it checks the file's upload checksum. That way, we only ever 
upload new or changed files.

there is cookies manager from Oldes somewhere, have a look around 
AltME for URL (he still ignores rebol.org, such a bad bad bad boy 
;).

well, working with cookies is not all that difficult, is it? My friend 
just asked me - why rebol does not handle sessions, if any other 
language does. I told him to write it himself, but he probably does 
not know how. Isn't session just about getting a cookie, looking 
into your storage space for the cookie identifier (session identifier), 
loading the session data, using them, and storing them once again?

Yes, session handling is not hard. REBOL does not have it built in 
because it was not designed to be mainly a CGI language; so you need 
to add that yourself.

the simplest way, which however needs write permissions to the filesystem, 
is to have a unique session id assigned to users; this id could be 
basically a file name (and you need to check for its sanity then); 
then you read from the file at the beginning, and save to it at the 
end.

yes, I know, as for files. My strategy is very simple - use cookies 
(I wonder if there is script being able to handle multiple cookies 
btw), then "start a session" = generate unique ID, store it in \sessions\ 
dir ....

maybe a pair of word name (literal) plus value ... and then some 
little accessor function

i just let the session variable be whatever the user wants. it could 
be an object!, or a block!, or whatever.

in some cases you may just need a logic! value, in others a block 
with words and values may be best...

allowing session handling to directly set variables is a bad design, 
see the plagues that php had for this.