AltME groups: search

Graham -- I've not seen such a problem today.

denis: the password is needed to be able to start a word with a given 
name. this is so someone else does not take up your name.

however, unless you "buy" the name, it is kept only for a few days 
or weeks (i don't remember how much time), so if that expires, the 
password is not needed/valid anymore, and the name is free.

My understanding is a world name is kept as long as you use it within 
ten days of your last connection.  However, I have had world names 
that I didn't pay for drop on the same day a world was used.  For 
example, I change between three world names when I loose the one 
I am currently using.  A pain for the users of course, which I assume 
would not happen if I would just spend the small amount to reserve 
the world name.  Otherwise, I'm sure this would be a pretty big topic 
for SafeWorlds.

And I was expecting a flood of messages!

almost a full day...

that's not the point. I'm making the same mechanism myself and was 
wondering how a running program can delete itself.

It's a linux update ..not altme

I think there is just a shell running that runs the encrypted source.

I run a Windows 2003 server on another box .. since there is no communcation 
to outside .. I decided never to update it.

That was after a particular bad instance when this box updated, and 
blue screened after that.  I had to completely reinstall the OS about 
3 times, each time blue screening after an update.  Never again!

So, wiped the install, installed fresh from cd, and then installed 
vmware server.  Not a single glitch now.

why not just turn off automatic updates

 - that's what i always do. better to do the updates manually. but 
 it's a waste of time, if only they could get these things right...

I think it's a little weird that an executable can't delete itself 
while running, but another script can delete that executable while 
the executable is running. I was therefore thinking about making 
a separate "self destruct and install" script which then could be 
launched. I've done that now, but the application restarts instead 
of quitting.

Pekr you could suggest  via feedback,  a feature alowing the user 
to choose the of the poster

Maybe we should create a new wish list after the Altme team completes 
our first top 10 wish list ??

Not a good idea,I want access to define the a and A style

I found an entry in the %pref-chat.txt file. (font-size: 15) A change 
here helps until I click a or A.
Suggest definition of 2 fonts something like this:
font-size-a: 15
font-size-A:20

OK, what I ment is control over size the a / A was ment to be "pictorial"
I put this on the list.

What I really want to see is full exposure of text properties, rigt 
click of the aA button, but a simple "font-size" switch will do.

So….


We have already put RSS, iCal, and iFrame feeds (syndication) into 
Qtask.  If you post these in a Rebol project calendar (on Qtask), 
then you can create a feed from it, and post it publicly!  You can 
even post the entire JavaScript Calendar into the page of a public 
website (like Rebol.org, etc.)

Reichart, et. al., I haven't reported this but for the past 8 months 
or so we have been using Altme at work as sharing tool at work. This, 
after many years of struggle.  Sadly, the MS forces have decided 
that it's too good to be true so it mustn't and we are installing 
an exchange server. Actually that will be a good thing for me personally 
as the responsibility for the email servers gets transferred to the 
sys admin guy running the exchange server. 

It is interesting to note that while it has taken a team of people 
to get this thing running (not that it's running as I speak of course) 
to share a single file, Altme was what, a few minutes to set up and 
use? Most of that time is spent on deciding on passwords : ).

Yes, I know a few disillusioned IT guys, who are in it for the money, 
but still curse the systems they have to manage. They must've lost 
the intererst a long time ago. They have not had experiences with 
anything that is truly great, revolutionary or in other ways very 
different from what they are currently working with.

James, I had the opportunity recently, while I was in a busy period 
(before this one) to make money on a job setting up an AltME-like 
website and was given about a week to do it. I decided to hand them 
AltME instead. I never got any money for solving the problem in 5 
minutes rather than a week and I never heard back from them, so I 
don't know how it went. I suspect people are not interested in something 
that is not already in use by millions of people. One can ponder 
whether that was a stupid move or not. :-)

and I know IT professional, who wanted to be a doctor. Took 3 years 
of medicine college study, but did not make it ...

I've seen this error twice now, on machines where AltMe is connecting 
to this world. Once on a machine where the world has been for a long 
time, and it caused it to resync everything; the second time, just 
now, on a virgin machine:

That's a good thing to have.

question: why not "search-my-altme.r" as a filename ?
(or another way: what does "skimp" mean ?)

It's a  pun on the phrase "pimp my altme"

skimp is the indexing engine....the project is really a demonstrator 
for what skimp can do:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=skimp.r

Ok, a reference back to your core indexing functions ?

I'm sure someone has mentioned this but can you autostart a world 
after a reboot? I don't mean autoreturning to a  world via the -w 
arg.

do a search in this world... its been covered before... or just browse 
up a bit... you're bound to find it.

I believe it's assumed since it's running on the 'server' and being 
accessed by the script, that the password is not required.  I think 
it's only when starting a world from the client that you are asked 
for the password.

Listen, I have a question. How do I know which port it is using? 
C:\Program Files\AltMe\altme.exe" -s "<Worldname>" -p <portnumber>

from the Safeworlds site there is a way to identify what port the 
world connected to... AltME Tools > Check Your World... then type 
your world name  ie,  Rebol3, and it will tell you what port you 
connected through.  Typically the first world connected will get 
5400 and then each one after will increment the port number.

Glad you found a way to get it to work.

Is there a way to sync the groups?  Several of the groups here show 
up as having no messages.  I thought they were empty until I added 
a message to one and then it downloaded the past messages.  Is there 
a way to force it to grab the messages for the other groups?

There is a "dot" group. What you do is go there and type something, 
traditionally a ".", and that works for some people.

I noticed this effect sometimes. Sending a message seems to "unblock 
the pipe".

Also worth trying: type a message to yourself.

What used to work is logging on as guest and then relogging on as 
yourself. This world has no guest account so that won't work here; 
but it may work in other worlds.

The last 300 messages of the groups whose names contain the tag [web-public] 
*were* being published on REBOL.net.

Sadly, that has not been available since the Great Server Crash of 
Mar-2007....I have no information on whether than service will be 
restored

The Library Team is toying with the idea of putting a fully searchable 
archive up on REBOL.org -- that's all 62,000 [web-public] posts. 
But that is at least a season away.

New AltME user question and test - how long before a post should 
appear?  And for that matter perhaps I need to find the FAQ section...

Altme has a lingering re-sync problem.  Posts usually appear within 
seconds.  Some

seem to disappear into a Sync Check black hole.  Watch the status 
line at the top

left of the screen.  On by Linux beta, sync checks occur every five 
seconds or so.

There are private and public groups.  But I've never delved into 
the rules.  There is

a WorldMaster that can add and remove privs.  I'll leave the real 
answer to someone
who has "mastered" a world.  I haven't.

Welcome to Altme REBOL3.  It's a pretty cool place.

Thanks, glad to be able to join - lost my view of REBOL when I switched 
to a Mac many years ago - so happy they have a working version for 
OS X now, beta or not. :-)

Ashley's RebGUI docs include a nice little snippet on OS X app bundles, 
just FYI.

Thanks, it helps that I've moved over to Mac within the last two 
years myself. The last stumbling block was a Mac version of AltME 
(which I've created an app bundle for ... works like a native app 
now).

Ah, I need to try the bundle steps for AltME.  I'm still launching 
from a terminal session, though I do have one open typically anyway.

The hardest part was creating a nice .icns file ;)  (the images that 
is, not the process)

Ashley is there a reason safeworlds dosen't/can't  use  your app 
bundle as its offical apple download?

They can certainly use the template as a starting point, but need 
to add their own copyright and other information ... plus add icons 
that are a bit more polished for the Mac (a bit of shadow on the 
existing icon and one drawn at 128x128 should do the trick). I should 
also point out that "my" app bundle merely builds on the work that 
Gabriele and others have done ... I just put it together in a usable 
format and published first, ;)

<< Any rules about who can post into what groups?>>

If you can see a group in the groups list, then you can post into 
it. If your posts are not appearing then either:

* it has been lost -- if you have a flakey connection, Altme will 
try to upload the message from your machine and if it discovers it 
needs to reconnect, it will do so automatically and then THROW YOUR 
MESSAGE AWAY. All you see is the "reconnecting" message. You are 
not told your message has been discarded.

* it has been recieved, but is not rebroadcast to everyone. Some 
people see it withing seconds, some do not unless they later post 
inot the same group This is the resync problem refered to above.

Can you help, please?

I'm trying to establish if we all have the same Altme Group number 
for the same Altme Groups.


If we do, then an app I want to build using merged data from several 
Altme users will be very easy.

If we don't, then I must salute Altme's excellent security measure 
in making the group number local to each user. But I have to do so 
while walking back to the drawingboard to redesign the application.

So, please: could a few people right-click !Atme in the Groups list 
and tell me what #nnn they see to the right of the Group Name?
Thanks!
I see #151

Thanks all, again.

Simple has advantages.....And that is a big advantage for me right 
now.


But, with my Security hat on:  the gaps in the Group-id numbers I 
see in the users.set file enable me to infer the existence of ex- 
or private groups. If I'd copied users.set daily, the skips in numbers 
would leak some additional information. Maybe not enough to launch 
some sort of attack, but more info than need be leaked.

Keep it simple, sure.
Bur also keep it safe and secure.

Leaking the total number of groups (ever) in a world would not be 
considered secure enough in some markets.
It's the traditional design tradeoffs.

If you are kissed by a baron, could you turn into a frog?

-pekr- being a bad guy once again :-)

How does Altme! keep track of  a client's cach of messages? Does 
it update based on differences from the messages on hte client machine 
or from the server? What I want to know is: if I use altme from two 
differnet computers will I always get a full update when I log on 
or will I lose messages if I loged on a different computer before. 
I'm having trouble updating on a computer I  recently installed Altme 
on. I am not able to get many of the groups to download the old messages.

Is there a way to manualy download the messages for a perticular 
group?

Reichart can confirm if there is a way to get old messages.  You 
might be able to either delete a group index file or something like 
that, but I don't know for sure as I haven't played with this at 
all.  Others here may have experience.

I know if you right-click on a group name, you will get some details 
related to that group.  I believe the number that appears in the 
upper right-hand corner may be of use to help idenfify the file that 
is used to store the contents of the group.

You have to reinstall to get a full fresh mix (simply put).

but, you may try installing more fonts... i think altme linux is 
using helvetica, maybe you don't have a scalable version of helvetica.

Please post a picture of AltME looking bad on your flavour of Linux.

Let's start another group to discuss this issue. ;) But seriously, 
if there was an option to archive/delete "inactive" groups (say, 
after 6 months without a new post) then that might help.

AltME is nice! :-) It's maybe not perfect, but it's one of the applications, 
I really use a lot. And that I enjoy using. Say thanks to the team, 
Reichart! If I could, I would take them out for a beer.

You may remember that, before the Crash of March '07, REBOL.net was 
hosting a small, web-accessible archive of this world.....It showed 
the last 300 posts in all [web-public] groups.

Now, with Carl's permission, we're hosting it on REBOL.org. With 
some changes:
-- *all* the posts, not just the last 300

-- permanent URLs, so you can refer to classic posts by a fixed address
-- [one day soon: fully searchable]

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp
***

Posts will lag a day or so behind for the first few weeks until we 
properly integrate it into REBOL.org.

Re: Serving multiple worlds. If I have a shortcut to start a second 
world, e.g.: 

	path/altme.exe -s "worldname" -p 5401


On the same machine where a world is running on port 5400, the second 
world starts fine, but the Check World tool reports that it's on 
Port 5400, and attempts to connect go to the other world (which *is* 
on port 5400).

Has anyone else seen this?

In a similar vein, does anyone else want the feature to be able to 
post via the command line or some nice API? e.g. 

	path/altme.exe -w world -to group|user -m msg

Sending a quick note with the CLI would be nice and I'd use it.  
Maybe not everyday, but I can see the potential.  (Now I'm kidding...) 
Unless I had to boot into Windows to send the quick note.

I had lots of problems with this early on when trying to run multiple 
worlds.  At one time I had 4 worlds that I attempted to keep going, 
for free without reserving the world name (I know, i'm cheap), but 
found it was a pain to keep restarting the worlds in sequence one 
one of the worlds inactivated.

I'm assuming this bug has already been reported but if not it seems 
when you have altme open and spend the windows taskbar so that it 
takes the maximum space that it crashes altme.  Not that many people 
would do that but still seems to be a bug.

I tried but could not get a crash but maybe I misunderstand the protocal 

the "task bar".   what bar is this top of the altme window?  winrows 
task bar (typically at bottom of screen)
I have tried most everything I can think of 

the question might what graphics card/driver   virtual window manager 
 ...

jljkGeomol it's not a color problem, even the cursor does not move. 
I've got empty area but now I'm going to press CTRL+S and it will 
be send (and I hope without errors as I can't see what I type :)

I just thought of a feature that a future version of Altme may want 
to look into, sub-texts.  I have an urge to make stupid off-topic 
comments sometimes, but also have a respect for keeping forums on 
track for the greater good and use of important time.  Perhaps some 
furture version could have a trigger or formatiing option for 'invisible' 
sub-text, only seen if requested.  Then we could make off-topic friendly 
comments without too much worry about disturbing serious discussion 
threads, while keeping said comments 'in the thread'.  Just thinking 
out loud.

Brian, To add to your thoughts... It would be nice to be able to 
highlight some portion of the message text and make that white-on-white, 
as a means to achive your goal.  Anyone could then view it, if they 
wanted to.  Right now, the white-on-white is for the entire text 
in the message instead of highlighted sub-text.

Is there a way in ALTME to make all files not download when a user 
is outtside the firewall?

From my experience on Ubuntu, there is not way to cut and paste or 
to click on an http link and launch the page in a browser.

I did this to get it to work:

- installed the missing libstdc++.so.5 using Adept package manager

- copied the entire Altme directory from WinXP to Kubuntu, to a directory 
in my home directory, using rsync

- renamed mods/ directory to old-winxp-mods/ (I think the mod files 
I collected while in WinXP don't apply to the linux version)
That's it. Here I am with all the old messages.

Re-installed on a fresh box and only see messages in 5 groups.... 
what was the trick to make Altme sync?

sometimes logging off and back on a few times helps

to post something to such a group. Ppl mostly posted dot, to not 
distract too much .....

That's all the tricks I know :-(

Other than to log on as a Guest then back on as yourself......But 
this world has no guest account.

The same trick may work if you have two personal accounts (say Maarten 
and Maarten2). Not sure if the Admins will issue a 2nd account even 
if you have a business case.
To see groups that may need resyncing:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp

Just chatting;  Did a security update of the Debian 2.6.18 kernel. 
 (One of the rare tmes where a reboot is good thing.)  This is on 
Dev an old 256 mb Compaq that I run at 0% free memory most days. 
 After the reboot the disk wouldn't stop grinding.  Every move was 
a disk grind.  Start looking through the optimization params.  All 
lookin' good.  Then I realized that I forgot to put Altme back to 
a reasonable number of chat entries.  (I had it cranked to 6 hundred 
to get search to display an old entry).  Back to normal once I set 
Altme back to 1 hundred messages per.  :)  Chatting over.

for Info: To use Altme behind a proxy is use 2 linked apps: "Proxifier" 
to force Altme to use a proxy and "HTTP Tunnel" to bypass the local 
restrictions of the company's proxy.

no as far i know (i've done many test) Altme dosn't work behind a 
proxy

i precise, a proxy which use user/pass authentification

A summary of a message I tried to post to the Mailing List, but the 
ML is a little wonky just now:

ALTME ARCHIVE SEARCH

You may remember that some months ago we added the archives of some 
Altme worlds to REBOL.org...
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-index.r
...and said that a search feature was coming soon.

It did not come soon enough but it is there now:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-search.r

Enjoy using it, and please tell me the bugs you find.

Are you meaning you want the worlds you host to auto-start?  If so, 
simply create a shortcut in your startup folder with the taget field 
equal to;

<path to altme> -s "<worldname>" -p 54xx         ; where -p is a 
port number 5400, increment by 1 for each additional world.  Use 
Safeworlds World Check feature to find out what port your world is 
assigned to  http://www.altme.com/cgi-bin/lookup.cgi, but your world 
must be started for the World Check feature to return the port it 
has registered for the word being checking.

If you search for my name in this group and use the word Port as 
the search term then you will come across a couple of conversations 
on this same topic.

If you have the wrong port number you need to create a new world 
and move the old world data into it.  The world server always maintains 
the port that you originally started the world from, so now they 
are out of synch.

(as previously reported) I regularly (most days) cannot connect to 
RT-hosted Altme worlds between around 18:00 and 24:00 utc.
The logon hangs with an "internet busy" message.

I've  no idea why. I have no such problem with IOS servers hosted 
by RT.

Evenings would generally be my most productive time for REBOL-related 
community things .... so it's a pity :-(

hmm, I am a clever guy, right? :-) Here's my packet sniff using WireShark 
(Ethereal):


cmd: open data: ["testik" 0].cmd: lookup data: [new 64#{xRXJdGGJkqhVd9WK5FzbXXZdT9o=}] 
.cmd: info data: [64#{oCjeSRyaoHOn75+8XOLs3tfSXalI1/XH} 192.168.0.136 
5400 1.2.13 0 *].cmd: lookup data: ok .

sunanda, I'm posting a bug report

Are you kidding? That, and a better "notifier."

Thanks Henrik: <<sunanda, I'm posting a bug report>>
I already did too!

Does right mouse click copy to clipboard work for you? As for me, 
for few versions already, I have a problem with that. Dialog box 
appears, but there is not text in the clipboard ....

I now have a zillion red groups.

Plus a lot of wrong settings (like the last two pressed of enter 
transmitted the line)


But I do have a dozen or so groups with messages I'd never seen from 
up to two months ago.....It was drastic but it has fixed the resync 
bug for me, at least for a while.