AltME groups: search

Here's a very simple skimp session:
  1. start it
  2. create an index called %my-index and add two docs to it
  3. search %my-index for the word "words"

   do %skimp.r
   skimp/add-words %my-index "doc1" "these are the words in doc1"

   skimp/add-words %my-index "doc2" "and these are the words in doc2"
   probe skimp/find-words %my-index ["words"]


(In real life, it may be a little more complicated as you may want 
to set some config options).

Skimp already, in effect has a plugin: make-word-list. That defines 
what a "word" is.


One way to implement stemming would be to make stemming a plugin 
to make-word-list. But I have not really thought about that yet:

http://www.rebol.org/documentation.r?script=make-word-list.r

I needed a specific stemmer ... porter stemmer fits english well 
but not so my language and I needed to do a lot of synonims for specific 
field search was used in

For anyone that needs a backlink to their REBOL related pages of 
their website, I offer a REBOL links thread here http://www.tretbase.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33

Good idea Paul.....

Another opportunity to present yourself to the world in a REBOL context 
is the members' pages at REBOL.org. Also highly friendly to Google 
and other search engines (No 1 in in Google for [I've tinkered with 
a lot of different languages] :-)
http://www.rebol.org/lmp-index.r

You do not have to be a script contributer to have a library member's 
page.

ah, slipping a little, now 'I've tinkered with a lot of different 
languages' is listed as the second page in Google!  ;-)

Anyone here have a patent and if so, where is your patent?  US, elsewhere, 
etc...    Also, what concerns did you have when you filed your patent 
or problems you faced?

I hold patents in many fields, and around the world.  Costs are tricky. 
 In general, a patent is not worth it in the big scheme of things. 
 You best have something amazing.  Today, coming up with a patent 
in compression  would not really matter, since it would just annoy 
people, i.e. the Unisys patent inside GIF.


Let's say you came up with a way to make something 50% smaller even, 
but if you patent it, and no one will touch it, does it really matter? 
 And then, WHO would touch it, knowing that it is not open?  Is it 
really worth it.  Keep in mind, I made a lot of money specifically 
selling compression technology.  If you did much better, like 70% 
over the next best open system, then it might become worth something.


You have to weigh the value.  But figure to file outside of America 
will cost half again what it cost in America.  That can range from 
you doing it your self (a few grand all said, to an average of $8K 
- $12K ).


I personally have never paid less than $20K just in America. But 
my patents tend to be well researched (better than most people do 
for their patents).

The patent "search" is the expensive part.

Well the way I look at it - if I do get compression working then 
I'm willing to pay $10k for a patent and go after patents for it 
internationally.   I think it will market if it works.

You would have to defend the patent as well, if you want to keep 
it valid. That may cost way more than the patent itself. I personally 
think that patenting an algorithm is a surefire way of avoiding widespread 
use.

Would patenting a compression algoritm be a "software patent" ?

yes - patenting algorithms is something that only the USA seems to 
be doing.. it gets a little stupid in the end..

Thanks for the comments.  Regarding protection of patents - this 
is an area where I believe the patent search is important.  If your 
lawyers have done a good patent search then I think the only defense 
your doing is for those that are infringing on your patent.  In which 
case I think you stand to make MORE $$$ if that is the case.

Paul, forget patents. Not worth. I hold 13, costs a lot, takes endless 
time and if a big player is infringing it you won't have enough $$$ 
to get your rights.

paul, what robert mean is that a patent is worthless until you have 

enough power to defend it. Unfortunatly I have the same experience,

to expensive and if a real big player like to take it, they will 
get 

it even if it takes years, your money and nerves. there are enough

simple and dirty tricks to dry you out. only speed helps here in 
my
opinion.

A great example is the RIM patent infringement - they got away with 
it until theyw ere big enough and then simply paid.

The idea of having a patent seems great, and can be very exciting. 
I'm co-inventor on one--just granted--and the company got together 
to discuss whether it was worth it to go international, add a continuation, 
etc. It's a long process, and has taken many years and a lot of money 
to get to this point. 


As we talked, we looked at who might pay for it. To make it worthwhile, 
we would need to go after big companies who would fight tooth and 
nail, and cost everybody more money and time. The best hope is to 
get *one* big company to acquire it for a reasonable sum, and let 
them add it to their arsenal for bartering and battle with other 
big companies. Other than that, it may keep our small competitors 
at bay in that area.


For us, it's clear that we would rather be doing real work than fighting 
legal battles. 


So, the product will now have a patent # associated with it, rather 
than "patent pending", and maybe we'll make something on it, but 
nobdoy is planning to get rich on licensing it.

Yeah, I'm thinking you guys are right which is why if I get my stuff 
to a point of production that I'm not going to go with a patent and 
sell it to Microsoft.

Hmmmm.  Ok,  let me go confirm a couple of things, and then I will 
honour your request, figure 24 hours...

Nope he purposely did it.  He is not supposed to be doing such things. 
  He didn't even have to come into the group so his spamming argument 
is a pathetic attempt for sympathy.

Exactly what you did Graham.  You deleted groups.  Your not a master.

Who knows how many Graham.  You deleted !Compression which was a 
private group that people could have opted out of.  Your the first 
person I know that just went around deleting groups because it didn't 
FIT your perspective of how this world should operate.

I have no need to Graham. I spoke the TRUTH and your a LIAR!

Yes it is.  We call Pharisee's vipers also - have a problem with 
that?

Graham, if you don't like me being a Christian then that doesn't 
give you a right to delete my group especially when it had nothing 
to do with Christianity at all.

It looks like everyone was just opted out of !Compression, Politics, 
and a couple others.  I just tested by opting myself out of !Cheyenne, 
and it also disappeared from my list after I logged back in twice. 
 (First time, it was greyed out, then second time it vanished)

You can only recreate a group, if it has been deleted, I think. Maybe 
we were just kicked?

Is someone still in these groups?

If no, then  probably soneone made a mistake, if yes, then there 
was a selection.

The only two not in "Math" is Paul and Dockimbel. Paul choosed himself 
not to be in "Math". I know this, because I asked him privately. 
Later Doc was excluded from "Math". It can't have been Paul, who 
excluded Doc, as Paul wasn't in "Math". So either Doc choosed himself 
to not be in "Math" or someone kicked him. I've asked Doc privately 
to figure this out.

(Or it could be a mistake by someone or an error in AltME.)

Maybe Reichart has a backup ready? :-)

There is a Compression group still existing, and it is set as public 
- all users should see it.

AFAIK, even if you are booted from a private group the messages are 
still on your local drive.

Some time ago there was a debate (dunno what group it was in) about 
making online tutorials. Could you please suggest me some tool? On 
of my folks used Wink tool, but I am not satisfied with the result, 
but maybe he just applied wrong settings - the letters could not 
be read, unless I enlarged it to 150%, but then it did not fit the 
screen .... I don't need voice, I would be OK with titles, and ability 
to let user read the comment, and then press some button to proceed 
...

I'll do me very best to tread here lightly...


- First, I have no direct control over this world, but will indeed 
try to help.


- Paul, it is a little bit like an "after school special TV show" 
when you accuse someone without knowing for sure.  It might all fit 
for you, but perhaps siding with best in your fellow man would serve 
you better than siding with the worse?


- If I were to make a guess here, someone, not understanding the 
interface to remove themselves from a bunch of groups, might have 
in fact gone out and deleted them instead, and may not even realize 
they did this.

I'm looking for a free server which allows rebol cgi.  I want to 
start coding a new site for all my work, rebol, music, visual arts, 
blogs, etc...  does anyone have free space/bandwidth on a server 
they can share?

I'll be purchasing a Domain name for it once setup.

it seems the shortest path these days is something like a linode 
VPS, but of course there will be a monthy fee for that too. The advantage 
is that you can pay per month, if you only need a month for testing 
a site, it'll cost 20 $.

If you are good with linux (command line) this one is the cheapest 
and offers the most, but you have to know your way around linux a 
little better than Linode or Slicehost  
http://prgmr.com/xen/

(install xwindow server I meant -- I am not a linux pro)

there are a couple of videos on linode's site. if you follow them, 
the setup is frightningly simple.

this is insane!  my 8 year old could setup a web-visible server in 
minutes.

I use a minimal 32-bit debian. Worked immediately.

Maxim, I played around with the X Window system on a Linode 360. 
If I remember correctly I was able to get REBOL/View running on it.

setting up and booting a vps on linode takes exactly 4 mouse clicks! 
 and you can log into it using ssh right there and then !  :-)  this 
is going to be really nice.

yep, for 20$ a month per 200mb transfer, its pretty cheap.  obviously, 
you are sharing CPU bandwith, but for most uses, this is a non-issue, 
unless you have a heavily visited site (several hundred hits a minute)

Pekr, I decided against buying a new HD for my old server. The Linode 
is much cheaper and there is of course much more bandwidth. I think 
there is a big advantage to it.

I'm like a Ghost

technology is surprising sometimes...   my DNS provider just sent 
me a mail to confirm my phone number.... 
- I click on the link in the mail, 

- a web page opens up with a form to verify my number (it was wrong!)
- I click a little link that says... call now!

- not 1 second after hitting the link, *my phone actually rings* 
and it spells out a magic number

- the next web page that arrives after "call now!", has a field to 
enter the number!
- press submit.
- done!

the most advanced captcha I've seen so far.


this mixing of web and physical space is always a bit strange... 
is it not?

my cellphone provider does this type of thing .. sends me a  passkey 
to my cell to enter online.

what was a bit unsettling was the speed at which their server called 
me when I hit call now... I think the phone wrang before the page 
refresh occured!

That's a good school, congrats. What are you studying?

Computer Science - I just finished my third year as an undergrad. 
 Just one more to go - I don't plan on doing any more school after 
getting a B.S., at least not for a while.

Chicago :-) I think of gansters 80 or so years ago and ... Al Bundy. 
I know, probably a cranky view. How is Chicago?

I'm in Bartlett, it's about 45 minutes to an hour on average by car. 
 A couple times it's taken about an hour and a half, though.  Also, 
I don't have my own car - there's 3 vehicles to share among 5 people 
in my family.

Yeah. I live on the north edge of the city, my parents live in a 
west suburb (Naperville, not the furthest west), and it's an hour 
drive each way. Between gas and tolls it costs me $12-16 to visit 
my parents. I have friends who live 260 blocks from me.

Owning a car is very expensive in Chicago because the traffic and 
parking rules are defined by the Department of Revenue - lots of 
bogus charges and tickets.

I suppose the amount of highrises in Chicago creates a different 
street environment than Copenhagen, that AFAIR is a very flat city.

Kind of the same is going on here. Parking is getting more and more 
expensive to get the cars out of the city. It's free to use the roads 
though. You only pay, if you cross the large bridge to go to Fyn 
and Jutland. I use a motorbike, train/bus or bike. It's free to park 
a motorbike, so less exensive.

People tend to either use cars or public trans, but less often both. 
Neighborhoods with easy access to public trans (particularly trains) 
tend to not have parking, and vice versa. I live in a rare neighborhood 
with both.

Yeah, loop traffic is a little to scary for your averave biker. That's 
why every bike messenger I know is likely clinically insane :)

Is a block a standard size?

Well, my roommate and a friend did bike from IIT to O'Hare and back 
once - from Midnight to about 8 AM

I often hear "a couple of blocks away" in US TV shows, but I have 
no idea how big a block is. :-)

A friend from Texas got confused once, because apparently we're one 
of the few places in the US that measures distance in units of time. 
 I'd never even thought much of it.

The scale on Google Maps looks like most are around 400 feet, but 
there's the river that messes it up, and some locations have a slightly 
different layout...  Unfortunately, that's the best I can do

Our cities are not lined up like yours. Ours are just a mess of roads 
going in all directions. :-) It's because our cities are maybe 1000 
years old, and the roads were never straighten. I've heard, some 
danes find the US way more practical and makes it easier to travel 
around. Others find our way more charming.

Winding roads in a city make it more fun to explore - "Wait a minute, 
how'd we get over here?"

Most of the outer suburbs are laid out at random. The city is a grid, 
with some occasional diagonal weirdness for indian trails.

I've found Bartlett too, a little north of Naperville.

I've only been there once. It was enjoyable, but I prefer my homeland 
a little west from there. :-)

Birmingham (Alabama) is even by US standards, a new city.  Designed 
around the placement of a railroad junction where in the hills there 
was a confluence of iron ore, coal and limestone.  It's a grid system 
as much as the hills flanking it permit.  The hills - long ridges 
at the tippy-tail of the Appalachians - form a stark barrier between 
the town and the spidery suburbs.

And of course, half the traffic are huge trucks or SUVs.  And noone 
thinks twice about opening a car door on you as you pass a parked 
car...


I expect every city you have to be agressive to cycle consistently. 
 I do envy those that live in cities that encourage cycling - evident 
in the Copenhagen pics above...

One of the new initiatives to "fight" the depression here is to build 
a cycle way from the top of the country to the bottom.  I expect 
though you'll still have to catch the ferry to get across Cook Strait.

montreal claims to have the most bicycle paths in any north american 
city.  we even are closing streets and completely removing parking 
downtown for bicycle lanes.


note montreal is a 365 day/year bicycle city... that include when 
there are blizzards, litterally  :-)  they have winter tires with 
studs for sale during the winter  :-)  people are just nuts.

and we really have quite a selection of pretty women ;-) ... people 
from the states coming in for training sessions, always marvel at 
how women here are at ease, varied in style, and usually pretty charming.

and some paths actually go for like 80km from top to bottom... 


in the state, we even have regional paths crossing entire regions... 
everywhere... you can litterally pedal several hundred kilometers 
in a pretty straight line many directions  :-)

yep... get a mountain bike   ;-)

too bad there's no F1 this year... (in montreal) we won't be able 
to walk on ferrari street for a whole week... imagine, its been said 
by pilots, that montreal was the favorite spot for partying on the 
F1 championship after monaco.

2 of my 3 children born in Montreal but both declined to go to U. 
there ... I don't get back often ... I always found spring too short: 
a long winter and suddenly its summer and hot and muggy (not like 
St Louis or Memphis, but still ...)  Fall was usually great - and 
biking and skiing in the Laurentides - I started out in Levis, but 
only spent one summer at U. Laval ... in German - and one summer 
in college up in Lac St Jean (no English spoken up there ! )

yep if you stray to far from montreal... english weeds out pretty 
quick.. a part from the eastern townships... which basically follow 
the US border.

and yes... seasons are a constant race  ;-)

Unflat countries can make some effort too (see map -- it's a 35.meg 
PDF linked to from thism page):
http://www.sustrans.co.uk/what-we-do/national-cycle-network

Designed by someone with a dark sense of humour?

[I'm sure I posted this a few days ago....Perhaps the resync bug 
ate it]

On the R3 Alpha page, Carl name checks a couple of Windows sandboxes: 
Sandboxie and DropMyRights. Anyone have experience of using these?
http://www.rebol.net/wiki/R3_Alpha

Scheduler library released (see Announce channel). A few words about 
that :


- it allows you to program deferred tasks (like night batchs or short-term 
tasks like sending a mail in 10 minute from now).

- it's feature-close to CRON or QUARTZ java library (not covering 
100% yet).

- it needs a lot of additional testing before using it in production 
for critical tasks.

- some issues are not yet addressed like tasks execution overlapping 
over other tasks events, daylight saving gaps or system time changes.
- minimum delay between 2 events is 1 second.

- maximum delay between 2 events is 9999 hours (a little more than 
a year)

- event loop is currently a custom one, next version will add 'do-events 
patching for a easier and more transparent integration with View 
or network apps.

Btw, it started as a simple extension for UniServe kernel, but I 
was keeping adding features...now it might have a broader usage, 
so I decided to release it as a standalone library.

Am I a spammer? Perhaps the truth is out there:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/23017/am-i-a-spammer

Perhaps someone else  could have a go at answering some of the outstanding 
and/or poorly answered questions regarding REBOL:
   http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=rebol&tab=newest

is it just me or is stack overflow generating a hell of a lot of 
new users for the language?

not every one is a developper by trade.

is it just me or is stack overflow generating a hell of a lot of 
new users for the language?


As I see it, it's mostly the same person asking REBOL questions on 
stackoverflow, the reboltutorial guy. How did you come to the conclusion 
with lots of new users?

I didn't look at all the names... but I did notice a few names I 
had never seen before...  the few times I went to that site...  after 
posting this I saw that most of the replies where from known REBOL 
experts.


I guess its attracting some people, maybe not as much as I initially 
imagined...

Greg Higley has asked a few REBOL questions on Stackoverflow.
http://stackoverflow.com/users/27779/gregory-higley

It looks like just him and Reboltutorial are trialing Stackoverflow 
as a place for REBOL questions.


I am not convinced the competitive points scoring paradigm of Stackoverflow 
currently fits the more "amicable experts"  character of the REBOL-specific 
forums that exist.


I will attempt to answer questions on Stackoverflow as I am also 
critical of the somewhat unoutreaching character of most REBOL-specific 
forums [darknet / gated communities are terms that have been used]. 
But I am not greatly hopeful that Stackoverflow will become the premier 
destination site for REBOL questions....


....Thus leading to the obvious question: what should be that site? 
Maybe it is time to build it!

[continuing a discussion from Core].....The occasional code golf 
type quiz can be fun, but only if the enough of the expert REBOLers 
have time to drop by and try their hand. Generally, I think they 
are more likely to respond to real problems rather than quizzes, 
but I am happy to be proved wrong.


BC – if you have an idea or two for a good round of Golf, we could 
start with a couple of new [web-public] groups here....It would not 
quite be as nice a website as (say) http://golf.shinh.org/but it 
would help gather the requirements and gauge the interest in a REBOL 
golf website.

Why not use easy puzzles then, then you don't need experts. Codegolf.com 
has a lot of really easy puzzles that everyone can solve, the focus 
lies more on how you solve them, not if you solve them and personally 
I like that approach better than bashing my head against the table 
for hours until I can finally start writing code. I really liked 
the 99 bottles of beer puzzle for example. You don't have to think 
about how you can solve it at all. You could just use a single print 
statement that outputs the lyrics in one go. The thinking comes when 
you try to make the code smaller.

I've even seen a karaoke version using tones and bouncing ball DOS 
graphics in the wee days of turbo C  :-D

As for the code golfing, it might also be a good idea to use popular 
topics as a theme. A puzzle that makes use of an API like Twitter, 
YouTube, Flickr, Facebook etc. REBOL seems to be pretty good in the 
internet/Network department, so why not make use of it? Those websites 
are popular for a reason. This could also end up producing some more 
libraries to easily use REBOL with popular APIs.

In Hackety Hack (an app that teaches Ruby programming to kids) one 
of the first examples was how to use Ruby to mash up YouTube with 
the iTunes Top 10 music titles. You ended up getting a list of music 
videos for those top ten songs. It was just 5 lines or so and was 
pretty cool. I wrote an article a year ago teaching Shoes (a Ruby 
GUI toolkit) that mashed up YouTube with Twitter to show you videos 
of the current buzz on the net. Something like that is pretty easy, 
takes just a few lines, but the results are actually usable and fun.

rebol tutorial has a twitter api under 10 lines IIRC