AltME groups: search

yeah anton, i lost a lot of important emails by doing a backup without 
checking the files first...

And *test* your backups! Did a medium-size system for a big bank. 
Ran great for 3+ years, they changed the network, glitched something, 
went to the backup and found that the archive software was set to 
remove all blank space (e.g. nulls) from files. Every backup for 
3 years had "compressed" the DB files in a way that made them useless.

I totally agree that AltME could be built in such a way that the 
peers can suppliment the data back, you might as an example simply 
check the integrity of everyone's copy, and accept data when three 
or more people agree on the data.

this is a problem?

Actually it has not been suggested that I remember.  Every once in 
a while I go through here and cull features though.

I need a solution that can hold alot of content that might be generated 
in one day - far more than we generate in the REBOL world in one 
day.

Also which there was a [quote][/quote] feature

I should have clarified a bit more.  I'm looking for an ALTME like 
solution

Actually, I would like to see an ALTME that is like a cross between 
PHPBB and MSN messengers interactivety

like I said, send me a spec.

do you have a customer, or is this just speculation?

so a 1 off?  are you going to make revenue with it?

churches find it a way to keep the youth involved.

I mean people are there at the forum it seems like 24 hours a day

well, send me a spec that is simple...not a long list, and what you 
want that AltME doesn't offer.

like Jim Carey when he gets to play "God" for a while and answers 
6 biliion emails, right?

These logs should merely just be html filtered and posted with a 
cron job then.

Reichart said if you were smart you could make a forum that would 
post to AltME as well as read AltME worlds but I'm not sure just 
where you what angle you would take to make that happen.

MASLOW'S MOTIVATION THEORY

The eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow postulated that people are 
animals who continually want.  No matter how many needs they have 
satisfied at any one time, they constantly struggle upwards to reach 
higher levels.  He classified these needs in a sequence of five levels 
the he referred to as "the hierarchy of human needs".


The FIRST LEVEL is the lowest and most powerful.  Maslow describes 
first level needs as the physiological needs, which include hunger, 
thirst, sex, air and rest.

SECOND LEVEL: Safety and Security - Shelter, clothing, protection 
from enemies.

THIRD LEVEL: Love and Belonging - Acceptance, friendship, lovers, 
family.

FOURTH LEVEL: Esteem - Recognition, respect, achievement, prestige, 
independance, importance, attention and appreciation.

FIFTH LEVEL (Highest): Self-actualizatoin - To develop or achieve 
one's full potential.

Wow, within a few click the whole time!

Currently AltME will choke trying to display the log if your path/to/altme 
includes a space anywhere in it though it does create the page...

i think that's highlighting the users in a private group (you need 
to haev a private group selected)

Yup, it is a sublt way to give you a hint who is and is not part 
of a private group (that you are in).

Looks like I've found a bug in AltMe : Go back to Main menu, change 
the REBOL3 world to REBOL2, launch the connection, when the error 
message is displayed (saying that REBOL2 is unreachable), click on 
"Return to world" => AltMe quits at once. My version is 1.0.1 on 
Windows.

Ok, I still have a problem. I can connect without problem to REBOL-HQ 
while my personal firewall is running. I can't connect to REBOL3 
while it's running. If I disable it, connect to REBOL3 and than enable 
it again. It works.


To me this looks like there is a difference in the login/connect 
process between REBOL-HQ and REBOL3.

Does that mean Josh gets a halo, rather than just a black hat?

she loved her biker like an icon...

 Paul McCartney (has an icon of Mona Lisa with a leather biker hat)

OK, so I'm trying Altme once again ... and here are two ideas which 
might make altme even better
- get a special notice on private messages
- possibility to add a "personal homepage" to a user account

Reichart is resistant to the first idea .. has been made many a time 
by me and others

About notice on private messages, we have alerts, that pop up a window. 
And if you use dividers, the "All Users" dividers will turn red, 
when you get a private message. So there's the notice, you asked 
for.

Reichart is resistant to the first idea .. has been made many a time 
by me and others


Uh, no........I love the idea.  I love the idea so much that when 
we were building our other product the first thing we did was put 
this feature in.  However, on AltME, that is not at the top of the 
list of what we are doing next.

Is there a way to make a horizontal scrolling forum?  Altme should 
do that and become revolutionary.  I think it could be pulled off.

It might be a side feature to something else.

I see the REBOL4 world is still available.  Maybe RT needs to reserve 
a lot of 10.  Just kiddin Carl.  ;-)

Hello. I just created this account here and I have found one problem 
with AltME. It's definitely nothing major seeing as it only applies 
to less than 7% of the people in the world but here it goes. I am 
red-green deficient (partially colorblind) so it's very difficult 
for me to tell which groups have messages that I haven't read yet. 
The red and black almost look identical. Like I said it's nothing 
major but, for the next version would it be possible to change the 
unread messages color? It would help me and just a few other people 
out.

maybe a tree in front of the person's icon, indicating that the view 
is not clear because there are messages stacked in front of the person 
for you to read...or an envelope icon?

and does it allow to create an view of the world, in real time, or 
is that something which can already be done with the altme client 
version, when running a world?

When we have group dividers, why are some groups named with a "!" 
prefix ? I find it annoying when manual searching in alphabetical 
order.

Any flash experts here?  We need a posting tutorial like this one 
: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/posting.php

the ! has sort of become a standard which refers to specific applications, 
instead of just when taking about a topic.  The world masters usually 
add it to a group when they feel it is appropriate.  Basically everything 
that goes into products...

Graham wrote "< than 7% of all people, or all males ?" 

Is there any difference (here).  As a matter of fact, other than 
Cindy, are there any females here?

James, yes, good point, as a general rule I try not to use colour 
alone to denote things.  Oddly, you are the first person to mention 
this.

Please note the 7% issue in your feedback, this will push it up on 
the list (the list is big), but we do fix things in a specific order.

Feature Request:  I'd like a one button push or automtated/timed 
solution to bring up the "Getting Started Window" OR remove focus 
from all groups.  Why?  If you aren't actually using AltME (it's 
running in the background), and you get new messages, the messages 
in the group you are currently 'in' aren't highlighted as new.  Which 
can make it confusing when the tool tells you a new message has been 
received, but you don't see a hightlight on any group (and don't 
check the time on the messages in the 'current' group).

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).

Knock your socks off?  No, perhaps just get rid of a lot of deep 
bugs completely, and enable us to move on to the next stage (applets, 
and applets written by people other than us).

Paul, I help people do that quite often...so if you need ammunition 
to blow them away...I'm only a 4 hour drive away...;-) (I pitch AltME, 
IOS, and other REBOL based technologies...and my road-show is ready 
at a moment's notice)

Reichart, one thing  which I realise as a new world master is the 
lack of being able to integrate the altme product within a larger 
toolset within a company toolset.

this being said, if it can be done as part of your rewrite, the ability 
to run altme on command-line to be able to post to a group, would 
be VERY powerfull.

something like a altme:// protocol loadable within rebol, similar 
to the mySql protocol by Nenad, would be really effective.  reading 
your post from a file browser and saving new posts to it from ANY 
rebol app.    :-)

This is a GREAT feature, and you are talking directly to how I think.

Mmm, so to post a message here you would do this:

Some more ideas:

write altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME/ "message"

Resolved of the first url here to the second url
by the Rebol3 world (local distribution):

altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME/239
is resolved to:
altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/151/239

151 is the set-file number for the !AltME group, and
239 is the message id.

read altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME
;== [set-number 151 first-available-message 1 last-message 242]


So it returns some group info, not the content of all the messages 
!

To get a message:

read altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/!AltME/239

;== [(date) 9 (colour) [font [fg 0.0.0 bg 240.240.240]] "We are working 
towards that."]

To find a user name by the set-number:

read altme://user:[pass-:-Rebol3]/9

;== ["Reichart" [reichart-:-safeworlds-:-com] (membership) (dates etc..)]

can be a disaster, if someone gets password and will script and flood 
channel :-)

If a bad guy discovers the guest/guest logon they can delete every 
group.
Security is not one of Altme's core qualities.

Whether that or not, it creates a problem of scalability.

If 1 in 100 of people who find the guest details are bad guys, then 
any public world has an easily estimated probably lifetime.


(The fact that worlds have been destroyed by hardware failure before 
the bad guys arrived doesn't invalidate that argument -- just highlights 
another security/scalability issue).


And I'm not suggesting that 1/100 of Internet users are bad guys 
-- the bad guys might work harder at finding things to damage than 
the good guys.

I still argue the hardware failure has nothing to do wtih AltME. 
 Since a double blind test shows all software fails this same test.

As to security, that is easy, don't have a guest account.


This "world" is like a Hostel.  People come and go, and if someone 
wants to come in and burn the books one night, they can.


There is no level of security that will stop this.  If I get your 
right password I can destroy your credit rating, blah blah blah.

None of this has anything to do with AltME.


However, we could add more locks to more doors, and that is a different 
issue.  We would thus be changing the philosophy here, which I'm 
open to, but it still needs to be clear this is a different issue 
than is be ascribed to AltME.

moderator would have a short list of things people can do with a 
group.

post, delete, read with each of these being 100% use private list, 
moderator only, others.  so you could have a list which is readable 
by all, postable only by private memembers and deletable only by 
the moderator.

also, moderator, should be a list of users, not just one person.

I forgot that there are a couple of clipboards in X :-/

Yeah, this happens to me too sometimes.  Although I use Word a clipboard 
(spell checking).  Sometimes I grab EVERYTHING and just paste somehere. 
 I have had to get in the habit of NOT hitting send anywhere (not 
just here, but o the web as a whole).

open your prefs.txt file and set:
sound-new-message: %wavefile.wav
It must be a simple wav format, not a compressed format.

There is a great webUI book called "Don't Make Me Think!" ... actually 
the title is probably better than the book, the contents are getting 
a little dated

Yeah, it is on the list, I call it the Knock Knock feature.  The 
way it works is people can actually sign up before even getting into 
AltME from a website if they want.

so, it might be a couple of years before the next release

Reichart -- glad to hear Altme is being actively worked on.  I'd 
got the impression from an earlier message of yours (on REBOL2, maybe) 
that Altme was what we used to call "functionally stabilised" (ie 
dead as a development)

Now about some interim releases? Create a sense of progress and momentum.

Actually quite the opposite.

AltME is being rebuilt form the ground up (which is why we don't 
try to fix every little thing on the current version).


We are building it to allow for the integration of applets, and a 
core messaging system to make it more compatible with external applications 
(for example).

I can state that the the team is in fact working day and night on 
this.  We just don't make a lot of noise when we are working.

Like a Rolls Royce!?

Is there a way for me to make the user column wider by one letter 
...so that the "s" at the end of my name is not orphaned to the next 
line?

Perhaps he doesn't feel that this is a plural society

Of the 5 messages I see of yours right now, the first an fifth have 
the 's' on a newline - the other three have it chopped off...

FYI - My server crashed (win2k) just as I was starting Altme, somehow 
all world data was destroyed, and Altme refused to run.  Required 
a re-install.

print "Play a simple tone..." ; (init event system too)

; Generate a sine wave tone (1 cycle of the wave):
tone: #{}
for phase 1 360 6 [
	val: 32768 + to-integer 32767 * sine phase

 repend tone [to char! to integer! val / 256 to char! to integer! 
 val // 256]
]

; Set up the sound sample parameters:
sample: make sound [
	rate: 44100
	channels: 1
	bits: 16
	volume: 0.5
	data: #{}
]

; Repeat the sine wave for 1000 cycles:
loop 1000 [append sample/data tone]

; Play the tone now:
? sample
sound-port: open sound://
insert sound-port sample
? sample
wait sound-port
close sound-port

sound has a lot of problems:
the .wav data source is modified at loading

a low-q sample seems to force a permanent low-q to all successive 
samples

samples are adapted (=modified) to audio capabilities at first use, 
if 'rate or 'bits are not the default values.

the only way to play samples without these problems is to: 
- open the sound port
- insert a copy of the sample/sound object
- close the port
for each sound.

The modification keeps happening, if you play different samples alternately, 
each sample is modified randomly, converted to a random mode. Gradually 
the sample becomes noisy due to rounding errors in the conversions.

This is a known issue. RT wants to address sound at some point, but 
I'm not sure where it falls in the priority queue.

Antor if you're interested, here's a screenshot of work in progress 
- http://krutek.info/pix/sintezar.jpg

Very nice looking ! May I criticise your knobs though ? They are 
a bit big. Before long, you won't have any room left ! :) I suggest 
make them half the size in width and height.

i love those fancy bars from winamp or wmp how they do that ? how 
they get the khz and hz and all that from the wav file ? suposing 
it is a wav ... (raw or pcm)

fast fourier transformation. no way in current rebol (to much computations). 
On my Athlon XP 1700+ can REBOL do some 3milions computations in 
second (this is very aproximate number, some computaions are more 
time-consuming than other ). May sound like a big number, but if 
sound's sample rate is 44100Hz, there's only some 70 computations 
for each sample. And this is the ideal situation (no GUI and other 
CPU-demanding stuff). So there are two possibilities. 1) Some faster 
math, or JIT REBOL compiler  and 2) wait for faster CPU's. Let's 
see what comes first.

Is there a loop around that?

yes there's a loop

I'm filling a buffer of 256 bytes so I can change parametres in realtime 
(buffer is filled, GUI works again, I can fiddle with knobs) and 
then I add buffer's content to some sound [block!]

I know Rebol quite well but I don't know music. Can anybody point 
me to a white paper/tutorial/newbie docs/samples that explains how 
to valorize sound/data to play some notes? Thank you.

luca: take a look at http://www.rebol.com/docs/sound.html, it's 
googd start. there are examples how to synthetize simple sine wavew 
and how to apply some envelope on it.

kru, would you mind if we use this as a VID showcase in the Wikibook?

will see if I can upload it in a few mins.

uploaded. if you get a new version with a new screenshot, you can 
upload it yourself, but you need an account to upload images... otherwise 
throw the link in the wikibook group

When I create a sound using Rebol, with 2 channels, is it possible 
to access the to channels independently? So as to create a stereo 
effect?

There's some strange conversion always when you play a sound.

Now that's interesting ... 

if I paste your example into a console, I get a very short high beep

if I paste it into a script and do the script, I get a math error! 
(Math or number overflow)

Wait a minute, I'll post fixed version

print "Play a ping sound..." ; (init event system too)

    ; Generate a ping waveform as a binary value:
    ping: #{}
    for amplitude 500 1 -1 [
        for phase 1 360 16 [
            val: 128 + to-integer 127 * sine phase
            val: amplitude * val / 500
            append ping to-char val
            ;append ping to-char 256 - val
        ]
    ]

    ; Set up the sound sample parameters:
    sample: make sound [
        rate: 44100 / 2
        channels: 1
        bits: 8
        volume: 0.5
        data: #{}
    ]

    ; Make the ping sound 10 times:
    loop 10 [append sample/data ping]

    ; Play the sound now:
    sound-port: open sound://
    insert sound-port sample
    wait sound-port
    close sound-port

print "Play a ping sound..." ; (init event system too)

    ; Generate a ping waveform as a binary value:
    ping: #{}
    for amplitude 500 1 -1 [
        for phase 1 360 16 [
            val: 128 + to-integer 127 * sine phase
            val: amplitude * val / 500
            append ping to-char val
            append ping to-char 256 - val
        ]
    ]

    ; Set up the sound sample parameters:
    sample: make sound [
        rate: 44100 / 2
        channels: 2
        bits: 8
        volume: 0.5
        data: #{}
    ]

    ; Make the ping sound 10 times:
    loop 10 [append sample/data ping]

    ; Play the sound now:
    sound-port: open sound://
    insert sound-port sample
    wait sound-port
    close sound-port

Btw, I get different values, and the stereo version plays a sound 
for me

(don't expect that 'bell' sounds like bell, 'violin' like violin 
and so on. it's just a name :-)

That which we call a siren, by any other name would sound as sweet?

Anyway, it works. In the bottom row, there are six buttons. Press 
second button (load sound) and go to %sounds/ directory. Select a 
sound and open it.

Then press fifth button (compute sound) and wait. Press last button 
(play sound, looks like triangle) and it should play a sound.