AltME groups: search

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

ok, I guess I need to read up a bit about this to understand it better.

1. 	A switch to turn off notification about new messages. On XP, 
the minimized window's icon blinks for every new message, which can 
become a little bit annoying.


2. 	A switch to 'subscribe' only selected groups - in a sense of 
"Only mark group with new messages if subscribed". 

 Otherwise, get message silently but don't mark group red for having 
 unread messages.


3. 	A "newer than new" feature: Whilst AltME is online and one is 
working in another app, inform (in a popup window or alike) when 
one returns to it: "New messages in the following groups:" 

 which can easily be clicked away if none of the groups are of special 
 interest.

'dot' it


whenever u feel that AltMe or the world is a bit too quiet.. send 
a dot to yourself..or to some group

I think we may have different definitions of efficient.

To me, using a bit of software as buggy as Altme is not efficient 
- which is why I've never felt able to recommend it as groupware 
(see earlier dicussion).

I've been joining in with the REBOLn worlds because it is useful, 
though painful at times.

The problem, of course, isn't the bugs. It's the rate at which they 
get fixed.

The other day, I cut off my dialup connection about 10 seconds after 
starting AltME. The next day I connected, looked in Advocacy group 
and there were no new messages. I posted a message, and then it synced 
about 10 messages that had occurred during the intervening time. 
Just a bit more feedback on this problem.. in case it helps. I usually 
don't notice any such sync problem.

In Silesion group, late today I will post about what I have in plan 
and will "complain" a bit about IOS ... it is so primitive db vise, 
that it is not much usable ...

parsing binary is a bit different than parsing ASCII...and I have 
done a bit for mp4...but I think your point of making it simple is 
a good thing.

Interfacing with lower-level naguages (such as C) from Rebol looks 
a bit harder but when you gain more experience with it (=no crashes 
anymore ;)) you realize it works logically. I was also dissapointed 
for the firt time I tried to use some DLL. But now I'm more optimistic. 
The only think I miss is the callback handling.

btw, if you have suggestions, please let me know. i'll be working 
a bit more on it on monday.

pow!  all fixed  :-)  just need to let slim  build the new release 
from all the included files and we are set !  I will also be doing 
just a little bit of cleanup within GLayout to reduce the size of 
the final single-file app...

well, I guess that's how things are right now. I do find it to be 
a bit elitist, you have to ask permission to come in here and most 
of the people know each other somewhat.

the IRC channels I visit can be a bit the same. It's like being a 
stranger walking into a bar full of people who know each other very 
well. either you are accepted or not.


The elitist thing is not meant at anyone here, but I think it can 
be seen as elitist from the outside. :-)

so  I ask this, is anyone willing to put a little bit of time where 
their mouth is... and help me organize the content of rebol.org.

I am willing to put a bit of time on structuring a vault of high-quality 
and re-useability functions and toolsets.  Is anyone ready to help 
me put some time on it  ? (speccing, coding, refactoring current 
sources,  and/or management of submission of new code).

Apologies -- REBOL.org was unavailable for just under a day, it's 
back now.

The problem originated with the ISP, and it took them a little while 
to work out what they'd done wrong.

Using a "non-standard" language seems to have added to their debug 
time:
Extracts from two emails from the ISP's technical support:

<<Hi, Sunanda.  Sorry this is taking a bit.  As I'm sure you know 
you have

a non-standard setup :-)  We aren't familiar with it and are puzzling 
it

out.  Am I right that you have your own scripting language?  And 
that
[snipped] is the [path to the] interpreter?>>

<<Aha!  Our web server rebooted yesterday.  It's a FreeBSD server, 
and for

a reason we haven't determined yet, the Linux compatability module

didn't load.  We loaded it and your site works again.  We'll figure 
out
why that module didn't load at boot.>>

Dear Library Team,


   I've only got a single script in the library, but I like it, and 
   I'd like it to live through the R3 update.

Are there any plans for adding explicit rebol versioning to scripts 
that want to stand the test of time?


   Is having multiple binaries on target REBOL platforms a no-no?  Meaning, 
   could the released binary packages for REBOL 3.0 include REBOL 1.3 
   (2.7) executables so scripts don't age out as fast as they did when 
   going from 1.2 to 1.3?  A little bit of configuring on the host OS 
   to start the correct REBOL by extension, shebang, or resource fork 
   on MacOS?  Can DO add a secret launch of older/other binary if a 
   Needs: is specified?

Curious.

That's a nice idea for a sort of "REBOL explainer" application.
But it would be difficult to do in the Library.

The Library does attempt to load and parse scripts -- that's how 
we do the colorisation. But (as with Gabriele's code) we rely on 
REBOL's own reflective abilities to tell us what is a word, function, 
operator etc.

The Library runs an old version of Core (and even if we update that, 
we'd never run a version of View on a webserver) so it does not have 
access to all the information a proper explainer.highlighter would 
need.
Take this script for example:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?color=yes&script=reboldiff.r

'new-line is a valid REBOL word, but it is not colored: that's because 
it is not a word in the version we use.

So sadly, the colorisation at REBOL.or remains a nice bit of eye 
candy rather than a solidly dependable feature.

Gregg, the Tiscali server (or network) was a bit slow last night. 
Try the links again, if you had trouble.

I prefer the color-code scheme over the VIM scheme (don't like the 
pink), but as long as it isn't too bright most anything should be 
OK. 


It would be interesting to do some research on using different rendering 
schemes for code, based on activity. For example, when writing and 
maintaining code, I like comments in gray, so they "fade out" a bit; 
but if you're reading code, in a Literate Programming sense, you 
probably want the prose to stand out and the code to be subordinate.

First example with test of colors: http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/example.html

My idea is to build an example, that satisfies the need. Then I look 
at implementation for the Library, so sources in the library can 
be viewed this way.


Maybe refinements shouldn't be that yellow!? Should background be 
a little gray like this? #f9f9f9 Or should it be white? The purple 
and blue might be a bit too bright compared to the red and green? 
Or should the red and green be brighter?

Regarding my css "Suggested standard" in the Libarary, I think, the 
red for values is a bit too dark. Also the orange for refinements 
seem a bit too light.

I liked this one from Dave Mills NTP RFC1305...
There will exist an 200-picosecond interval,

henceforth ignored, every 136 years when the 64-bit field will be 
zero
and thus considered invalid.

Let's look at bit closer at the REBOL header block and licenses. 
In the library (http://www.rebol.org), REBOL scripts have a library 
entry in the header, and it contains a field named "license" with 
about 10 different possibilities. Is it enough to specify the license 
like that, or do we have to put a license text and/or warranty in 
the header of our scripts? Not just in the library but in general. 
Does anyone know, or should we ask an attorney?

Results of a tiny bit of debugging on the ascii chars problem:
-- problem seems to be at the input stage:

     -- if you have exended ascii characters (top bit set, like the 1/4 
     used in the script) what we get from the webserver is bad (extra, 
     unexpected extended ascii chars)

    -- only download is (visibly) affected, although the extra extended 
    ascii chars are present in the text streams

     -- though there is some REBOL mezz code (decode-cgi) that may be 
     doing something I do not understand

    -- I can replicate the problem with both Apache and Xitami which 
    suggests the problem may be in REBOL rather than a given server.


-- the quick fix would be to add accept-charset="ISO-8859-1" to the 
<form ....> or <textarea ....>

    -- but that stops all extended ascii, including the ones we want. 
    So we won't do that.

-- the slower fix has yet to emerge from the available options.

does not support UTF-8

 - what do you mean by "support"? if you mean having native encoders/decoders, 
 no, it does not. but, utf-8 is just 8 bit characters, and it is backwards 
 compatible with ascii. if you can handle ascii, and leave alone any 
 char > 127, you already support utf-8.

Sadly, REBOL running as CGI under the two servers I've tested (Apache 
and Xitami) does not seem to support the whole range of ASCII -- 
ASCII chars with the 8th bit set seem to cause problems.

I don't know where the problem really is, but right now, we do not 
even support 8-bit ASCII, let alone anything more modern :-)

Sunanda, can you publish some files with the 8-bit ascii and note 
what the problems are ?

I think the root of the problem is that when the Library system was 
first written, no account was taken of character encoding. As a result, 
not only is the data encoded as it was when originally submitted 
but the method of encoding is not even known.


Whatever charset is specified in the http header is not going to 
be correct for all scripts and messages. Using charset=utf8 seems 
to cause the least problems. Though for example, it will cause many 
ISO-8859-1 "high bit" characters to be incorrectly displayed.

Do you have any stats on how many 'high bit' characters are now contained 
in Library content?

Sunanda, you're right about that ascii-math.r file. When I clicked 
the [Download script] link, the browser (konqueror) downloaded and 
directly opened it with the editor (SciTE). SciTE thought it was 
8-bit ascii, and showed the characters incorrectly. All I had to 
do was change the file encoding from 8-bit to utf-8 and the characters 
appeared correctly. I guess the editor had no way of determining 
the encoding, and incorrectly guessed 8-bit ascii.

It seems the responsibility lies with the clients to interpret encodings 
properly. As we move to a unicode world, software assuming 8-bit 
encodings are some ASCII encoding should drop off. But until the 
transition is complete, there's not much we can do about client software 
guessing wrong like that, except stating the encoding in the script 
header, in the web page that provides the download link, and by helping 
confused newbies.

Ok, so there are some editors which don't support unicode, don't 
guess encoding correctly, or can change encoding only with difficulty.

How about this suggestion; if a rebol.org script is known to be UTF-8, 
then an additional link should appear:

[Download as ASCII] download-a-script?script-name=ascii-math.r&encoded-as=8-bit-ascii
which transcodes a UTF-8 file to ASCII.
Just have to get a conversion function in place for this to work.

I understand what you mean, and obviously the definition of "legacy" 
is a bit fuzzy.

That helps.  since this one is such a pain we like to know everything 
about it.  Eveyr little bit helps.  But we are not convinced it is 
inside AltME.  it might be a little deeper.

I am not sure if I am wrong or not, but Open Office 2.0 should be 
a bit different - both faster, more MS Office compatible, but should 
also support open document format. If so, it is good for open office 
...

gen-html doesn't even have a tag for enum2 or enum3 (but have to 
study a bit more

Doc.   my very competent db admin, told me that it could simply be 
an issue that the client is expecting a reply from the sql server 
too quickly and that it is likely a simple timeout issue.  HTH.  
 if there is a way to let the tcp wait a bit more, it could be that 
the fraction of a second more needed might be all that is required.

It could be RT, or they could come from 3rd parties.  I guess the 
answer is time will tell. You can certainly express your views and 
requests to RT, they may change direction based on customer input. 
However the directions is a bit blurry right now.

what is your common rebol syntax you use mySQL driver with? I find 
it a bit difficult to use Doc's block mode, as I have to provide 
it with exactly the same amount of question marks, as there is amount 
of columns in the table (talking of insert here)

I fixed the protocol .... just latest bit is needed :-)

The BeOS efforts are fractured, but Haiku seems to be doing quite 
well. Nevertheless, they're far behind Syllable. They can test parts 
on BeOS, but their own system is only running at a very basic level. 
They do have interesting pieces of code, and quite a bit of it at 
that. They use a BSD license,  so any code we want, we can integrate 
into Syllable. :-) Soon we will release a port of the OpenBFS file 
system for Syllable

fig yes. and every compiler-bit can be reused in the application 
as a menu-system :)

BZip2 compresses quite a bit better than Zip, and the CDs are fairly 
big, so...

VMware supports just about any Linux as a client with no difficulty. 
However, it requires a bit of hacking and testing to host VMware, 
so they have only done so on a few stable, commercial distributions 
like RedHat and SUSE.

This may be a wild goose hunt. Hard to say. I'd just like to have 
something a bit more standard for our Linux distro.

Let me back up a bit.  No Linux wars here please.  I have about 10 
different Linux distros running..

So, I studied the situation a bit, and found that Debian is really 
the meat behind a lot of these distros, and someone I trust suggested 
that Debian made a better dev platform and would provide the perfect 
build standard for us.

Bit confused by that.

in your case though... updating the glibc is a bit risky, i remember 
completely trashing a version of RH (or was it Mandrake?) by just 
a glibc update. it was a long time ago though.

so to enter directory, I need to set x bit for it?

thanks ... the problem probably was, that for a directory, there 
needs to be "execute" bit set, or you can't enter it ...

lower s it the "sticky" bit for dirs to cause item under them to 
take on the same permissions and ownership
only applies to directories owner and group (but effects files)


upper case S I am not recalling off the top of my head ... applies 
to files  scriptable or sockets or something

I thought the sticky bit is T?

on solaris sticky bit is 's'  i would be suprised if linux strayed 
that much

write access means you can add files to the dir, but to write on 
them you need to be able to access files in the dir which is the 
execute bit. i think you can probably use the touch command to create 
new files on dirs with rw- (not sure though) but for complete access 
to a dir you need rwx.

I have an  AMD 64 bit Acer laptop running Mandriva and have no problem 
running Rebol/Altme but I use KDE so not sure what would happen if 
 you tried to used another windows manger with it

Rebolek, yes there is a 64 bit version

together with a bit unix for copy/deep test-directories and a diff 
later.

in the moment i play a little bit with xml-parse.r, it has a lot 
of things done, some are still open (like  <!ENTITY ...> parsing) 
and it is like SAX - I try to implement some handlers to learn REBOL, 
but it's still in progess. A benefit of xml-parse is, that there 
would be only one parser and some kind of standard API and the handler 
could then generate rebxml or some other desired format

Geomol, just looked over rebxml...  I've build a similar engine, 
even simpler actually.  but it might become a little bit smarter 
in a few weeks... maybe supporting more of the XML 1.0 specs like 
&chars conversion and such.

this group exists for a long time, and IIRC initially we were more 
or less discussing rebol - XML interoperability - SAX or DOM parser 
in rebol .... while from what is being discussed now, sounds like 
slightly bit different topic?

Jaime: that's what I meant too. But the discussion jumps around quite 
a bit and as some of these terms are unfamilar (besides the simple 
I know what you're talking about) - it's hard to know what to vote 
for :-).

it turns out that i can do tree rewriting as a subset of dialect 
rewriting. it's a bit tricky but works well.

The HTML Dialect can do a bit of XML

wait a bit, I'll find it - it was cool stuff from XML REBOL guru. 
That person used it for his work ...

All the 'into values are a bit of a pain, but work can be broken 
up...

That makes life a bit simpler.....Objects with year-long lifespans 
can be harder to manage :)

I use blocks, although a bit slower to access, they are faster for 
big loads cause thery require less ram and do not required binding 
which is a big issue on large XML blocks.

if possible, also bring a bit better video and audio recording equipment. 
I liked last years videos, but the quality was poor

so far 8 people sent in the survey email. we need a bit more to decide 
for dates and so on.

Just did. Magic has a nice set of HTML functions but the drawback 
is that you need a daemon for session management, which won't work 
in a shared hosting env and is harder to keep alive. But is seems 
a bit more complete, so provided that you'll do the 3.5 translation 
as well I'd be happy to include it.

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.

but because there's no difference in speed of integer and FP math 
in REBOL, everything is done in FP sou it's needed to convert FP 
to 16-bit integer

You can change waves, adjust modulation, filter, envelopes, wave 
shaper, bit crusher and so on...

As you add together a larger number of waves, you will find the maximum 
amplitude is typically much less than the total of all the wave amplitudes. 
It might be easier to generate all the samples of the complex wave 
(using decimal!/float), keeping track of the maximum value, then 
scaling it to 8 or 16 bit integers afterwards. It would be nice to 
have a precise mathematical way of calculating the maximum peak values 
in advance, though...

hmm, I never thought about it, but you are probably right - I tought 
one of my friends rebol for quite some time, and he was always nervous 
a bit, when I told him - look, there is special function for that 
....

Ok. So moslty imperative programming languages. To get the gist of 
rebol I think you need to study a bit of the functional approach.

Because C is a good abstraction of current hardware architectues. 
(It is a just bit better than assembly).

If I had time I will translate the examples there to Rebol. Maybe 
you can do that while you learn. I can help you. My first attemp 
was to make the Class Factory from the book. I got it. However Oz 
the language of the book has bit better security than Rebol. But 
any how I was able to do this and in the process I learn a lot of 
good programming techniques.

I am hoping that this will help adoptance a bit.

oops  typed a bit too quickly...	

do %slim.r
slim/open 'liquid 0.6.4

oops  typed a bit too quickly...	

do %slim.r
liquid: slim/open 'liquid 0.6.4

*little bit

i've worked a bit on an MSX emulator in Rebol

a little bit

so... its a bit tough at first, cause you can't just go in and start 
off quickly... especially since some coding practices have to change 
to adapt to the paradigm... but in the end, you have no cleanup phase. 
 so its a fair tradeoff...

thanks  :-)  took a bit of tweaking to get the stuff sorted out, 
but I'm starting to get the hang of AGG.

watching video, editing photos, chatting on icq, altme, a little 
bit of rebol coding, browsing web :-)

excellent - most sites are just reference to hotel search portals. 
 It would be really nice guys, if you would manage some eventual 
hotel discounts for conference participants. Well, maybe a good idea 
would be to advertise DevCon a bit, to know how many ppl would attend. 
Or you can do it other way - reserve e.g. 30 rooms, and use FIFO 
(first in first out) - even email would work to book room, no form 
needed ...

Usually hotels will hold a block of rooms until about 2 - 3 weeks 
prior to the event.  We used a about 20 rooms in the previous two 
years so asking for 30 would work.  I did notice while in Paris last 
year that there are many small hotels and the larger hotels can be 
a bit pricey.  I think it does benefit to have the attendees stay 
in the same hotel.

I really do worry about conference a bit. No proper activity/propagation, 
call for sessions. The only one session so far is Carl's R3 introduction 
.... Hopefully it will all come ...

yeah it's a bit like that.

not just people who have spare time cause their lives are bit less 
"filled"...

its getting a bit last minute IMHO.

Sooo the conference starts in 20 minutes ... no live stream yet, 
I am a bit worried :-)

video is pinky, sounds is good, although a bit jerky from time to 
time ...

I'm actually in Ottawa, Canada, the down-under was a bit of joke 
about being from where I "don't get much sun"

completely beat any of my efforts.  It has opened some new interesting 
doors for me, though (now learning Openlaszlo,  Red5 server, some 
Java, and Openmeetings - that's the next best platform and bit of 
 software for this type of work).  I'd love to do more work on Rebol 
videoconferencing some day.  I think it'd be a killer app...

Hi Paul - yes, I've been lurking via html :)  Off topic:  I dabbled 
a bit with the Windows API and have a simple working webcam viewer, 
and also a working remote video client that produces usable video 
from simple image refreshes.  I need to explore the audio api to 
understand how to capture and pass audio frames across the net - 
I've got plenty of code from other languages - just need  to convert 
all those api calls to Rebol and see if there are any performance 
issues, but I suspect that a very simple point-to-point app like 
that could work in Rebol2.  To make it practical for real use, there'd 
need to be a little server/repeater app to pass data back and forth 
between clients that are behind routers.  Not so crazy difficult, 
I don't think...