AltME groups: search

At least coders are very easy to persuade. I created a graphical 
Windows CD menu for a coder in about 10 minutes using Rebol/View 
and Payload from scratch. Before that, he had no idea if he'd need 
to use Visual Studio for that and spend a week on it. An argument 
here: "It allows you to get your job done."

Agree totally Pekr. This altme world is about technical achievements 
and possibilities of Rebol. No debate about how good it can be, but 
there isn't any cohesive marketing going on. No blogging, no search 
engine strategies, no PR announcements to the right people, a dearth 
of both Rebol powered products and even the experts are crying out 
for some basic stuff to be fixed.  My guess is that even the rebol 
evangelists use it as "secret weapon" so that they don't get told 
to put their toys away and get back to real languages like C++ or 
Java. [off soapbox]

Well thats good. So now you reverse that it determine what key words 
someone would search for so that Rebol websites would pop up. Some 
how I don't think you'd look for "vision" or "ahead of its time", 
but you would want to zero in on "rapid development multi or cross 
platform development internet protocols messaging " etc ... and start 
feeding the Search engines these sites linked to these words. If 
you go to rebol.com and do a "view source"  see how many hits you 
get on those words.

Yep.

We need to get better for the things they are finding us for....including 
having more solid content.
Plus help them find us for other things.

REBOLcom is No1 for:
-- Internet messaging
...But the content needs improving

I took some mac training about 6 months ago from the company but 
the macs faded out when they thought they were going to deploy more. 
 I have come to learn something about the platforms.  If you don't 
get the big consulting firms to push the other platforms then the 
other platforms will never dominate the corporate desktop market.

today you enter a secretary office there is windows XP  every where 
you enter a publisher/graphist maker you have apple every where? 
As there is less publisher than secretary  this explain as a short 
cut why there is sutch difference. When you enter a astronom office 
you have sun Sparc every where. As you get less astronom than plublisher 
you understand the difference betwin Apple and Sun :). Some people 
needs simplicity of use others need fiability of use. Then you have 
the rounding industry those building the sourrounded technologies 
in all cases they need to sell a lot this explain for example why 
a comon SONY MP3 sevice came with drivers to plug it to a PC equiped 
with windows and why they not giving apps and drvers to handle it 
under linux and unix.

for example here in france macs are pretty well implented in university 
because they are simple to manage in hight number. In hoght schools 
you get windows but you get lesser computer to manage (In my hight 
school in 1997 they was only 30 computers equiped with windows with 
a controled acces for the students you can use it only on certain 
days of the weeks durring a gived time. When I ingress to university 
they was 200 macs for every one  to use every time 100 windows pc 
to be used on restricted time and 20 Alphas/linux debian + 10 Sillicon 
graphics 02 with IRIX + 3 data severs (2 sun ultra 1 (X11 sharing) 
 + 1 dec 50 (NFS, mail, web ) + 40 Xteminal box for former computer 
ingeneer  ) MAc and PC was used for office application LINUX/UNIX 
computers was used to form computer ingeneer .This shows pretty well 
I think the world clivage in informatic :)

They let us do the sidebar, which should get some publicity for "why 
REBOL?

But once again I think, that from newbie rebol coder perspective, 
the most important things which should follow is - additional, more 
complex styles, docs, and SDK featuring latest developments. Hopefully 
we will get there soon, but we are almost there with 1.3 - good work 
was done!

still get invisible menus

Graham, sorry, I still one get the compkarori one. Which one is correct?

Sorry -- no explanation -- I see 0.1.8 when looking at both the source 
and the download on REBOL.org.  Maybe it is caching at Graham's ISP


Graham, you could try using the LDS interface to download the script:
     do http://www.rebol.org/library/public/lds-local.r
     res: lds/send-server 'get-script [menu-system.r]
     print res/data/script

I'm not into optimising for now I'd like to get the script refactored 
first and then profile a bit.

I spend a whole day with trying to put the menu into real windows. 
Didn't get that right ...

The thing is - even Carl admited, it is usefull, but because of compatibility 
to old scripts, we can't have a change, becaue you would get scrollers 
two times ...

:-) I also hope we get answer to font situation rather quickly ... 
hopefully, as Jaime mentioned, it will be FreeType ....

I still need to get used to the fact... it's all a bit abstract at 
the moment. But I'm sure this will change :-))

I even used it to get different viewtops on different computers (I 
had rebol on a usb stick, and depending on the computers name, my 
local fold showed different icons)

if you really want to protest, get your converted to run on vege 
oil

get your car converted

If you add to that the tendency for bikes to get stolen here, the 
layout of Chicago and commuting patterns, and the efficiency of our 
public transportation, it is rare for people to use bikes here except 
for recreation and the bike messengers downtown.

It'd be interesting and highly revolutionary if more cities adopted 
York's highway use hierarchy:
http://www.york.gov.uk/roads/excellence/strategy.html

(My city claims to have done -- they hired the guy who did York.....But 
the planners just don't get it, so progress is painfully sow)/

The iPod would certainly get students' attention.  But the Imagination 
and Cyphre demos posted there might throw them off..

Carl wrote:

Q: "So, what should be the rules? "

A: Let's lock these down as fast as possible.  It would be great 
to post this in 2005.

Q: "Perhaps a limit on the size of the script."


A: I would like to suggest it has to be a free standing script (not 
a script that grabs other scripts, or other media.  Given AGG, I 
would like to suggest 32K (32,768 bytes) total.  It can be in multiple 
files, but the combined total must not exceed this.  Compatible with 
Rebol View 1.3.


Q: "It needs to be fast to download. We can setup a demo upload/download 
area on the View desktop."


A: I suggest not doing this, but rather put this on a public website. 
 We are trying to invite new developers, the less steps the better. 
 A copy can be on the view Desktop though.


Q: "So, what deadline date? Early January? Before students return 
to school." 


A: I vote the contest ends Dec 31st 11:59.59 (this should be 11:59.60 
but Rebol has a bug representing leap seconds, which happens this 
year).


Q: Who should judge the winner? Vote of the REBOL community or RT 
worldwide staff?


A: I think the people giving the prizes should not do the voting. 
 I can suggest using someone more famous, I can get one of my friends 
like Charles Fleischer the comedian to vote, or better David Brin 
(author of Earth, the postman, Transparent Society), they would both 
enjoy doing the voting I suspect.  


Lastly, I would like to offer the following:  Prolific will put up 
a brand new Xbox 360 (when available).


Instead of having a first and second place, rather, both can pick 
which prize they want.  


So the award wording would be "Win your choice of an Apple iPod video, 
or a Microsoft Xbox 360.  Awarded to the first and second place winners."


Third place should be a choice between SDK license, or Command (and 
in fact, the first and second place winners could chose these as 
well).

I vote keep it simple, and based on the feedback of this one, we 
step it up a notch next year, which can be the day after if we get 
our asses in gear and post this ASAP! LOL

Terry, cool.

Please offer bigger (taller edit window).


Just so you know. "All Rights Reserved" has no legal meaning...  
so if you are inclined, get rid of it.  IT cleans up the page.

Can do once I get some time.

Alan, nice idea -- it would make the content more widely available 
again.

But there may be a problem....Those worlds were set up as private, 
and there was nothing in the joining conditions that said the content 
would be made available more widely.

With this world, we have the convention of marking groups as [web-public] 
or not, but the older worlds have no such convention.

So it would be very difficult to contact the original posters and 
get all their agreement.

Gabriele, can we get tray enabled for the rebol.dll ?

does right adjustment work? it says so in the docs, but I can only 
get center to work....

I'll do some testing and get back with you.  It may take me several 
days, however, as I am in the middle of several projects right now.

I am interested to understand format of metrics definition blocks. 
Is it possible to use them to get language specific characters correctly 
displayed?

if they are all the same width, though, it's possible to use the 
total-fit algo on page splitting too, meaning we get something much 
better than TeX.

i'm going to play with the penalties and demerits for hypens to see 
if i can get a better output; however the columns in the test are 
pretty small so it's hard to get a good ouput anyway.

or, if i ever get to support unicode, a sentence in english that 
quotes japanese.

winansiencoding does not have ligatures - too bad, so that'll need 
to wait for when i get to unicode. :(

Anton, only a few things of the text dialect are implemented. i wanted 
to get to a working version as soon as possible so that i could test 
the typesetter easily.

note, that the result when using emergency breaks is not optimal. 
they are only used to allow break-lines to produce a result in all 
cases. increasing the tolerance is the only way to get optimal results.

How about this for an idea: you allocate space for each page reference 
as if it's the largest likely page, eg 9999. As each page reference 
is resolved, you get some space back, but that reclaimed space becomes 
"dead" whitespace (probably placed at the end of the page, or distributed 
amongst other whitespace), and it does not cause an earlier  page-break. 
So the page reference resolution will not affect the pagination.

I think that could be useful. As tables get longer (and need to be 
broken across pages) it becomes more probable that it has data with 
a very wide range of widths. In that case, reproportioning the table 
for each page makes sense. But perhaps when crowding between cells 
occurs because of very wide entries, simply wrapping text within 
cells would allow the column width to remain the same for the whole 
table.

On the whole, I would prefer to have consistent column widths, but 
there might be cases where that's really annoying. I would probably 
put that as a lower priority feature for now.

basically i must find all possible breakpoints in each row. the problem 
is what to do with vertical alignment: if you have a cell that should 
be aligned in the middle, and there's a bigger cell that gets split, 
how does the smaller one get aligned?

Thanks amacleod I'll give that a try. ChristianE, I don't see any 
MySQL settings like that on my cpanel, which I am familiar with. 
I don't know if my ISP allows me to access such things. I've never 
seen that kind of information about MySQL in cpanel. How would I 
check? I am also looking for a virtual server where I can set everything 
myself in order to use Rebol to access databases and create HTML. 
If possible I want to eliminate PHP and use Rebol as my standard 
web interface program, but until I can get Rebol reading/writing 
to my databases I am stuck.

What is the SOP for building json objects from MySQL queries? 

I saw this but I could not get it to work:

SELECT 
     CONCAT("[",
          GROUP_CONCAT(
               CONCAT("{username:'",username,"'"),
               CONCAT(",email:'",email),"'}")
          )
     ,"]") 
AS json FROM users;

If a query gives me a rebol block of blocks and I send it through 
json.r I don't get a json object.

Should I work on converting the query to a rebol object first?

You should get back a top-level JSON object, but nested blocks will 
be arrays, not objects. e.g.


>> rebol-to-json [a: 1 b: 2 c: [d: 4 e: 5] f: #[object! [g: 6 h: 
7]]]

== {["a", 1, "b", 2, "c", ["d", 4, "e", 5], "f", {"g": 6, "h": 7}]}

The link is not working for me, I get a "Invalid Thread specified. 
If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator".

You put the "your browser does not support" message in the noframes 
section.

Many elderly browsers don't support them. All modern ones do -- though 
support can be turned off as a user-selected option.

Search engines are still very patchy at indexing frames -- and that 
is unlikley to get better given the inherent problems with frames

If i put short html source with meta tag and redirection, I get endless 
loop of redirects ...

Thanks Gabriele. I should mention why I do need it. The problem is, 
that some big distributors cheat on their sub-distributors. Together 
with few shops we found out, that although they allow to use their 
part of portal, some customers are clever, find out what shop it 
is in reality and they go directly to the parent shop and get the 
same price as from us. That is indeed bad behavior on their part 
as their partly ruin our business, but we can't do nothing about 
it. I will do my own shop, but as a whole system. I will describe 
architecture later ...

isn't it in printer driver? What about other websites? Do all get 
truncated? Maybe FF can't handle the particular one, which may be 
badly coded?

ah, but none of it works...FF, IE, NS, Opera...all rubbish.  All 
I want is to print a proof.  At least they could get the text right.

Could you post a link to site you want to get printed?

Any CGI gurus here? I've just started setting for CGI on windows 
after years on Linux. I can't figure out how to get the proper registry 
entries so that I can work with apache as the server on windows XP. 
Anyone have any experience with that? Or point me to correct forum 
is this is the wrong one... thanks.

Hmm, I don't fully recall setting up Apache, but I also don't think 
that I needed to change the registry to get it running...

Does anyone have an idea how one can get the timezone a particular 
server is on (in an automated way) ? eg. What timezone is www.lexicon.net 
in ?

(I hope this is the right group to post this in.)

I have a problem, when reading a file on another computer thru a 
shared drive. I'm sitting on a Windows client, and the file is on 
a UNIX server. First time I read the file, it's ok. Then if the file 
is updated on the UNIX server, I still get the old version on the 
client.

I've tried the read-thru/update command, but it doesn't solve the 
problem. Maybe read-thru/update doesn't work with shared drives? 
My code looks like this:

read-thru/update %/u/adv71-20/data/invoice.txt

Any ideas?

(It's possible to distribute a sync from the server to the client, 
and then I'll get the new version of the file. But I'll like to be 
able to get the new version from the client.)

>> print mold get-modes %a 'file-modes

[creation-date access-date modification-date owner-write archived 
hidden system]
>> set-modes %afile [archived: true]
>> set-modes %afile [archived: false]
>> get-modes %afile 'archived
== false

So the idea is just look at the ARCHIVED mode, toggle it, then set 
it back to how it was. Hopefully that will wake the outside caching 
mechanism up and you can get your fresh data.

Good suggestions, Anton! Yes, I'm pretty sure, it's outside REBOL's 
control, as I sometimes see strenge behaviour (for example regarding 
file locking) in other programs. The intra-network, I'm doing those 
things in, is a combined Win98-Win2000-WinXP network with a few UNIX 
servers present. The way, we share drives, is the standard Windows 
way using the SMB protocol (using Samba on the UNIX servers). I've 
for a long time suggested, that they do it the UNIX way and install 
NFS clients on the PCs in stead. I tried to install some ProNFS client 
yesterday, but couldn't get it to work (probably because of some 
lame Windows authentification, maybe also encrypted passwords).


It could be interesting to see, if the cache problem dissappear when 
using NFS.

I downloaded a page from a web site, but it will not display.  Could 
this have something to do with frames? What must I do to get this 
file to display?

If I try to open the downloaded file from my harddrive with Foxfire, 
I get an error message saying the file cannot be found!  But it is 
there and can be opened with my text editor.

javascript:readpanel()

   -->  Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property 
   Location.host
javascript: readpanel()

  -->  Error: panel is not defined  Source File: file:///d:/Anton/Dev/Rebol/View/list-demos/Micha's-javascript-page.html 
   Line: 26

I have a problem with HTTPS over a proxy. I'm using REBOL/Command 
2.5.6.3.1, that came with our SDK. This version first need the HTTPS 
protocol to be activated using this code:


net-utils/net-install HTTPS make system/schemes/http/handler [] 443

system/schemes/https: make system/schemes/https [user-agent: reform 
["REBOL" system/product system/version]]

I activated trace by typing: trace/net on

Our proxy is set up ok, as I can read the internet with a browser 
using it (both HTTP and HTTPS).
Now if I in REBOL do this:

>> s: read https://webservices.rki.dk

I get:

URL Parse: none none webservices.rki.dk none none none
Net-log: ["Opening" "ssl" "for" "HTTPS"]
connecting to: webservices.rki.dk
Net-log: {CONNECT webservices.rki.dk:443 HTTP/1.1
Host: webservices.rki.dk:443

}
Net-log: "HTTP/1.0 200 Connection established"
Net-log: {GET https://webservices.rki.dk:443/ HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*
Connection: close
User-Agent: REBOL Command 2.5.6.3.1
Host: webservices.rki.dk:443
}
Net-log: none

** User Error: Error.  Target url: https://webservices.rki.dk:443/ 
could not be
retrieved.  Server response: none
** Near: s: read https://webservices.rki.dk

Yes, I get this result:

>> s: read https://webservices.rki.dk
URL Parse: none none webservices.rki.dk none none none
Net-log: ["Opening" "ssl" "for" "HTTPS"]
connecting to: webservices.rki.dk
Net-log: {GET / HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*
Connection: close
User-Agent: REBOL Command 2.5.6.3.1
Host: webservices.rki.dk:443
}
Net-log: "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
== {
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
  <HEAD>
    <title>RKI Webservices</title>
    <meta na...

Yes, like this:

>> s: read http://www.rebol.com
URL Parse: none none www.rebol.com none none none
Net-log: ["Opening" "tcp" "for" "HTTP"]
connecting to: www.rebol.com
Net-log: {GET http://www.rebol.com/HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*
Connection: close
User-Agent: REBOL Command 2.5.6.3.1
Host: www.rebol.com
}
Net-log: "HTTP/1.0 200 OK"
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
Net-log: ["low level read of " 2048 "bytes"]
== {<html>
<head>

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>REBOL Technologies</title>
<style ...

And if I try with a wrong TCP/IP port configuration (like I did with 
the browser test), I get this:

>> s: read http://www.rebol.com
URL Parse: none none www.rebol.com none none none
Net-log: ["Opening" "tcp" "for" "HTTP"]
connecting to: www.rebol.com
** Access Error: Cannot connect to 193.3.239.91
** Where: open-proto
** Near: s: read http://www.rebol.com

So I am going through the proxy with REBOL.

I also tried reading a https page using command and squid, and couldn't 
get it to work.

Geomol - there is nothing like "connect". If you have a free bit 
of a free time, I suggest you to download Winpcap and Ethereal - 
they are both free and you get cool network monitoring tool. You 
can learn a lot ...

ah, proxies ... in our company, although we use Squid IIRC, we have 
following problem - we found out, our admins use kind of load balancing, 
but they are not able to solve session afinity right now, so eg. 
ICQ disconnects after some time, as it can get packed routed using 
different machine and it imo causes communication to break ...

I think Jaime wants to know how to get the data first !

that is fantastic.  I'm starting to shake a little.  beyond all expectations. 
 talk about power to the people. . .  I'm off to do some crazy prototype. 
 I'll post a link when I get something wild cooking.

--no events-- 
,LaunchURL =    // PUT String 
,bgcolor =    // PUT String 
,ScriptVersion =    // PUT String 
,args =    // PUT String 
,LaunchURL;// GET String 
,bgcolor;// GET String 
,ScriptVersion;// GET String 
,args;// GET String

It's not released .. but ask politely, and you can get a copy

Pretty good. But it will be nice that if it also included each page 
content. That way I will not just get title headers in my rss news 
app.

http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/27969Part 2 of the Nano-Sheets 
article is published, I did not get notification till now.  Gregg 
and my co-authorship

The menu system starts to get useful, all the basic features now 
work. I've split the actual menu script from it's demo and mainly 
improved keyboard support and styling method, so it's already usable, 
even though there will be changes to the setup dialect and accessor 
function signatures.
 
http://www.rebol.org/library/scripts-download/menu-system.r
http://www.rebol.org/library/scripts-download/menu-system-demo.r

I would like your permission to publish some of the groups here on 
R3 to the web site. See:
http://www.rebol.net/article/0183.html


The only groups that will be published will be those that have descriptions 
that contain the string [web-public].


If I do not hear any objections (post them to "Carl Only" group), 
I will fire up the scripts and get this started.

so test it send bugs report to rambo and we will get a pretty good 
version

It's yet very good to have a working alpha version for MacOSX after 
only 1 month of the Win32 1.3  stable release. Even in the 1.3 stable 
version for win 32  we have remaining bugs like agg matrix key word 
or gradient effect converion from SVG

Images from Apollo Missions


The talk about language niches and "Lightweight distributed computing" 
in the "Io" group made me remember a REBOL program, I did last year. 
It takes images from www.apolloarchive.com and present them in a 
REBOL program, where it's possible to zoom, change light and contrast 
and others. Get it here:
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/apollo.zip


First run the script "makeidx.r", which will build image indexes. 
Wait until files from "apidx_11" to "apidx_17_b" are build. Then 
run the program "apollo.r". Instructions in the first window. It 
takes time to get thumbs and images the first time, and the program 
doesn't have a load indicator, so be patience and wait for window 
to open after activating a control. It's possible to swtich between 
windows.

Have fun!

A tiny news reader http://www.ddmind.com/modules.php?name=gdp_rforum

You can select the group adding the parameter ng:  http://www.ddmind.com/modules.php?name=gdp_rforum&ng=comp.lang.functional

Rebol pluging is used to connect and retrieve message, javascript 
is used to display posts, and as in ajax apps no need to refresh 
the page to get new messages.
PS Should be nice to have a comp.lang.rebol usenet group :-)

Viewtop-extenders: To get started: launch-thru/update http://polly.rebol.it/test/site-desktop.r

That desktop does not ask security-questions, some pathes patched.

That way you can put a personalized desktop on your site, which can 
be launched from the real one. It patches the inbuild one, so size 
is 1242 bytes.

Little goodie for Windows users: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/Misc/clips.r


It will stay in your system tray and keep track of your clipboard 
(remembers the last 5 clips). They are saved in a file so you get 
them back across reboots. You can also add notes that won't get pushed 
out from the clips. Selecting a note or a clip will copy it back 
to your clipboard so that you can paste it wherever you want.

BTW, now eFishAntSea is a Registered Trademark...so I get to put 
the little r with a circle (now that could be OnT for Announce, eh?)

Martin Johannesson has updated his great HyperNotes. Some bugs were 
fixed. Get it here -- http://hem.bredband.net/martinjohannesson/hypernotes/

I hope to see a Rebol group participating, it will be a good way 
to get some promotion.

http://home.wilddsl.net.au/anton/rebol/util/batch-download.r

http://home.wilddsl.net.au/anton/rebol/util/demo-batch-download.r
  ; <--- this will get my SITE variable wrong, but look in it for 
usage

run the script. it needs some mb  sprites, which i get from another 
website. http://reinerstileset.4players.de/T_dino_green.zipand http://reinerstileset.4players.de/Tblue knight.zip 
.

when you run it, it makes a %sprites/ - folder in its dir. unzip 
the sprites in folders, %T_dino_green.zip in T_dino_green/ etc. and 
put these folders in the %sprites/-folder .

click "zum spiel" and avoid the dino.. (or, ctrl+cursor  swings sword 
:)

Get a parse tree result from Parse


http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/documentation.r?script=load-parse-tree.r


For fans of REBOL's Parse function, it could be particularly useful 
used with Gabriele's Rewrite function.

Oldes, you either have very fast hands or a very fast computer or 
both. I can't get close to your record even using your code. But 
isn't it amazing what be done with just one line of rebol code?

Anton, I get an error: ** Script Error: include has no value
(under OSX, if that has anything to say)

Try it again. If you still get an error try this first:

but it could get ugly quickly.

First, second, ... go up to tenth. We don't have eleventh. You need 
to do serie/11 to get the 11'th element.

I am driving so my responses are going to get really simple.

don't get me wrong, I live and breath by rebol, but people who are 
interested, quickly get annoyed at little things missing under the 
hood.

rebol feels like a hybrid car.  Almost, but note quite enough to 
get new people out of their cosy stylish cars.   Its got a lot of 
promise, but at what cost.

But this raises again, the issue of trying to get backwards compatibility 
and is it even possible?  with so much changes in the air?

jaime, i don't think multimethods have been discussed for r3. they 
would be nice... but really only if we get custom datatypes too.

The current library interface is servicable, but could be improved.

For example, char arrays in C structs are a real pain to deal with,

there is redundancy if you're importing a number of routines, from 

the same library, and extra work is required to deal with pointers
to values.

The biggest issue for me seems to be that I have to use COMPOSE 

heavily to get the results I want, or there's a lot of duplication
in struct and routine defs.

--- Easier Routine Declarations

The only thing I've addressed in my lib interface dialect is
making it easier to declare routines. I posted it to REBOl.org
for discussion:


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

--- Pointers


This is maybe a bit of an extreme example, but I had to do it, so 
it's not purely theoretical.

    LPINT-def: [value [integer!]] none

    LPINT: make struct! LPINT-def none

This struct shows where a nested struct is needed.

    _FAX_JOB_PARAM-def: compose/deep/only [

        SizeOfStruct    [integer!]      ; DWORD structure size, in bytes

        RecipientNumber [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to recipient's 
        fax number

        RecipientName   [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to recipient's 
        name

        Tsid            [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to transmitting 
        station identifier

        SenderName      [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to sender's name

        ;SenderName      [struct! [value [string!]]]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer 
        to sender's name

        SenderCompany   [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to sender's company

        SenderDept      [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to sender's department

        BillingCode     [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to billing code

        ScheduleAction  [integer!]      ; DWORD job scheduling action code

        ;ScheduleTime    [struct! (SYSTEMTIME-def)]        ; SYSTEMTIME  
          time to send fax
            wYear       [short]
            wMonth      [short]
            wDayOfWeek  [short]
            wDay        [short]
            wHour       [short]
            wMinute     [short]
            wSecond     [short]
            wMilliseconds [short]

        DeliveryReportType  [integer!]      ; DWORD e-mail delivery report 
        type

        DeliveryReportAddress [string!]     ; LPCTSTR   pointer to e-mail 
        address

        DocumentName        [string!]       ; LPCTSTR   pointer to document 
        name to display
        CallHandle          [integer!]      ; HCALL reserved
        ;_PTR   Reserved[3]  [integer!]      ; DWORD must be zero
        _PTR-0  [integer!]      ; DWORD must be zero
        _PTR-1  [integer!]      ; DWORD must be zero
        _PTR-2  [integer!]      ; DWORD must be zero
        _PTR-3  [integer!]      ; DWORD must be zero
    ]
    _FAX_JOB_PARAM: make struct! _FAX_JOB_PARAM-def none
    _FAX_JOB_PARAM/SizeOfStruct: length? third _FAX_JOB_PARAM

    fax-complete-job-params: make routine! compose/deep/only [

        JobParams     [struct! (LPINT-def)] ; ptr to job information struct

        CoverPageInfo [struct! (LPINT-def)] ; ptr to cover page struct
        return:       [integer!]
    ] winfax.dll "FaxCompleteJobParamsA"

So, the API call returns pointers to structs containing the 
data we want; to get it we need to dereference the pointers
after the call.

    complete-job-params: func [
        /local
            params-ptr cover-ptr    ; API return pointers

            params cover            ; REBOL structs with data from API
    ][
        ; allocate return pointer structs for API call
        params-ptr: make-LPINT
        cover-ptr: make-LPINT

        ; make the API call

        reduce either 0 <> fax-complete-job-params params-ptr cover-ptr [

            ; get data from pointers returned by the API

            params: get-dereferenced-data params-ptr _FAX_JOB_PARAM-def

            cover:  get-dereferenced-data cover-ptr  _FAX_COVERPAGE_INFO-def
        ...



Getting the de-ref'd data is the real pain, and seems like it might
be unsafe in the way I did it, though it worked.

    get-dereferenced-data: func [

        {Given a pointer to memory, copy the target data into a REBOL struct.}

        pointer [struct!]   "LPINT structure whose /value is the data pointer"

        struct-def [block!] "The struct you want returned with data"
        /local struct data orig-pointer result
    ] [

        struct: make struct! compose/deep/only [ ; make wrapper struct
            sub [struct! (struct-def)]
        ] none

        orig-pointer: third struct              ; store original inner pointer

        change third struct third pointer       ; change inner pointer to 
        ref'd data

        data: copy third struct/sub             ; copy data from the inner 
        struct

        change third struct orig-pointer        ; restore inner pointer

        result: make struct! struct-def none    ; make result struct

        change third result data                ; change data in result struct
        struct: data: orig-pointer: none
        result
    ]


--- char arrays in structs, or as routine parameters

You can't just declare a fixed size block or string to do this, 
you have to (AFAIK), have individual elements for each item.
That's a huge pain if you have a 128 element array, so I end
up generating them dynamically. I think that was Cyphre's idea
originally, but I don't have notes on it.

    make-elements: func [name count type /local result][
        if not word? type [type: type?/word type]
        result: copy "^/"
        repeat i count [
            append result join name [i " [" type "]" newline]
        ]
        to block! result
    ]

    GUID: make struct! GUID-def: compose [
        Data1   [integer!]  ; unsigned long
        Data2   [short]     ; unsigned short
        Data3   [short]     ; unsigned short
        (make-elements 'Data4 8 #"@")  ; unsigned char
    ] none


--- MAKE-ing structs

How do other people make structs from prototypes? 

    make-struct: func [prototype /copy /with data] [
        make struct! prototype either copy
            [second prototype]
            [either with [reduce [data]][none]]
    ]


--- BSTR type

I've only needed it for one project, but it might be worth 
finding out if it would be worth adding BSTR support for
Windows, as a routine datatype.

ok, I will try to get the basics done before going to bed, I took 
time off to go see star trek (it rocks, if you overlook how badly 
some of the movie-specific physics/astronomy ideas are approached)