AltME groups: search

I was reviewing my old iMagick.reds binding for a while and found 
that it the current version I cannot write something like:
		DrawComment: "DrawComment" [
			;== Adds a comment to a vector output stream
			;-- void DrawComment(DrawingWand *wand,const char *comment)
			wand          [DrawingWand!] ;the drawing wand.
			comment   [c-string!] ;comment text
		]
It throws:
*** Loading Error: invalid comment string


Do we really need to have 'comment word such an important? I'm pretty 
sure I would never use it in declarations (as a comment).

It reads it as a stream of bytes. As UTF-8 doesn't use null bytes 
in its encoding (except for codepoint 0), it can be fully loaded 
as string! or binary! in R2 (but you'll see garbage for non-ASCII 
characters).

which is the difference between pointer! [byte!] and c-string! ?


C-string! points to a stream of bytes terminated by a NUL character, 
while pointer! [byte!] has no such requirement.

It's hard to imagine that the native UI interface would meet with 
criticism from any main stream developers - by definition, it's the 
_native UI.  Doing things that way just takes longer to port.  I 
honestly don't care which way it goes, as long as there's a usable 
GUI system with a _productive syntax_.

Donations are currently vital for Red continuation as it is my only 
revenue stream. Without all the donations I have received, Red progress 
would slowdown a lot. So, it is probably even more important than 
contributing code. ;-)

We have made an other big achievement of bringing R3 to Android OS 
based devices. In the last couple of days Cyphre added console support. 
So you now can input stuff on your Android. Further .r extension 
is now associated with the interpreter. So you can run downloaded 
scripts. We have uploaded a script, so you try it out.


Android R3 installation package: http://development.saphirion.com/experimental/R3droid.apk


Test script, for direct access from Android device: http://development.saphirion.com/experimental/oneline-prime-numbers.r


Thanks again to all who made a donation to drive this stream. We 
still can spend 10-15 days on this project at the moment. If you 
would like to help push this developement forward, feel free to donate, 
sponsor or make a bounty for features.

Thank you all for addressing my concerns and for your answers about 
my first coding question.


Ahh.. rejoin. Reading up on it makes me better understand how some 
things are to be done in Rebol.

 Continuing to the final goal...


I have to extract an email address from a GET transfer. The methoed 
of sending the info to me is completely out of my control. An email 
address will be entered into a form on a website not controled by 
me. GET methoed will send the data to my script. The people who created 
the form on the external site advised that they label the email address 
as "trnEmailAddress".


 So now I want to see if I am correct in thinking how to extract and 
 use the email address. Will using the decode a cgi form command (I 
 know they are not commands in the tradiational sense)  work. How 
 does it work, does it create variables out of the GET (or Post when 
 using Post, but I am forced to recieve the info via GET) stream?


The GET stream in my case will include "&trnEmailAddress=person%40example%2Ecom. 
So can I do this?

decode-cgi system/options/cgi/query-string

send trnEmailAddress "Thank you. Rest of message." 

Thanks for your help.

Sunanda: Thanks again for issuing the World invitation. Everyone 
thanks for the continuing help.


I have read the cited document, but it just leaves me with more questions.

Is the following literal?

cgi-string: read-cgi
cgi-block: decode-cgi cgi-string
cgi-obj: make object! cgi-block 


 That is to say should I type exactly that? Or is cgi-string for example 
 a theoretical variable assignment that I could call anything? Are 
 they all proper commands, or is any part of that just for example 
 purposes?  I am thinking I should copy and paste it verbatium. I 
 am also thinking I mispelt verbatum.


 I am stuck with GET. Does this mean I can leave out some code that 
 makes up for  not knowing if the original data is POST vs GET? These 
 are hypothetical questions for better long term learning. I for now 
 will go with the idea that everything is as straight fowarrd as it 
 seems. I know that my GET stream will have "trnEmailAddress" in it 
 which is a field that will contains an email address.


 So will the following  generate a random number, extract the address 
 and email the same random number to that email address?

token: random/seed now/percise

cgi-string: read-cgi
cgi-block: decode-cgi cgi-string
cgi-obj: make object! cgi-block 


send trnEmailAddress rejoin [ "Thank you. Your number is" token "." 
]


 Graham: Thank you for the extra info on GUID, but Windows is not 
 involved here. I realize that random number generating really isn't 
 unless you have a monkey throwing darts at a numbered board. Regardless 
 extra effort to 
make a number unique is useful and your advice appreciated. 


 I do not think the corner cases will come up and the people who control 
 the original form assured me that web page issues warnings if the 
 form is not filled out correct which should help. I do realize that 
 people are idiots, systems are not fool proof, etc. What I am saying 
 is my basic needs are basic and I should be OK so I am not fretting 
 over those examples. It is great though to know the solutions are 
 out there when I need them.

 Tahnks.

If we could encap R3 apps we might have a chance to continue this 
stream of research.

Joke, most rebol scripts are just a continuous stream of code, lines 
don't have any significance except for legibility

It's not a single-stream model like zlib or gzip - those would be 
better supported by COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS.

As I'm updating my old scripts on rebol.org, I'm trying to understand 
the problems with compress/gzip & decompress/gzip , 
and found at least one issue in u-zlib.c . 

When compressing, as the checksum method is assumed to be adler32 
for most of the code, stream->adler (the current checksum) is wrongly 
initialized to 1 in two places, giving an off-by-one checksum in 
the output and making it unusable for decompress/gzip. 

Still no clue for what yields the 
     ** Script error: value out of range: none
error and why calling 
     compress "" 

seems to fix this problem sometimes.It seems that something isn't 
correctly resetted between calls.

What about a new refinement /stream and keeping /direct for backward-compatibility? 
And the old protocols are source, one could add an option to enable 
them. Would then be a small change to get scripts running again, 
until the bigger one of some rewriting is done.

- I have an internal function in crc32.r who allows working with 
big files and stream, but it isn't fully documented.

Thanks everyone for your prompt and honest comments.


Why did I join this community? The primary reason is to be part of 
a small, smart and passionate group who think differently, which 
when combined with REBOL is a very powerful combination. Therefore 
it would seem that focusing the resources of the community on a "killer" 
application leveraging REBOL3 would increase the chance of REBOL 
becoming main stream, and as a side effect possibly allow part time 
REBOL developers to become full time REBOL developers. As an example, 
think what Ruby on Rails did for Ruby. Wouldn't it be nice to get 
paid to do what you love!


IMO/E I believe it's very important for the application vendors to 
have very close and strong ties with the platform vendor so architectures 
and features can be designed and exist at the correct layer. Also, 
if something needs to be implemented in the application but really 
belongs in the platform, it can be done in a way that enables that 
feature to be migrated in the future with minimal impact and extra 
work. This seems to fit with REBOL's history of improving based on 
experience.


I'd like to think it's possible to build great applications in 3 
months, with new releases every three months as required based on 
requirements, so I don't have the time (and maybe not even the ability) 
to spend years learning REBOL. I'd also argue that for a company 
to be successful, it needs a small team to have a number of diverse 
skills which is focused on delivering the product. I mentioned when 
I first signed on that I would be interested to meet REBOL gurus 
who are in Northern California and see what happens when interesting 
(or not) people get together. Sorry for the length of this post and 
thanks for listening.

stream objects are usually compressed; so you may need to decompress 
them too

New version 1.3 of new MySQL driver released as beta. (same URL).

Changes:


- Fixed the multiple result sets end-of-stream issue. Now an extra 
COPY will
  return NONE, marking the end of the data stream.

- Fixed error message parsing for protocol 4.1.


- Added SQL request delimiter property to port/locals/delimiter (default: 
#";")

Then, you can try with HTTP chunked encoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding), 
it's the classic way to stream HTML to the browser. Having the page 
displayed while downloading chunks is browser specific. It's implemented 
in Cheyenne's HTTPd, but reading that wikipedia page makes me wonder 
if it still works with the new automatic HTTP compression introduced 
in 0.9.19 (haven't done regression tests for that case).

Let me try this again. 


RT hosts this world for REBOL discussions, and they graciously don't 
complain that we have a lot of off-topic channels, probably because 
they understand that's how people work. It is for the REBOL community.


There aren't any set rules here, nor do I think we need them. I think 
that, as a community, we need some non-REBOL channels, just not so 
many; and not so "loud" (i.e. active) that they consistently shadow 
the REBOL content. If each of us "self monitors", there should be 
no problem. i.e. if you find yourself writing a lot more non-REBOL-related 
messages than REBOL-related ones, consistently over time, think about 
whether that's adding value to the world.  


I disagree somewhat with the view of "let them opt out of a group 
if they don't like it", because that puts the power in the hands 
of one group to drive others away. That's just me.


To me, a group belongs here, and a conversation has value, if it 
is of interest to the vast majority ofere people who are part of 
it. 

Here are a couple suggestions:


1) Don't post a long stream of uninterrupted messages. If there's 
a subject on your mind, post a message or two on it, and see if anyone 
responds. If not, don't keep posting more messages on that subject.


2) If a non-REBOL conversation involves only two or three people 
and/or is argumentative in nature, go private or off-world. Again, 
this is not our world; let's not abuse RT's storage and bandwidth.

Thanks!

Someone reported this error .. "The file "...exe" contains more than 
one data stream, but the destination volume does not support this 
feature.  Some data will not be preserved as a result" .. what does 
this mean for encapped apps?

hmm, i think you can safely ignore it. i don't think rebol has anything 
to do with it. NTFS allows for multiple content to be associated 
with a file name, but almost noone is using this feature i think 
(like for links); so something on that system added a data stream 
to the exe file.

Graham, multiple data streams are how Mac files are stored on Windows 
servers. Also, some antivirus programs use the extra streams for 
storing checksum data, some viruses for storing their payload, the 
system for storing file metadata, and various applications for obscure 
reasons. Any file copy program that ignores multiple data streams 
does so at the user's peril. Since there are few such programs written 
in REBOL (Carl's recent blog post notwithstanding), the lack of data 
stream support in REBOL isn't much of a problem for now.

So, just plain read and write does not touch the alternate data stream

Much of the description of NTFS streams and their limitations, as 
expressed by Robert Muench in your link, refer to limitations in 
non-stream-aware code. Windows has APIs that handle streams quite 
nicely AFAIK, including retrieving the names of the streams and deleting 
them if you want to do so without deleting the file or directory 
they are attached to.

<filename>:<stream>:$<attribute> without the < and > of course. Since 
the default stream is the empty string and all attributes start with 
$ you can skip one of the colons with default attributes. The default 
attribute is $DATA, and what you would normally think of as the contents 
of %file would be in %file::$DATA really.


Executable files aren't marked as such with attributes like they 
are in Unix, but you can hide stuff in alternate streams. It wouldn't 
matter what the file was named if you could pass it to CreateProcess 
or some such, so you can hide executable code in alternate streams 
but without library support you can't call it. You should validate 
the filenames of files you are serving for security anyways, so this 
is just one more thing to look for.

I am not sure what all of the details are about the semantics of 
this. It would be nice if REBOL was really stream-aware so we wouldn't 
have to worry about things like this.

REBOL should be stream-aware, period. Preferably using the same fork 
syntax that it uses on Mac and everywhere else.

There is no reason to let that weird NT file-stream-name syntax infect 
REBOL file! syntax if we can avoid it, especially since we already 
have a mechanism for dealing with this kind of thing (and I use the 
term loosely - the underlying semantics are different on every platform).

but when you stream a file that is encrypted, the file length is 
now changed

What would be the best way how to limit server's output bandwidth 
using Uniserve? For example if i would like to write a stream server.

Will... I want to make a private mp3 stream server to play music 
on a local network. So it must be solved on the server side... read 
only enough sound data from disk to play and distribute it to listeners. 
I have already the mp3 parser to get for example enough data to play 
during specified interval of time. Now it's just how to distribute 
it and don't send more data than is necessary  for the listeners.

So with DOM you need all in memory, with SAX you can stream.

Robert: it's a good idea but not for my case. I don't want the data 
strucure from whole xml , I want to stream it through parser and 
collect out the data. 

Geomol: I will look at it but probably not what I want in this particular 
case for the reason above

Gregg: I haven't tested any yet, I googled and found that xml-parse.r 
above , which has sax style of work but seems huge. I only care to 
support the simplified subset of xml, xml with all the variants is 
a total bloat so I believe it can be that complex (and it doesn't 
support 100% of it also).  Thats why I am considering writing a simple 
sax liek parser, I wrote it in c once and it was small (but it parsed 
even smaller subset of xml)

i wanted to record to tape too, however that would mean changing 
the tape every 60 min, i.e. stopping the stream every 60 mins. if 
we manage to have two cameras this time, we won't have this problem. 
i'll record to tape and another camera will be used for the stream.

minDV is only 60min, at least that's what i found here. but anyway, 
yes, one expects talks to be shorter, but there's still the problem 
of having to stop the stream. it's much better to have two cameras, 
one for the stream and one for recording.

also, while the stream camera would mainly point to the screen, the 
recording camera would point mainly to the speaker, since with minimal 
editing you can just make a screenshot of the slides and insert them 
in the video at the appropriate places.

to share audio and video we need 3 things 1) the shoutcast server 
(configured properly but this not the most enoyant part)  www.shoutcast.com/ 
 2) the NSV Tools that is used to share video stream from the webcam 
(use the VP3 encoder for video) and from the  microphone   (MP3 Lame 
encoder)  3) client use winamp software to see and listen the intervention 
in the conference ;)

are you looking at the stream actually ?

maybe the support for shoutcast video stream is not optimal yet

anyway - we didn't have many people watching the stream actually 
last year. less than 5 or so. so it's higher priority to me having 
good recordings to offer after the devcon.

I see a stream, working perfectly here in QT 7 on windows

gabriele, is it possible to stream both or too much bandwidth?

so, if it's like last year with 5 people watching the live stream, 
number of users is probably the least of our worries. :)

so this is only for the live stream.

let me try another thing. let's see what happens if i select "stream 
over TCP".

vlc can handle the stream fine for a period, but then dies

vlc can also stream video, but I don't know if it can grab from a 
webcam

How about a live stream when the DevCon is running? Others can Enjoy 
realtime.. Perhpas even interact ?

I'm using this script to parse binary formats: http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/stream-io_latest.r

Here is for example script for parsing AVI file using the %stream-io.r 
script: http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/avi_latest.rbut I use it 
to parse other formats as well

here is a version with some rebcode optimizations: http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/stream-io_rebcode_latest.r

what I normally do is click on the relevant tcp lines, and the right 
click, and then choose "follow tcp stream" so that I only get the 
relevant data.

ints-to-sbs: func[

 ints [block!]	 "Block of integers, that I want to convert to SBs"

 /complete l-bits "Completes the bit-stream => l-bits stores the nBits 
 info of the values"
	;/maxb mb
	/local b b2 l bits sb
][
	ints: reduce ints
	max-bits: 0
	bits: make block! length? ints
	foreach i ints [
		;b: enbase/base load rejoin ["#{" to-hex i "}"] 2
		b: enbase/base head reverse int-to-ui32 i 2
		b: find b either i < 0 [#"0"][#"1"]
		b: copy either none? b [either i >= 0 ["00"]["11"]][back b]
		;insert b either i >= 0 [#"0"][#"1"]
		if max-bits < l: length? b [max-bits: l]
		append bits b
	]
	foreach b bits [
		if max-bits > l: length? b [
			insert/dup b b/1 max-bits - l
		]
	]
	either complete [
		sb: int-to-bits max-bits l-bits
		foreach b bits [insert tail sb b]
		sb
	][	
		bits
	]
]

int-to-FB: func[i /local x y fb][
	x: to integer! i
	y: to integer! (either x = 0 [i][i // x]) * 65535

 fb: rejoin [either x = 0 ["0"][first ints-to-sbs to block! x] int-to-bits 
 y 16]
	if all [x = 0 i < 0][fb/1: #"1"]
	fb
]

Is the index 37 position relative to the beginning of the entire 
code block that contains the brab statement, or relative to the statement 
targeted by the -10 offset in your brab offset block? The "affected 
area" of your brab statement is the 40 instructions beginning with 
the one pointed to by the -10 and ending with that pointed to by 
the 30. This is also referred to as a "basic block". When your branches 
are relative, this area is the one that you should be concerned with. 
If you are counting your insertion index relative to the affected 
area then the only offset affected by the insertion would be the 
30, which would need to be changed to 33.


If you are counting your index of 37 as an absolute offset (actually, 
relative to the beginning of the code block that contains the branch 
statement), then you need to subtract the absolute offset of the 
branch statement to convert to the offset scale that matters, that 
relative to the branch statement. Coincidently, that is exactly the 
calculation performed by the label fixup phase of the assembler. 
Because of this I tend to suggest that when you are programming based 
on the whole code block, typical of programming-by-hand, that you 
use label statements and branch to them.


When you use literal offsets you have to consider the range of instructions 
from the branch to the target as being one entity, a "basic block". 
When inserting instructions into a basic block, all you need to consider 
is how it affects that segment of code. These code segments are usually 
developed and tested independently, and then dropped whole into the 
greater stream of code without much change. Programming by stringing 
together a set of these basic blocks (or code snippets) is often 
what code-generating dialect processor (or "compiler") does.

So they adopted JQuery *and* push Silverlight where they can, even 
if that means supporting the Moonlight project like they did for 
the inauguration stream. I think that Silverlight has more potential 
than Flash, but I am not Flash's target market :)

I'd love to have a non-vanilla input stream.

I asked Carl to free plugin source several times, sadly with zero 
response each time I tried. I think that plugin was not part of RT's 
revenue stream, so it is a pity it never happened, as someone could 
pick-up, do some fixes, improvements, etc.

I have a data stream engine built using liquid.

stream is for filtering streams of data (like events)  in which you 
chain handlers and modify the stream as it flows from one node to 
another.

announcing stream !  I am in the midst of  adding some more functionality 
to liquid which allows it to act as a signal processor (push method 
data-flow) the nice thing is that its incorporated  in the same plug, 
again, and using message stream will retain 100% compatibility with 
all the current plug featureset.

I changed it to value 10240 - the change is not so visible but I 
think it's better as there is not so many on-stream-in calls

You'll need something like a mod-proxy (to be implemented) to stream 
your upload to another server.

Good point, Cheyenne may fail decoding the Posted data if it's not 
in url-encoded format. The only workaround is to set Content-type 
to something like  'application/octet-stream.

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

I got live stream here?

Stream has no sound?

Stream is amazing.. watching on a 60" monitor..

i had to cancel the upload to youtube as it was creating problems 
for the video stream

Message from the techie in the brown coat: could we all in the room 
not surf -- the bandwidth out of the building isn't up to it, and 
it may affect the video stream. 
Altme is fine though :-)

what I am supposed to use to view and hear this stream on windows??

(i guess the decoder loses sync with the stream)

and they'll all be drunk, which won't look good on the live stream

Yup, stream has died.

dunno if the stream is being recorded

Talked so fast he stalled the stream !

thanks for the info, Sunanda - the live stream is not there yet, 
right?

btw..does the Qt stream work? I mean was it only the whole time yesterday? 
and how is the sound?

does it stream already? Or am i on the wrong page?

stream works fine here

i think it was 4-5 people not 400 on the stream, but i don't know

did not get my iTV yet so had to open about 40 stream to fill all 
the 60 inches monitor in the room

(i wonder if the stream should be off during this to give more bw 
to skype)

I asked yesterday if the sound could be piped to the stream, but 
that probably would clash with the room audio

graham, when it tries to focus, we lose audio on the stream :-)

stream is gone in sleep mode?

that'd be great, as it's very hard to recognize anything (apart from 
random windows) on the stream ...

the stream really works fantastically well, congrats on that!

Would be nice to click individual peopl in  the Video stream and 
turn their volume up or down..

Enjoyed watching most of devcon in the office over the stream.  Thanks 
for that stream.  Loved the talk by Ron on ADBMS. It would be great 
to see some of that technology filter down in Rebol. There are is 
other video on You Tube?  I'll have a search.

I'm still a little amazed that 1000 people appearently watched the 
stream

srean = stream

Yes, having a seperate stream with the presentaions would be very 
cool.

We might investigate u Stream ....

perhpas stream.rebol.com could stream 24hrs a day the conferences 
they had so far..

https://plus.google.com/stream/circles/p7f75634d89318aef

Games API coming soon to G+

yes, but then i say, we meet, and allow others to see video stream 
(worked well in France), and call in via skype (just need to make 
sure we have a pc with skype set up ;). 100% virtual is not even 
1% of the fun. ;)

I may be able to help in the video streaming area. Our company has 
encoders that will stream at a lower rate and archive locally at 
a higher rate.

Sunanda, agreed...

Basically there are for stream techs we need:

- Camera
- Computer screen
- Text
- Audio.

All of this needs to be captured.


Text is still BEST in AltME, it was designed for this, this is also 
a way to bring people into the fold.


Computer and Camera are not the same concept, since video is fine 
at 320x250 (even if stretched), while Computer needs to be exact. 
 


We still have some tweaking to do here, but this is coming together....

This is a stream from a friend of mine http://www.ustream.tv/channel/freedom-of-information-2008-az


She is using UStream to do this.  I'm going to play with this, but 
it "seems" sort of perfect for the Video part of what we are doing.
you set your "Show time" and go!


But, I will only know after I have played with the incoing, and also 
tried broadcasting, and gotten feedback from a large group.

Alan, the stream has not "happened" yet.  This is a stream that "will" 
happen in the future.

In fact, this is one of my complaints of their UI.  IT does not treat 
it like a "meeting"