AltME groups: search

I  know someone who had a water issue on their cement, and when they 
started asking around about the white mold which was appearing on 
the surface, they where told to leave the house and call a professional 
cleaner...  it turns out, killing the mold was easy, but when dying, 
they released spores which are extremely dangerous and can suffocate 
a majority of people before you have time to get to the hospital... 
 :-(

and THAT time, they where living in a gigantic , human "fly trap"...

It's a simple REBOL script.  Believe me, if I had time then I would 
do it.

People learn in different ways, some people learn by reading, some 
people learn by listening and some people learn through wriitng. 
Sir Winston Churchill, the British wartime Prime Minister, didn't 
do well at school because he was one of those people who learnt through 
writing. His brilliance emerged during his time as a war correspondent 
in South Africa.

So it looks as though Brian is of the same mold.

As for me, i'm the worst kind of learner - I learn by talking!!!!

mmm... is the trial time-limited ?

Hmm.  I have to send a Control-C to stop it recording if I don't 
specify a time interval.

He told us at Devcon that the most time he spends is selecting the 
exact right word to use in REBOL.

Geomol: i'd suggest using RAMBO and not email feedback for bugs. 
this frees up some time for Carl.

on UML.


my take on that is it can consume a lot of time and energy.... as 
engineers try to 'perfect' their model.


Personally, I use FLiP process ( http://www.fusebox.org/index.cfm?&fuseaction=methodology.steps
) or Fusebox for short.

It makes it easier for end users to understand.

any time table on a new altME? or maybe just one built on the 1.3 
SDK if it's possible?

Quick fix for AltME - store the last text sent in a buffer so it 
doesn't get lost if Altme discos on you at the time you send it - 
thereby resulting in data loss.

How far are we from AltME for OS X? I'm only on this PC for about 
an hour a day, and I'd love to spend some of the other time on AltME.

So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand 
at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get 
done right now and if you're not doing it, you're not making progress 
at the fastest possible rate.
 -- Joel on Software


I'm guessing you're a 'switched on' kind of guy.. so..  .. Altme 
simply isn't one of your priorities.

We have a very low bug rate (we have won awards for it.)


We take it very seriously.  On one side it means things can be a 
pain in the ass (especially for us).  On the other side, what we 
do release is much better.


One thing it does cause though is for everyone to focus and gather 
up all the things they want to change at the same time.  Sort of 
like knowing that you have to put all your stuff on one boat every 
day to set sail.  If you miss the boat you have to wait a day.

I'd like to see a metric that measures the success of a world .. 
for instance, the number of posts per logged on user per unit time.

I usually see this happening when connecting for the first time, 
and clicking on a group area while AltME is syncing.

When I saw the dot bug then most of the time a lot of the groups 
were syncing correctly and there was one or two groups that just 
didn't sync completely like it got some bad packets or something.

Guys...when I say "magical," I'm speaking of testing.  I can save 
our in-house testers a lot of time if I can simpy say "set one machine 
high, one machine low. and start reducing the problem."  giving them 
a number to start with saves a lot of time.

Mike, for the record, this is a gray area.  I am in fact saying Graham 
is full of crap, but for a subjective opinion.  To actually be an 
attack of him as a person (ad hominem) I would have to say something 
about him, as opposed to about his method.  This is a rather meta-argument 
because the very thing I'm attacking is his debating skills. 


I happen to treat software as people (my own quirk), since it embodies 
the spirit of the creators.  As a result a consider some statements 
attacks.  I'm fine with a factual statement. But if I do not call 
attention to this, it becomes lore.


Gab, there is not a perceived lack of on-going development, there 
has been in fact almost no development for long stretches of time 
on AltME.  That simple.   Does not address the issue, and a disagreement 
is not a flame war.  I have too much respect for Graham to flame 
him.

I used to run altme all the time at work until they clamped down 
on all firewall and proxy ports. I found it to be the ideal program 
to log progress on tasks I was doing but now it wont connect. I only 
need it to do the do name or world resolution as the server would 
be running inside the firewall too. No data traffic needs to flow 
outside the firewall. Reichart - is it possible to have a local name 
world name server our enable the name resolution to be proxied through 
http, and I could just plug in the corporate gateway/proxy?

very possible, i install and uninstall stuff all the time so there 
is no telling what package takes the link out

Can smoeone send me the last 10 lines frmo this Group? It seemed 
to be lost while I was running the old Altme and the new at the same 
time..

Another variable will be how many simultaneous uploads/downloads. 
Right now it does them all at the same time.

Carl - that is strange ... becuase last weeks, I got really two-time-the-week 
recycle crashes, mainly while still syncing and pressing groups quickly 
to "unred" them :-) No such problem with new beta yet .... but maybe 
it is too early to tell, however surprised that it is build on 1.2.10 
....

I wondering for some time now..Why is there NO ALtME-Transport-Protocol 
available?? Is there none or is it simply not yet secure enough to 
give away? Or does it break the ALTME secrets ?...

also something about the window going to the top every time a message 
comes in, even if the setting has been deactivated in preferences

i hope so, anyway, it's not such a big problem as it's still very 
rare bug. Altme is great. I'm sometimes using other web forums and 
can compare it with Altme - which has much more better approach (as 
I don't need to load huge HTML all the time to just check if someone 
answered my question:)

Well, I have three worlds open at the same time.

I know it's a known bug, but it happened first time for me: strange 
datatype during recycle.
While clicking a red group during syncing.
AltME 1.1.28 Windows XP

Yup…….I apologize.  There is something very very subtle in this bug 
about timing.  For those that it happens to, it happens all the time, 
but setting up the exact same configuration does not reveal the bug 
to us.


We will nail it, we have been ripping into the code lately, and we 
hope to get this with it.

if you don't believe me, try resyncing this world from scratch - 
it'll take a very long time :)

Yup. But at that time I wasn't doing anything - just browsing the 
posts from one of the groups.

Over time, things will get more specific.  But we want to keep things 
as simple as poosible.

I've reinstalled both Windows and Linux on my machine. I'm only able 
to run Altme 1.0.1 on Win (don't ask me why new beta crashes all 
the time on clean installation while it was working without problem 
on old one) and it synced no rooms. On Linux I have no problem with 
latest beta and syncing works without problem. So I spent some nice 
minutes clicking on red rooms (but it's better to have something 
to click on than otherwise :)

Why not base REBOL/view widgets on GUI4CLI widgets maybe to save 
time it will be easyier to make the same kind of integration in this 
topic that it has been done for AGG integration

I've got one event that I am processing for timer events, and I want 
to start up another that shows a time elapsed.  But it seems I can't 
have both going at once ?

rebol []

newtimer: does [
	inform layout [
		timer2: info "00:00:00" 60 font [] rate 1 feel [
			engage: func [face action event] [
				if action = 'time [
					timer2/text: now/time
					show timer2
				]
			]
		]
	]
]

view layout [
	timer1: info "00:00:00" 60 font [] rate 1 feel [
		engage: func [face action event] [
			if action = 'time [
				timer1/text: now/time
				show timer1
			]
		]
	]
	button "New timer" [newtimer]
]

SHOW-POPUP:

 There are 4 types of modal windows: plain, /window, /away, /window/away
	/window  - puts popup inside pane of an existing window

 /away    - allow handling of events of other faces than the popup 
 face eg. [time inactive key] in Romano's patch

and i usually track elapsed time...

Quick and dirty, but not the same as the event, as it does not account 
for processing time.

using a time event is like multitasking whereas your quick and dirty 
way makes it difficult to do anything else ...

A face with a rate and time catcher in the engage function.

Yeah .. strange that it has laid hidden for such a long time.

To prevent ui events and have counter start with 1 using your short 
form:

num: 0 view layout [cnt: label (form num) rate 1 feel [engage: func 
[face action event] [if action = 'time [cnt/text: form num: num + 
1 show cnt]]]]

Here's what I use for simple timers in layouts:

stylize/master [
    timer: sensor 1x1 rate 0:0:1 feel [
        engage: func [face action event] [
            if action = 'time [do-face face none]
        ]
    ]
]

Maybe it is not easy(or time consuming) to implement but it would 
be cool to have it at least on main platforms(win, linux macosx). 
btw Flash has the same functionality so why not Rebol?

I'm going to take these security issues one at a time.

Hi guys. I was going to take the security issues one at a time, but 
Carl and I are talking about getting some kind of file location where 
I can upload a design doc for you to take a look at.

Yes, unplugging works fine.  So if the plugin is running at the time 
of the network connection loss, no problem.  I wasn't however able 
to startup once the connection was lost.

I do that all the time by .r-association.

Just an update if you're curious what's happening with the plugin. 
We're busy working on it. That security design doc will take more 
time, don't have a ETA yet.

Tell me where I'm missing it. The goal of the plugin is to provide 
an environment for REBOL apps to run within an HTML page. It has 
nothing to do with download.


This is the second time you have paraphrased what I wrote in a way 
I can't tract.



R: I can't wait to be able to click on a ".r" file and have it just 
pop up and go.
J: How does double-clicking on a r file relate to the plugin?
J: It has nothing to do with download.


I don't know why you mention double click, nor do I know what downloading 
has to do with this.


Perhaps we can get on the same page by simply answering my question… 
when someone comes across a .r file, what happens now?

Josh - Opera needs to be supported, definitely. The strange things 
is what you say, because the extended API announcement I pointed 
you to last time, was signed even by Opera company. Maybe you should 
check with Opera team ...

Did it take long time for you to dig it up? :-)

This is why it would be best to use the browser cache for "let me 
store some graphics so I won't have to download them every time" 
situations. Other user settings are small in comparison, and can 
easily be stored in browser cookies or server side. Then, no security 
requestors necessary.

do they have time and resources to sift through thousands of expertly 
crafted scripts per day? (just being positive about a future scenario 
:-))

Well, I went back to FF and added rebol.com. This time it downloaded 
the plugins (2 files, viewdll.dll and nprbmzpl.dll) and screen changed 
slightly in that I no longer see all of the white box that is supposed 
to be red and blue. It is cut off on the top.

except of "wait time", that waits a few secs instead of fractions.

Volker: That "wait time" may be due to the new auto-update feature, 
which checks for a new update at RT's servers every day. Do you notice 
a speed improvement on subsequent uses of the plugin within the same 
day?

Ingo - I don't understand - most of the time, you don't care of proxy, 
if you don' know what it is ;-)

To me Ingo makes sense. HE is around the first time, makes browser 
working, a while later she downloads this pluginin without him aorund. 
says things like control-panel.

Nothing to be sorry about...it is all about getting feedback, everyone 
here that reports a bug to the rest of u saves us time, and makes 
the product better.

According to the blog, now is the time Carl is supposed to be in 
France for several weeks? We will have to wait anyway ....

that's ok for me. I don't need it tomorrow, but it would be nice 
to develop my concepts for demoing in a few months time.

(That ends my ranting, Orca still has a chance if anyone time please 
feel welcome to contribute, I sign-off from this channel now)

Ah yes! You are right :) Sorry, have to read it better next time 
:)

Sorry, but we are not.  Our plan has not changed in a long time. 
 But, what you see are pieces of the plan in development in parallel. 
 To explain...

So, a short list of the outstanding critical problems .. see if they're 
fixable in your time frame , if so - commit to a final release?

No, I think instability means crashing the browser, not being able 
to install the plugin at all etc.  I followed the installation steps 
and it didn't work for me. (I should spend more time analysing why). 
But that means I can't join in with testing and be at the same level 
as everyone else here.

That is the right order. I had some free time today and was investigating 
the issues involved with the proxy project, hence the discussion. 
(we may develop this slightly out of order anyway, because Carl is 
in France for a few more weeks)

would like that a lot! but time-machine broken :(

Graham: Have you been able to get this to reproduce consistently, 
or was this just a one-time occurance?

Its been a long time since I've played with javascript... so I'm 
not only rusty, I'm shut. ;-)

I hope that Carl sees all this nonsense and that he understands, 
that unless he can employ 10 full time programmers... he has to make 
all of this open source and relinkeable like python. (even if the 
core interpreter is closed)  99% of bugs are not related to it.

Thanks, Gregg. As soon as I can find time, I'll try to get it to 
work.

and because it took me some time... there is this important difference, 
if you center faces inside plugin:
;system/version == 2.6.2.3.1

center-face: func [
    obj [object!]
    /with face [object!]
][
    if none? face [face: system/view/screen-face]
    obj/offset: max 0x0 face/size - obj/size / 2 + face/offset
    obj
]

;system/version == 2.7.5.3.1
center-face: func [

    {Center a face relative to parent (screen for windows) or a sibling 
    face.}
    obj [object!]
    /with "Center relative to a sibling face." face [object!]
][

    if none? face [face: any [obj/parent-face system/view/screen-face]]

    obj/offset: max 0x0 face/size - obj/size / 2 + either with [face/offset] 
    [0x0]
    obj
]

I'm using at least one plugin script all the time

Pekr.. good thing is, that I was able for the first time install 
the FF and Opera version without problem

maxim, I made this a long time ago, shortly after the first plugin 
came out:

http://hmkdesign.dk/dom/curvyclean.html

http://hmkdesign.dk/dom/<-- all files can be seen here

Wow that is really cool. I downloaded and tested under Opera. Works 
very well.
Just a few notes: bubbles takes too much cpu time,

And gfx effect crushed (Opera hanged) when I tried all the effects 
then back to Invert (the first one)

Yes, bubbles take a little too time the first time it's launched, 
but it's very impressive,; so I put it first.
If you want more scripts, just email me: [maxint-:-tiscali-:-it]

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 made a RGB<->HSV back in the dawn of time I think newer rebols 
have it built in

I don't know, I haven't had time to check Wikipedia thoroughly. But 
as we consider it more closely, we can see many factors contribute 
to the final colours.

May I suggest that:


- Starting with just cold metal - metal is not a single colour.  
You are seeing many colours at all times, and different patches of 
colour everywhere.  You are seeing colours reflected and you need 
a coefficient table to calculate the reflection index.  Copper for 
example would lean heavily towards red.


- Next, heated metals are the same, meaning, not a single colour 
either, but now for a different reason.  But to produce the illusion 
of something burning hotter and hotter will require something that 
is multi-pass, and changing constantly.


In video games to produce the afterburner on a jet we did a few tricks:


- The jet flame itself was made of a cone-like shape (maybe a dozen 
polygons).

- The cone was set with an alpha channel so that the source was close 
to opaque, and the tip was close to translucent.

- A second cone was placed around the first cone, but just slightly 
larger.

- They both undulated at all times.  In other words, the length was 
always changing for both cones independently just slight.  And when 
the jet went faster and slower, they changed from long to flat (with 
the plane itself).

- The textures on the polygons were already a rainbox of colours, 
but as the jet changed what it was doing, the colour pallet was changed. 
 Again, both cones were not always changed at the exact same time.

- Just behind the jet (but depending on your angle of view), several 
filters (polygons that read the bg info and render again) would be 
used to create a small waiver and a refocusing.  The more GPU you 
had, the more of this you could do, and the better the final effect 
would look.

- Lastly, and this is what makes the whole thing amazing in a 3D 
game.  We are always checking the location of bright things, such 
as the sun, or things like the after burner filling your screen. 
 If so, we change the contrast of the whole world, and flare out 
your iris.  In the case of the sun we throw up a lens flare, and 
darken all the ships in the sky.

Even as a 2D problem, you should attach this the same way.

This video I think drives this all home for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHL94qQgl_8&feature=related

the same probably applies wrt the way the color spreads out over 
the time it cools down and/or the distance from a single hot point.

there should be time counter capability in calendar here, or something 
like that. Stating 20:00 UTC is like saying nothing ...

ah, finally something - http://www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_UTC.aspx

http://www.dxing.com/utcgmt.htm- UTC = GMT .... there is a clock, 
which will show current time counter in relation to your timezone 
...

<Stating 20:00 UTC is like saying nothing ...>

Part of the idea behind ISO 8601 is that everyone should be able 
to convert their local time to UTC and vice versa. So times specified 
as UTC are unambiguous. Anything else, in an international context, 
is mis-interpretable.
See you at DevCon!

It's currently about 10:45am here in Eastern time, USA, and I'm planning 
of being at http://rockfactory.us/rooms/room22at 3pm (4 hours 15 
minutes from now) - the Altme timestamp should help clear things 
up.

(not much suprises me.............but it is interesting how some 
programmers get very confused by time offsets.  I wonder if this 
is the same reason American's get confused by metric)

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/


At the bottom of the page it says "Current UTC (or GMT/Zulu)-time 
used: Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 18:12:34" (right now)

May I suggest that the following be added to the home page of REBOLConf.info 
website:

- Much bigger date and time.
- Link to the video conference.
- List of known speakers.

I need: a countdown timer that sits in an external file, is invoked 
with startTimer('date and time string'); and changes the text content 
of <span id="counter">.  That is all.  Otherwise, no timer...

I set aside too little time for this one (not intentionally), though 
not too bad for a rush job...

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.

It's not just the money, it's also your time. it was extremely generous 
of you, Nick, and the others who helped with the organisation.

With any luck the next online DevCon will have more preparation time. 
I look forward to your presentation, Terry :)

Has a date/time been proposed?