AltME groups: search

AM/PM time: http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-message.r?m=rmlTTVK

I have an iterated face function. This funciton stores some information 
that is than used later by an other function.


The problem I have is that the iterated function is executed when 
the VIEW command is exectuted. How can I call my other function AFTER 
the iterated function was exectued (the drawing is finished)? I thought 
that the iterated function is called at the time the LAYOUT command 
is used. Than I could call my other function before issuing a VIEW 
and it all would work. (BTW: The fact that the iterated function 
is called on VIEW and not LAYOUT should be documented).

Think of iterated function as another way of "show". Only that this 
show is called multiple times on a real show. One time for each row. 
so you can feed different data (and offsets!). Looks like multiple 
faces, needs space for one.

Robert, you can see http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-system.html#section-10
for more insight on how pane functions work.

An iterated face function is there to save memory, so it must be 
executed every time the display is refreshed. It creates the illusion 
of many faces by moving one face around very quickly.
It does not create and position new faces like LAYOUT.

What LAYOUT allows you to do is set up the pane function that will 
be used afterwards when SHOW is used or VIEW is used and events start 
flowing.

I am more busy implementing some solutions so I only think loud from 
time to time :-)

hrm. Having issues getting "show" to work right for me. Time to dig 
a little and see what I can find out...

Almost there. What controls the amount of scroll when the user drags 
the bar up or down. I want my bar to move in increments of one row 
at a time but it seems like I have way too fine of a value in there 
to the point where the program has to catch up to the user's movements 
after a while. I would think it would be obj/step.

I'm expecting you're doing a show every time there is a scroller 
movement. What you want to do is check if the current row (ie. the 
one at the top of your list) has changed If so, show the list. If 
not, ignore. Not all the shows are necessary.

I agree, that seems to be an inconsistency. Cyphre is probably aware 
of it, but worth a bug report. If you have some time maybe compare 
with other commands, too.

but I've always had this problem that painting large surfaces in 
REBOL takes a long time on my machine and it doesn't really matter 
what drivers I use

Anton, yes, that is a solution, but

being able to have sticky coords at all time is good. Let's say, 
you want to draw a line aligned to another element, but at the other 
side of the screen. Then you first move the pointer to the element, 
press SHIFT, move to other side of screen and start the line. I've 
implemented it via the "detect" function. New version uploaded at 
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/canvas/canvas.r

Instructions at: http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/canvas/canvas.html

It's possible to press or release SHIFT at any time, also e.g. doing 
an ellipse to freeze height or width of ellipse before finishing 
and rotating it.

you could probably force a show canvas every time you receive an 
'up event

I don't have much time today, but next thing, I'll do, is to reimplement 
the brush, so different shapes are possible. And so you can select 
an area of the image as a brush.

What is a good way to check for certain values in an input field?

Let's say, I want to do an integer field, I've tried this as the 
action function:

if error? try [to-integer value] [set-face face 0]


It works first time, but if I try enter an integer afterwards, it 
just get settet to zero again. Any ideas?

now SQLs are different kind of beasts -  there is NO live connection 
to sql database (on cursors later :-), you simply send a query, SQL 
server prepares results for you and sends it back to you. So, I wonder, 
how could actually SQL server slow your recordset browsing? And IF 
you were sending new requests after a key-press and wanted to stay 
real-time, then it is quite heroic aproach :-) Within our SAP system, 
you are glad if you receive your query result in few secs.

Hello, anyone have any ideas how I might improve on the integrity 
of a program that sends email to a list of people. I just realized 
I should be using '/only' but I have to check its behavior as I don't 
want each person to get a list of the other recipients. My problem 
is I often get a time out and I want to trap that. Yesterday during 
my first test it got halfway through the list and errored out which 
then caused the program to exit. I figured I should at least keep 
a running log so I can go back.

It was a time (not so far) where view doc was pretty inexistent.

Anamonitor was (is!) the way to correct partially this "state of 
fact".

Ouch to me... Oh well.  I guess I'll have to make a "Do not repeat" 
file from now on. Now I remember, I did the exact same thing with 
the exact same word some time ago...

I've been grumbling over a few observations I did on early versions 
of Canvas and ROAM regarding SHOW on three different machines: A 
slow PC linux laptop, my fast Windows PC with a Radeon 9500 graphics 
card and my mac mini with medium speed Radeon 9200 graphics chip. 
For my tests I used the ROAM object browser available in the desktop 
under Rebol/REBOL Tools.


When I maximize ROAM to full screen on my laptop and mac, they are 
rather slow at redrawing the highlight bar. But if I move the mouse 
quickly to the top/bottom of the list, the highlight skips those 
entries that can't be highlighted in time, and therefore it remains 
fairly responsive even if the frame rate is low.

However on my fastest machine with my powerful Radeon 9500, the highlight 
bar moves at a snails pace behind the mouse pointer, insisting on 
redrawing every highlight. It takes at least a full second to reach 
the current mouse position and the event system is locked and REBOL 
is fully concentrating on SHOWing the list face.


The amount of time SHOW takes to display the list view is dramatically 
dependent on the size of the window. A small 400x400 window is fast 
enough for normal use, but a 1280x1024 window is very slow.


It looks to me like a frame rate problem: Somehow my fast machine 
calculates a specific very high framerate (say 50 fps) that SHOW 
should handle for the list face, but can't keep up at all. Therefore 
50 SHOW operations take 2-3 seconds longer than they should and the 
delay occurs and it drowns out the event handling. This framerate 
is apparently tuned properly on the Linux and the Mac so it never 
becomes a problem there. How is this framerate calculated?


Also when I run the console benchmark program, I get remarkably bad 
performance on text output on my normally fast Windows machine, while 
the mac and linux consoles output text 5-10 times faster. Reports 
from other Windows users say my console is very slow.


I'm really just wondering if others with Radeon graphics cards and 
Catalyst drivers have similar problems.


Not all is bad: This framerate problem can be solved within REBOL. 
I did a simple delay system for Canvas which sped things up quite 
a bit on my machine and I've just done a dynamic method for ROAM. 
The delay system simply implements a DELAY-SHOW function which does 
not invoke SHOW unless a specific amount of time has passed. The 
method I did for ROAM is dynamic in that it measures how long a SHOW 
takes and adjusts the delay accordingly plus a tiny safety margin 
of 0.01 seconds. It works quite well. At the cost of a reduced framerate 
and sometimes missing a redraw at the end of a mouse move, I get 
a much more responsive ROAM, and the framerate adjusts nicely between 
large and small windows.

See if you can tell the difference between:

http://www.rebol.com/view/tools/roam.r
and
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/roam.r

pekr: The highlight problem is because it only wants to refresh if 
it's not the same row as at the last read of the mouse position and 
if the delay time has been exceeded. sometimes this is not the case 
if you move the mouse too fast.

system/view/caret: none. but focus will put a string there, so you 
have to none it each time.

A couple of questions: Is there a switch to start view in the console 
mode (CLI)? I know I can do something in the user.r but I'd like 
to do it from a prompt on demand. And also, anyone have any idea 
why my emails sent via a rebol program take so long to arrive. Any 
special settings in the header or hints. I 've created a program 
that sends emails to a list but I notice that it takes a long time 
(30 minutes or more) to receive the email. I checked by sending from 
Outlook and through the command line in rebol and it  was instantaneous. 
There's something happening and I wonder if any on you  have seen 
this.

I don't think they're intended to be in real time.

Just more to provide a snapshot over time.

There is a window face option named "all-over", that will "Causes 
the over event to report a continuous stream of mouse positions as 
the mouse moves over the face". I use it in Canvas, but there seem 
to be a problem. After a while, when I haven't touched the computer 
for some time, it seems, that the all-over option is canceled. It 
can be seen in Canvas, that the coords in the title-bar isn't updated, 
when the mouse is moved.

Does anyone know something about this? I've checked RAMBO, but couldn't 
find anything about it.

This demo shows how time events are handled with an iterated face. 
(Basically, time events don't iterate.)

do load-thru http://www.lexicon.net/antonr/rebol/gui/iterated/iterated-rate-test.r

is it possible to affect the key repeat rate? I'm trying to read 
a magnetic card through a reader which delivers one char at a time. 
I'm reading it into a face which has a feel that reads each key event. 
But the keys are read very slowly, about at the maximum key repeat 
rate set by the OS, so it takes 5-10 seconds to read a card with 
only 116 chars. Is there a different way to do this or can I manipulate 
the key repeat rate for that face?

but maybe it would be something for an article, placed there, for 
newbies. its prominently placed. people who try /desktop first time 
will click there too, and then your arguments are right.

When I test locally, I do not want to download files I already have 
each time, do I ?

I might also need access to view system's internal "timer-list" - 
this is the list of faces with rates which need time events sent. 
I at least need to know when this list changes, which as far as I 
know only happens when SHOW is called.

I guess I am hoping for a bit of attention. I will need some changes 
to the View system or it will not be able to work perfectly. Right 
now seems not a good time with rebcode just released, but this seems 
so fundamental to user interfaces to me I think it's more important. 
Everything always seems to lead back to the list.

Maybe right time. rebcode goes speed, iterated lists goes memory.

Volker: funny about get-set you know. Some time ago I objected, that 
'get-face, 'set-face should be made more general and accept additional 
parameter, so that you would simply use parameter name to set it, 
so e.g. set-face 'color value .... etc.

mhinson has just not yet learned, how to learn a programming language. 
I've noticed that by his stumbling on every little bit of basics, 
such as lit-path and why it doesn't make sense to him, because he 
can't extrapolate how it works inside a function.

mhinson,


REBOL, like any other programming language, is a system. It's a design 
with intentions, methods and patterns and it's designer has spent 
about 25 years thinking out how REBOL should work, in order for you 
to see the elegance and simplicity of the system.


A good programmer can predict what happens in a programming language 
with a specific piece of code, not by remembering what every little 
single thing does, but by knowing how the system behaves. If you 
study the works of Ladislav (such as Bindology), you'll see how much 
time he spends on figuring out the system of REBOL. REBOL wasn't 
put together randomly. Figure out the system of REBOL and programming 
becomes way, way easier. This goes for any programming language.


It helps to, when you get to a problem, to try to figure out why 
REBOL does this and that, while you're trying to figure out how to 
solve the problem. Why do you have to pass a lit-path to a function 
for it to be understood as a path in the function?

mhinson, when I made Tretbase 1.0 engine, I used Bind quite a lot. 
 The only time I really like to use 'bind is when I have iterations 
where performance is an issue.   That way I could write a block of 
code and then just bind it into a logic based loop.  This way I didn't 
have to record additional loops to meet the logic.

Just realised if I dont go to bed now the birds will start singing 
& the sun will be comming up again.. Rebol seems to cause time to 
speed up :-)

Your problem is this line:


 ["thing " copy thing to newline (append StructuredData reduce [to-word 
 thing []])]

Specifically this part:

	reduce [to-word thing []]


The last block here is never copied.  When you append your data with 
the reduced block, the owners block is always the same (as in 'same?) 
block.  You need to create a new block each time:

	reduce [to-word thing copy []]
or
	reduce [to-word thing make block! 5] ; 5 is arbitrary

Thanks everyone.  I like the shortcut ideas, once I can find the 
right %user.r file to modify.  I think I probably need to delete 
all copies & start again as because I have downloaded Rebol several 
time in my inital confusion when I first started trying to use it 
my PC is confused.


I have not come across GET before so that seems to be my missing 
link, thanks.

I think I would love to know when evaluation occurs.. So far I mostly 
just have to test every fragment of code I write & if I am lucky 
I guess right first time. I am slowly getting better at it, but I 
would say it is often a bit of a mystery.

Unfortunately, parsing is considered a hard subject. Learning PARSE 
might take some time if you haven't had experience or taken a class 
in parsing before, even when you read the online docs.

I started looking at the R3 Gui too.  I am mostly intrested in drawing 
my own graphics on screen, controled by a bit of maths & trig, but 
with real-time interaction from sliders etc.  I suspect this is not 
the sort of thing that newbies are expected to do, but writing text 
in different fonts on coloured buttons dosn't do anything for me.. 

I am finding that using any part of Rebol makes it easier to understand 
the discussion here & get more in tune with what behaviour to expect.

Mine'll also only grab one character at a time, so {abbb--} would 
need something extra

parse/all { X X  XX X X} [some [copy x "X" (prin x) [copy y "X" (print 
y) | skip] | skip]]

Character at a time:
- the outer skip
- copy x "X" (prin x)
- the inner skip
- copy x "X" (prin x)
- the inner skip
- the outer skip
- copy x "X" (prin x)
- copy y "X" (print y)
- the outer skip
- copy x "X" (prin x)
- the inner skip
- copy x "X" (prin x)
- the outer skip

Try this:

>> parse/all { X X  XX X X} [some [copy x "X" (prin x) [copy y "X" 
(print y) | skip (prin "i")] | skip (prin "o")]]
oXiXioXX
oXiXo== true

Thanks sqlab, no need to excuse yourself please, your examples are 
great & I learnt a new use for COPY in PARSE. This has made your 
examples clear to me now, so thanks for spending your time helping 
me.  


The problem I have set myself is purely to understand parse more 
clearly so I have enough know-how to write any scripts I need without 
spending all day doing it. That is why I start off anking one question, 
then jump to another question if I don't fully understand the help 
I get.  


I have used parse a fair bit all ready, but limited myself to very 
simple concepts. see http://www.rebol.org/script-information.r?script-name=cisco-extract.r
and marvel that it even works ;-)   Thanks.

WTF ... did Ladislav's time zone undergo a shift  ... or is he flying 
??

It does not notice the change, but does take into account the dst 
at start time.

I wonder how far outside the perimeter of their bases does their 
time zones extend

They don't define time zones in Antarctica, afaik - they just define 
the bases' operating time, not the local time in the area. But as 
you say, afaik is not very far.

Also on mine under OS X:
>> time [call/wait ""]
== 0:00:00.308834

*Waiting on new process (instead of returning immediately)

*Process must run and end (launching of the shell, shell interprets 
string, etc)
*Process must be reaped
*Possibly other stuff
>> time [call/wait {}] 1
== 0:00:00.300538
>> time [call {}] 1     
== 0:00:00.010613

300 ms: maybe there's a hardcoded "wait" for the other process to 
start, or something like that. it seems to be too much consistent 
to just be the shell startup time.

300ms is a LOT of time for webapps, it would be really appreciated 
if a build without that limitation could be made available, Thank 
you Gabriele for taking care 8-)

joanna - the best aproach is to probably ask here. We have few old-time 
rebollers here, who might remember some gems. One of them being me 
for e.g. OTOH - sometimes I am surprised, I can find real gems in 
rebol.org archive. So - rebol.org, google, ask on mailing list or 
here on AltME ...

most R2 script will work unchanged. There were, however, some changes 
to VID over time, so older VID scripts might not work with newer 
VID (View) engines. As for R2 to R3, Henrik is right - most scripts 
will not work ...

the time invested in learning R2 is not lost when you switch to R3.

Just avoid to pass to much time on GUI aspects and Ports handling, 
they are/will-be completly redisigned.

Steeve: well, sometimes things take time..  It took me decade (or 
was it two) before I got <build  does> .more or less right.  And 
I still don't get Lisp.. (nor have I tried it in years)..

Re the practicality: a good Parse dialect may be very practical (can 
be used to implement dialects, parse texts, match various patterns, 
etc.), but, at the same time, the design of it is rather a theoretical 
task.

From the liitle time I've spent looking at the rebol.org system in 
respect of converting it to R3, the code changes required seem to 
be very small (I've only looked at the cgi and core code, no View 
or VID).


The biggest problem would seem to be the  need to change the source 
code to UTF-8. MUch of the rebol.org code is pretty old and was written 
without attention to string encoding. The newer code is mainly ISO-8859-1 
"aware" and seems to be ISO-8859-1encoded. Some of the Rebol.org 
code won't load in R3 because it contains invalid UTF-8 characters. 
Changing the source encoding is trivial but with that comes the need 
to change all the data stored in Rebol.org to UTF-8 for it to be 
processed properly.

So, I'd like to ask if there is any sureproof way of telling apart 
which scripts are for R3 and which are for older Rebols?  This may 
indeed be obvious question, but I try to ask these now as long as 
I can cause I'd expect these to be asked a lot by the time R3 is 
released.

The 824 tests are unit tests of the production Rebol.org system which 
still runs in 2.5.6. So in that sense they are biased in favour of 
 2.5.6. My point was that many of them still work unchanged under 
R3.


The two main reasons that I started to build the Rebol.org unit tests 
was that they would help stop bugs being introduced when the code 
is enhanced and also help when it comes time to upgrade the version 
of Rebol that Rebol.org uses.


Sadly, I haven't written anywhere near the number of tests yet to 
reach my objectives.


(By the way, I wrote most of the tests before R3 was announced; I've 
recently converted them to a test framewoirk that also runs under 
R3.)

currently we can't download a single message knowing his Id. We only 
can download all the base, and the remaining messages each time the 
client sync. Not a good system to my mind

Wikis need work too. Making them open doesn't magically get people 
to contribute their time. The wiki has been open for more than a 
year and only a few people contribute to it.

one problem I see with opening up the wikis to a larger degree is 
that the number of moderators (or perhaps more accurately, the number 
of people who are qualified to be moderators and who have the time 
and are willing to vet any changes/additions)  is limited. Maybe 
once the community grows ease of access could be increased.

thanks Graham.


this altme thing is very buggy. this is the 10th time I am sending 
almost the same 
message and it is not posting.


does someone have a dsn less odbc connection script for connecting 
to a microsoft access 
database ?

not a problem for me either... actually its the first time I hear 
about someone with the problem you describe.

I have a slow connection  . you see ... sending 3rd time .  

i never had a problem posting a message in any browser based forum. 
  which again show the reliability and resiliency of web based forum 
over this altme.

YueM's problem is weird, but I think he's misinterpreting that AltME 
is simply downloading messages the first time.

He is using a slow   web connection,so it will take  much more time 
for downloading.

I've send a Feedback to AltME, given them the forum link....Time 
for the big guns ;)

Actually it gives me some ideas for bulk download of messages, the 
first time you start AltME in a particular world. The method it uses 
is fine for maybe 500-1000 messages at one time, but if you're getting 
250000, there should be a way for AltME to notify that or simply 
get them by the bulk.

Graham, I don't know. I personally don't have the time to delve into 
dealing with reverting those changes. It could take many hours to 
do.

3.0 is not production ready at this point. Still under heavy development, 
so maybe just stick with 2.7.6. LIST-VIEW is untested under 2.7.7. 
I haven't had the time to test it (but please do, and tell me if 
it fails :-)).

I guess what I'm trying to avoid is spending a lot of time learning 
something in r2 which is obsolete/redundant or majorly different 
in r3.  I suppose I could try running the various r2 demos and one 
liners under r3 and learn for myself the syntax differences.

great, r2 it is then.  I've been passively watching the rebol project 
for a while now, years in fact.  I'm now keen to 'at last' throw 
time at it , learn it all and start programming in it

because every time I use "find" I have to check the return value

I think your "none = next none" falls in that category as well... 
it can be useful here or there, sure, but most of the time you're 
probably masking bugs.

But 90% of the time, when you find a Rebol decision when you are 
not used to the language and study it after a time you will find 
it was made after a lot of deliberation.

most of the time you're probably masking bugs
 - exactly.

Now if all these accepted NONE and returned 0 at the end:

length? find find find my-string "a" "b" "c"
== 0

where would the error be?

That would destroy the locality of errors. Every time you pass through 
none, it takes you further away from the code that resulted in the 
none in the first place. The further you pass it through, the harder 
it is to figure out where it came from. We have been careful about 
the balance about where none is passed through, but there are still 
some tweaks to go.

The plan was to read  card at random into a block called the-deck, 
then remove them one at a time, and add them to another block called 
the-tableau.

I still need to put the time to answer him  ;-)

Note I added a bit of meat to the do-events topic raised by Graham, 
as an extra answer.

and yes... it would be swell if you rate the answer as the final 
one  (shameless I know, but worth the time and effort Me thinks  
;-)

Well, about binding in Rebol,  it's not that hard to understand.
The context of any word is a hidden property.
Meaning it can be changed at any time.

yes to "The context of any word is a hidden property.", but "it can 
be changed at any time" is a bit complicated by the fact, that it 
is "immutable", meaning, that you create a new word with a different 
context, when you want it, instead of changing the original

to go further.
If we admit that words may change of context during time.
Then, Rebol process "spacetime" binding

Sounds better than "applicative binding order". Time will tell if 
the increased explanation needed will be outweighed by having a cooler 
term.

When you know what it is referring to it sounds weird in English 
too. It means that bindings are set at function, object or module 
definition time (ignoring explicit binding).

I haven't looked at that in a looooooong time. I hope someone else 
can chime in and help.

thinking of using objects for the first time, using them to capture 
clinical data for patients.
Need to capture data by time; still just a fuzzy idea.

I have read how you can extend an object by simply redefining it 
with new values, but I wonder if there is a way to REMOVE elements 
from an object?
TIA!

Thanks to both Ladislav and Brian for taking the time to make that 
clear!

How can I make a file containing a tokens on each line be displayed 
one at a time in an info field(ie not modfiable, just readable) on 
the view when I click a button?

you can disable the pencil icon, then it allows you to simply press 
return. but then you can only send one line of text at a time, which 
may not be practical.

do you not want the DO block in the layout to be performed after 
FLASHCARD-PARSING? otherwise the questions-list.txt file is not generated 
in time.

ok. I think in general you will have an easier time not doing this 
split. Instead you can work on using the card data directly. Then, 
what you would save, would be a REBOL formatted copy of those card 
data. I think this will simplify your program.


you are already taking advantage of reading the cards with READ/LINES. 
when you parse that data, you can turn it into a record with two 
elements in each, the question and the answer. then by using SAVE/ALL, 
you can directly save this as your questions and answers, in the 
custom order that the user likes.

result-answer/text: " "
show result-answer


This will assign a new string to the TEXT facet of the RESULT-ANSWER 
face. What to be careful of here is that every time you pass that 
bit in the code, it is the exact same string (same memory location) 
and not a new string that gets assigned. That means that if something 
is put in there from another location, that memory location will 
no longer be empty, and the content will be shown in RESULT-ANSWER.

Implementing a design, you'll be doing series manipulations all the 
time

Having trouble with the "switch" function.
I'm entering the following at the REBOL terminal:
>> time: 14:00
== 14:00
>> switch/default time [
[    8:00 [send [wendy-:-domain-:-com] "Hey, get up!"]
[    12:30 [[cindy-:-dom-:-dom] "Joinme for lunch?"]
[    16:00 [send [group-:-every-:-dom] "Dinner anyone?"]
[    ]

For my trouble, I get: :)

** Script Error: switch is missing its case argument
** Near: switch/default time [
    8:00 [send [wendy-:-domain-:-com] "Hey, get up!"] 
    12:30 [[cindy-:-dom-:-dom] "Joinme for lunch?"] 
  ...


Am I using the REBOL terminal incorrectly? I'm using rebcore v 2.7.8

Is there a way to loop throu the objects in LDAP? I seem to be able 
to get just one object at the time.

(had several incompatibilities with 2.7.7 and never bothered to figure 
it out at the time)