AltME groups: search

Hi guys;
  Thanks for the input.


PeterWood & Anton:  I could have sworn that I tried both to-char 
and to-string.  It is the obvious answer, but I have been trying 
so many things in solving a parse problem that I missed it.  Now 
I remember, I did try them but at the time I complicated the character 
testing by using quotes and brackets and braces, or in the case of 
the hex string - not using the #{}.  Anyway, thanks for your time 
in answering. 


Gabriele:  As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about 
modifying your CVS parser to make it work with (improperly) quoted 
strings.  That may be the simplier answer to my parsing problem.


MikeL: I started by not using the /binary but then the 'read' converts 
the #{0D0A} sequences to just #{0A} so I was going to try using the 
/binary option to preserve the original #{0D0A} and got sidetracked 
into changing the rest of the file back into a string.  Turns out 
that I will be going back to just using the 'read' without the /binary 
option and try modifying Gabriele's, CVS parser to handle improperly 
embedded quotes.

Whoops. Didn't see your post in time.

that would be cases where you need to compose things during runtime 
and not "layout time"

Well, you know I'm in favor of including BUILD in the default REBOL. 
You clash with parens all the time when building parse rules.

All the time - haven't you been paying attention? :)

Henrik - where did you get it from? :-) IIRC asking Gabriele some 
time ago the answer was something like possibly. IIRC there was one 
page with parse suggestions, but not sure what will come in. I know 
that mine would make parse a different tool, but for "novices" like 
me, I would welcome 'to [a | b | c] :-)

Why this function runs well on some web servers (f.ex. KFWS) but 
hangs (getting cgi script time out) for MS IIS and how to solve them? 
I found that problem is in line where read-io is.

read-post-data: func [
    {Reads the HTTP entity body}
    /safe "Disables evaluation of content-length header."
    /local len data tmp
] [

    len: load any [ all [safe "65536"] system/options/cgi/content-length 
    "0" ]

    data: make string! len
    tmp: make string! len
    while [ 0 < read-io system/ports/input tmp len ] [
        insert tail data tmp
        clear tmp
    ]

    data
]

I got two REBOL functions, say, f1 and f2, which are both time-consuming.

How can I make them run simultaneous in the same process? Thank you.

(I think I hit this problem already a long time ago..)

I got two REBOL functions, say, f1 and f2, which are both time-consuming.
How 
can I make them run simultaneous in the same process?


We don't have threads in REBOL (though the rumored task type in R3 
may give us this capability), so you need to do big tasks in little 
chunks, maybe FSM driven, to simulate things like co-routines.

time fot 64 bits ints.... and people asked... do we need them?

by all accounts, time is expressed in seconds internally .  and guess 
what! 600000 hours is 2.16 Gs..  just above 2^31 (2.14 Gs)..   so 
if we had 64 bits, then we could hold the date and calculate it with 
other values.

I think the minimum time unit is milliseconds - thousandths of a 
second.

Is time quantisized? ;-)

Anton, that might be right under Windows. I think, under UNIX (Linux, 
OS X, etc.) the minimum time unit is less than that. Under OS X:
>> now/time/precise
== 17:28:10.349125

time really is quantized depending on the OS. XP SP 2 has got a bigger 
quantum than XP SP 1, which was 10 milliseconds IIRC

Linux has much more precise timer (or it just simply returns more 
digits for now/time/precise)

if we don't know that input data is invalid within REBOL (like an 
integer specification which does not fit inside an integer) then 
I don't see why REBOL should try to cope.  its plain logic to me. 
 this decimal issue can drag around a LONG time before you realise 
what is going on and by that time... its a hard thing to fix.

we are at a crossroad (R3) where we can pick the best direction, 
that is why it is time to ask these questions

red-icons = old time problem with timestamps we can't rely upon

part of why R3 is going to be so incompatible... I'd say its the 
perfect time to address this and actually propose stuff instead of 
just whine that they don't work  ;-)

I don't see the point to the partial evaluation either. A set-path 
will always evaluate its argument, so you don't need to preevaluate 
the set-path to determine whether the argument will be evaluated 
- it will. Just evaluate the argument ahead of time. If the set-path 
fails later, so be it.

Tough questions! :-) In general I'm for evaluation of what possible 
at the earliest time as possible. This way stack space should be 
kept at a minimum. This works against the post-check method mentioned 
earlier. So we have the old fight between speed and size. We want 
both! (Good speed and minimal size = reduced bloat and small foot-print.) 
Examples are good to explore this!

i: 2
a/(i: i + 1): (i: i * 2 0)


Should evaluate the first paren right away, because it's possible. 
This way the path is reduced to: a/3

Now, a/3: might not make sense yet, depending on wheater a is defined 
or not. But we don't care, because it's a set-word, and here post-check 
rules.

a: [1 2]
a/(a: [3 4] 1)

should give 3 (I think).

a: 1x2
a/(a: [3 4] 1)

should also give 3 then.

The last one:
a: 1x2 a/(a: 3x4 1): (a: 5x6 7)
should go like this:
i) a is set to 1x2
ii) a is set  to 3x4

iii) first paren returns 1, so a/1 is about to be set (a is not desided 
yet, because it's a set-word).
iv) a is set to 5x6 and second paren returns 7.

v) a is about to be set, so it's being looked up (a holds at this 
point 5x6).
so result is, that a ends up holding 7x6.

Hmmm, has anyone looked at my FILE-LIST script on REBOL.org? If so, 
would it make sense to add an option to sort the results, or an option 
to have extra data returned (e.g. attrs or date-time) along with 
the file names themselves?

note that in the above, if you didn't compose the block it would 
still work, since val would be evaluated on the fly... BUT if you 
have several windows opened at the same time and each new window 
displayed a different caption, then the above is necessary... otherwise 
changing the value of val will change ALL windows at the same time 
 :-)   which is a common error we all make at some point.

so the callback of the button will be bound to the value of 'val' 
at compose/deep time .. ? ok.

it will replace the (val) by its value at specific time

another very good use of compose:

time: now
my-object: make object! compose [
	name: "me"
	time: (time)
]

without the compose, my-object/time will be none

actually it will raise an error since time within the context of 
the object, is not yet set.

hm, isn't:

my-object: make object! [
  name: "me"
  time: now
]

equivalent?

i would expect that time is identical to now after

time: now

but it's not.

forget it.

time: now
my-object: make object! [
  name: "me"
  mtime: time
]

behaves the same ...

time: time was the problem

I want to speed up access to a block of objects (unassociated) for 
a search algorithm.
Should I use LIST! or HASH! ?

It's a growing list of visited objects, and I'm searching it each 
time to see if the currently visited object has already been visited.

I wonder what the conversion time is between BLOCK!, LIST! and HASH! 
there must be some kind of penalty there.

Wait, I haven't shown you this yet.
	; my second version, more like Chris's version, using FORALL
	use-foreach: func [
		words [block! word!]
		data [series!] "The series to traverse"
		body [block!] "Block to evaluate each time"
	][
		use words compose/deep [
			forall data [
				set [(words)] data/1
				(body)
			]
		]
	]

; my fourth version, using WHILE
	use-foreach: func [
		words [block! word!]
		data [series!] "The series to traverse"
		body [block!] "Block to evaluate each time"
	][
		use words compose/deep [
			while [not tail? data][
				set [(words)] data/1
				(body)
				data: next data
			]
		]
	]

although dns:///async is asyncronous, it probably can't do multiple 
host resolution at the same time.

i never used it this way, so i can't say if it can be made to work. 
but by thinking about how this is implemented on unix (a second process 
that calls gethostbyname), i'd guess that it can only do one host 
resolution at a time.

but i never tried what happens if i try to resolve many hosts at 
the same time

let's get on the first reason: why did I say that threading is worse? 
for the reason holger explained a lot of time ago on the mailing 
list. shared memory.

Chord - problem number one, udp:// has bugs that make it inusable 
in async manner. problem number two, it just stopped working after 
a couple minutes, and figuring out why was incredibly difficult. 
(maybe it'd work on 1.3... but i haven't had time to try it)

ok, thanks for your answers - looking forward to R3 Core alpha, hopefully 
released at least for DevCon time :-)

On the subject of date! and values having meaning. I think that the 
zone refinement needs to be looked at again:

>> dt: 17-Jan-2007/9:52+25:00
== 17-Jan-2007/9:52+25:00

but 

 >> 17-jan-2007/9:55+5:45
** Syntax Error: Invalid date -- 17-jan-2007/9:55+5:45
** Near: (line 1) 17-jan-2007/9:55+5:45


To the best of my knowledge +25:00 is not a valid time zone offset 
but +5:45 is (Nepal).

I did, twice (some time ago, though). All the years end in 5, no 
0.

I don't think the UI was hard at all. My parents were able to use 
it without any problems (and they can't even rename a folder on their 
PCs), my sister had no trouble (and she's not much better than my 
parents with computers) and a friend of mine who is reeeeallly bad 
with computers (like, worst case scenario) figured everything out 
pretty much on her own (and she doesn't understand a word of english). 
I think the much bigger issues here were that people always tried 
to compare it to vastly different things (Skype, Facebook, Twitter, 
etc.) which made them completely oblivious to it's potential. It 
was also maybe hard to see the potential because third party adoption 
was really low. I think there are two reasons for the low adoption. 
For one, there was no real incentive for a developer to write an 
extension for Google because there were no real solutions to easily 
make money with Wave (an app store could have helped here, which 
Google planned to do at one point but never did). The other is something 
I don't understand at all, the API documentation. It's horrible. 
You have to look up everything in the source code because the docs 
tell you next to nothing. This hasn't improved at all over time and 
it's a shame because writing an extension for Wave is actually very, 
very easy and it allows you to do stuff that just wasn't possible 
before Wave unless yo spend a 100 times more time on it to get all 
the necessary behind the scenes stuff working.

bassically, it de-activates the session key.  so that a new login 
process is required.  since you may have several sessions opened 
at any time, this is very nice, and should be available for ALL on-line 
sites.

two highlights of that "dog" are when it recuperates (in real time) 
when pushed sideways... the other is at the end... when it starts 
running and JUMPS over a 3 ft wide obstacle... look at how precisely 
its hind-legs land just beyond the obstacle... waiting for the proper 
balance to occur...

now THAT is downright scary

You "really" want to learn to fly a helictoper? It takes a lot of 
study, is time consuming, very hard to get time on a machine, expensive, 
and, THEN what?

of course I really want to get the license. why not?
investing in personal abilities is always a good choice.
but in general you are right, making this license 
without the intention of some commercial usage could be 
seen as wasting time... execpting for me, at least I can 
add this to my fixed wing I made many years ago and what comes
after the THEN? well, the last time I flew is many years 
ago but hey man...it was a original refurbished tiger moth
at one of the coolest location ever.
as you can see I can use it also to brag a little bit ;-)

but ok, this is a little off topic for this channel...

GPU rendering has been used for production since Pixar's CArs... 
I've seen real-time manipulation of one of the shots ... it was impressive... 
it had caustics, refraction, reflections, all the stuff.  was running 
at full HD.


the only noticeable artifacts, where slightly lower polygon counts, 
slight transparency artifacts (hardware depth is aproximated, never 
subpixel) and some edge alliasing.


IIRC the actual color precision of images was within 10% of actual 
rendered final passes which took several hours per frame on the CPU. 
 so the animators could actually use the reflections and general 
look of the shot right away.

well, Apple is on the road to world domination.....  all-time record 
sales with a net profit of 4 billion$   !!

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/apple-grabs-20-billion-profit-with-record-iphone-mac-sales/

funny... that is exactly what CGR is going to be... time to make 
a browser plugin  ;-)

facebook is an insane waste of time. the moment you have more than 
10 friends using it actively, it becomes a constant stream of noise, 
most of it pure trash.

Correction: The problem was solved years ago with socalled Time of 
Flight cameras. The kinect is just a much cheaper way to do the same 
thing, so now, everyone can do it.

13 million lines of code


Linux is on the wrong track! The same can be said about OpenOffice. 
I downloaded it the other day for my new Mac, and I just checked, 
it takes up 427 MB of my disc. It simply takes too much time to deal 
with such software, it being maintenance or just figuring out as 
a user how it works.

if you're running Windows, you could use something like MySpeed from 
Enounce - it can let you play back videos at faster than real-time. 
I find that for most content 2x is still very understandable.

It takes 1-2 uninformed politicians to make headlines, so it may 
not be as bad as it seems, but it's seems the desire for categorizing 
and quantifying software through law making won't end any time soon.

time for another revolution ... storm the bastille

anyway - we need two things - Carl getting back to R3 coding, porting 
a library, and someone skilled doing the port. We don't have skilled 
ppl with free time and will to do so, nor the resources to sponsor 
such a non-business case  imo ...

No..this was just a comparison. Such R3 based tool doesn't need to 
have anything with 3D...it just have to be useful. If you pick just 
a few pltforms/markets that makes it useful and do the ports you 
have very high chance it will save other developers time and they'll 
buy it.

well I will stop here I already explained my point of view on this 
matter ... but yes we lack volunty we lack people we lack knowledge 
we lack time we lack direction etc...

We've not applied any specific intellectual property but instead 
spent time analysing where boot delays are coming from and simply 
optimising them away. The majority of the modifications we make usually 
fall into the category of 'removing things that aren't required', 
'optimising things that are required', or 'taking a new approach 
to solving problems' and are tailored very precisely to the needs 
of the 'product'.

I like extrem stuffs like that ... It shows that hardware progress 
just servs people to be more lazy in their creation. At a time hardware 
was short and expensive people were spending zillions hours to  optimise 
everything even going on the lower possible assembly level to have 
just and only the necessary. Now in days with  our gigantic powerfull 
processor people stoped to optimise things they pile up to the sky 
things and don't care if it take 30 more times to execute ...

Pekr linux is fast on boot time i mean a genuine  linux ubuntu 10.10 
on a 1.6 ghz procesor like my netbook boots up in 30 seconds wich 
isn't bad at all compare to the 5 minutes of boot time needed to 
 start windows 7 starter ed on same machine...

after you can gain another 10 seconds of boot time just by  using 
X11R6 + openbox windows manager instead of gnome + Metacity or kde 
etc...

I've already started the research, bought the phone and such. My 
limiting factors aren't Carl. And I don't do the incremental development 
with frequent compiling style, I do the write it ahead of time style, 
so am not limited yet by not having a lib in hand.

getting rid of the CO2, one molecule at a time.

Not in Europe or the Americas -- still prime time for announcements 
of R3 and such things,

since we are not rid of things like the daylight savings time yet, 
I'm starting to think it's easier to just change the Earth's rotation 
:-)

We have constant daylight savings here. That's why the time in Jakarta 
which is two hours flight to the east of us is one hour behind the 
time here. The sun is at  its highest between 1:00 and 1:30 depending 
on the season.


There was a rumour that the Prime Minister who made the change did 
so because he was fed up with the senior civil servants playing golf 
before going to work.

If the poles reverse, we might as well change the timezones so we 
can still use our compasses to guess the time

too bad that swatch time never caught on. perhaps it was simply introduced 
at the wrong time.

My chat program based on Maarten's rubgy used swatch time

All these webinar invites I get .. no idea what the local time is!

We have continuous daylight savings time here in the Netherlands, 
too, since Hitler synced us to Berlin time, instead of GMT

Pity Hitler didn't enforce swatch time ...

Sure beats sitting for hours at a time typing in program listings!

he is getting bashed all the time and he replies with a good attitude. 
 I think he just was lucky (had the opportunity and will) about being 
able to license both commodore and amiga from the two different license 
owners at the same time.


If he can give me a better linux experience at a reasonable price 
I might just go and get one.   and yes... having a C64 cased PC *is* 
geeky cool.

the only problem is that they are not using any decent video cards 
in their machines, so that sucks big time.   sorry, but all of the 
intel cards are extremely sucky.   they don't even compare to 4-5 
year old mobile cards from ati and nvidia.

Even though my instances and EBS volumes were in the affected zone, 
I'm not aware of any down time for  me

Yes, I have been thinking the same. Amazon is very good at keeping 
their web services simple, but over time, complexity adds up anyway

It was 4 months or so ago when I read them, so I don't have the link. 
I was looking at job stats at the time to see what to learn next. 
I wouldn't be surprised if the trend was to more web programming 
in the future, because a lot of developers are looking for excuses 
to use Linux on the servers, and ways to support the OSX laptops 
they do their audio stuff on, while the businesses they support are 
all running Windows on the client. I've seen a lot of consultants 
try to push web-based stuff because they hate Windows, but it doesn't 
work very well a lot of the time. Still, developer pressure is cumulative, 
so eventual change seems likely.

MS is pushing HTML5 in order to convince developers to not abandon 
IE. Programmers who have to do business work have to run their stuff 
on web browsers with no HTML5 support. Despite what MS says in the 
HTML5 presentations, they aren't abandoning desktop development tools 
or Silverlight any time soon. The HTML5 guys are in a different, 
competing department, so they have no say over whether the desktop 
development tools go away. Only the developers who are outside of 
MS and use their tools have any say.

Right. Maybe I'll find the time after my retirement

I haven't really ... well, I remember hearing something from time 
to time in the news. I just pointed it out, because that might be 
valid information when comparing the prices.

I like working experiments which look like this:


http://pesn.com/2011/02/22/9501770_Rossi_cold_fusion_reactor_achieves_15_kW_for_18_hours/


it means we'll be able to build time-travelling deLoreans   ourselves 
  :-)

Robert, production is ~ 0.01/kwh   so very cheap...   and the minimal 
size is the actual device we see... 50x50x100 cm...  this is very 
cool... it means we could actually see "home-sized" units in time.

also, the current machine is prohibitively "under performing" because 
by his own account... they have no clue what (rather why) its actually 
working.  so they are using extremely safe levels of operation which 
have a zero chance of becoming dangerous.   

they are still trying to provide the theory behind the discovery.


the current demonstrations provide a ratio of output of about 6-7 
times output energy wrt input.   I've read that they did tests up 
to 400:1, at which point explosions always occur... but by his own 
account, they will be able to significantly improve the "reactor" 
in the next years, when they start understanding it more.


operationally safe levels could be a lot higher today, given a different 
environment in which they build the reactor so I expect tha commercial 
products will double output within a very short period of time.

my fear is that the "nuclear" aspect of this process, especially 
at this time, will cause alarmists who don't know the difference 
between fission and fusion to oppose it

It is designed to plug into a TV through HDMI, not USB. More likely 
it is because this platform is apparently designed for educational 
use, and is programmed by plugging it into another computer as a 
USB device. At runtime it changes the USB port to host mode, though 
not the USB plug. Perhaps they expect it to spend more time being 
programmed than used.

obviously not counting the time to boot the whole host os :)

Of other things, the liquid oxygen is no longer time critical (there 
is much more of it and the vaporization system is different) and 
radar control has fewer people running around. The launch platform 
itself no longer needs to be towed by a separate boat, but is powered 
by two diesel engines. Generally it seems a lot calmer and quieter 
than last year.

Hopefully his health will improve over time.

textmate eats less memory and the initial load time is shorter, but 
it's mac only, doesnt handle double with characters and gets confused 
by the proportional font too.

IMHO he was a far better inventor than Bill G.
Both were very good entrepreneur at there time.

Oh, that was suddently. I hope, he had fun most of the time.

Has anyone tried this:

http://stereopsis.com/flux/


It is supposed to change the color temperature of the display throughout 
the day, so that the display becomes warmer as it becomes night. 
Research apparently shows that you sleep better, if you are not looking 
at cold lights at night time.

I guess it depends on whether you know it's correct? I find it fairly 
reliable with having collections of information that would otherwise 
be hard or time consuming to gather. This is both for general topics 
and very specific topics. If I want to read up on the latest news 
on a developing technology (like Polywell fusion), I go there. Importantly, 
I also use the talk page to see, whether information has been removed 
or corrected for various reasons.

Maybe not more and more reliable over time, but more reliable, the 
deeper the question is.

I don't remember the last time I came across an incorrect statement 
on wikipedia