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thanks, maybe it is in time.

Arnold: the devcon in July will suck up a lot of my coding time, 
as I need to prepare the presentation and that's something I'm very 
slow at.

I also plan to bring a surprize, if I can make it in time.

Very slow in making presentations? http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=presenter.r

Well I know all about that, making a decent presentation takes a 
lot of time.

Hi Doc, congratulations for this new landmark. As the hello.apk generated 
in the past from Red/System was not running for my Galaxy tab 10.1 
was not running, I expected the new apk release not running too and 
it is effectively not running here opn this machine, even  if I upgraded 
to Android 4.0.4 recently - so the problem is located under the Android 
level - as I had expected it too. May be the op cpodes generated 
are not the ones expected on my machine - that is they are not currently 
compatioble with the ones you generated - but I have no time to test 
it. this was just to keep you informed so others know this too... 
Don't bother with this case as I plan to get another Android device 
in the next few months to compare the compatibility of the product. 
Probably the CPU codes are not athe level you deliver them (ARM v5 
if I remember correctly ?)  Best regards.

@Doc : So the text msg is really missing - only the Window's name 
is appearing on my device - Phew !!! I was not disrturbing you for 
nothing at least! Hope the last log results could help a bit - but 
don't stress too much if your time is limited (rare) and I suppose 
it is .... thanks for the screen capture you sent.

I'm not sure that you can just change a driver file "in place" after 
each recompilation. I'm wondering if you need to deinstall the old 
one and install the new one each time...

Yes, they use a stack-based allocation system, so each time a slot 
is popped, it becomes available for a new series. But, as series 
are not freed yet, slots are not popped.

Now how to time the script? Red/System and C, the executables have 
a start time in seconds in the terminal logs but that is imprecise 
and there is no endtime just a logout message.

On OS X, there should be a time command in the terminal

Did in a shell the following: 
time C-script
real	0m0.073s
user	0m0.028s
sys	0m0.004s
time Red/System script
real	0m0.059s
user	0m0.039s
sys	0m0.004s

this time ;)

Having debugging code in there distorts the result, and a lot compared 
to the real code, since it takes so little time

But even loading the executable takes more time than the calculation, 
so the above timing is meaningless

Is the second time for 1000 x C? Then Red/System comes out almost 
8 times as slow as C. I wouldn't expect that, either

Depends on how stable the ARM version of the bridge will be (and 
how much time I will take to fix it if required).

ELF: no it's not, Andreas hasn't found time for it yet, but I can't 
wait anymore, so I'll merge it in master this week.

Time for the Red rebolution to improve the readability of software.

I have been playing with the Mersenne Twister code, from C to Red/System. 
There is no unsigned integer in Red/System?

this would be an nice way for users to try red and progressively 
replace their binary code base, one source file at a time... instead 
of a whole project at once.

Yes, not yet, but it's in the roadmap. Currently, you can replace 
a project one shared library at a time, or one 0MQ service at a time

It is just slightly different. The possibility to go back to the 
first element of the array or store that address. :(ran_arr_buf/1) 
would make it a lot easier. 

I already had a lot of help from Peter on this (thumbs up!) and I 
made good progress by now.

I get the pointer of the array and I can go up and down  using + 
and -, this works great, and the pointer is going along with it then 
and I suspect that if I do 
ptr: ran_arr_buf 
and I progress ran_arr_buf by 1 that I progress ptr too.

I now kinda solved it by using an additional variable. When I reach 
a 100, I subtract 100 from the array ran_array_buf to go back. 

Tonight and tomorrow I have some time to clean up my code and I can 
experiment some more. 

It is proven it can be done, but keeping the extra variable is surely 
slowing down compared to C's pure pointer solution.

@Kaj, if I free the memory at the library funtion level then I lose 
the generator state all the time, I expect that not to be the best 
thing for the randomness of the produced numbers. Say I am a programmer 
and I #include the random functions file/lib. Do I need to call a 
random/free function at the end of my program yes or no?

We, no I, limited myself to keep as close to the original as possible. 
Also because of the obfusction factor of the source. I believe much 
of the construction could be made more like in the REBOL way of doing 
things. A C program just is not a Red/System program. My goal was 
to get a working program reproducing the same result in the shortest 
time. Because I had little idea what the original program did because 
it is complicating things on purpose this was the way to do it. Now 
based on this useable program it can be made more Red/REBOL-like 
step by step.

I do feel for you, for indeed a lot of stuff out there is C or 0-based 
and it brings its problems along, but the next step in bringing Red/System 
to 0-based is having Red being 0-based as well?

[...] the next step in bringing Red/System to 0-based is having Red 
being 0-based as well?


No, it's not directly related. Implementing low-level algorithms 
that require working with index 0 is not the common usage of Red. 
Also, the +/-1 offset required in such case has no noticeable performance 
impact in a Red program while in Red/System, in a tight nested loop, 
the impact could be significant.


The most important part in considering a 0-based indexing system 
for Red/System is mainly helping the user and avoiding common programming 
errors (even I get caught by it from time to time, but it's probably 
due to my strong C background).

New try for the Red port on Android demo:
http://static.red-lang.org/hello2.apk


This time it should work fine on all devices, please let me know 
if you find any issues. Just be sure to uninstall previous version 
before installing this one (just to be sure you won't report false 
positives).

You don't need overloading for that, just type conditionals. REBOL 
uses those all the time, and so can Red

@action 42 I think I was not returning the return value and violating 
various other things at the same time

Yes, but you'll need to put all the pieces together in a single folder 
to be able to build it with Eclipse...I'm working on automating the 
APK building process, if I can't finish on time, I'll just provide 
a link with an archive of the eval demo project suitable for Eclipse, 
so you can at least have a chance to mess things around in the meantime. 
;-)

The first time the scripts runs, it download copies of binaries from 
the Android SDK, so it can take some seconds depending on your connection.

btw - observed some delay, when app starts. dunno if for the first 
time, but few secs before prompt and button appears ...

So you're pointing img3 to a semi-random memory area that happens 
to have an address equal to the size of the first image. That will 
crash the first time you try to access the image

I thought it worked without an account. But I haven't been logged 
out for a long time

The calculation is okay.

Code:

Red/System []

red: as byte! 240
green: as byte! 120
blue: as byte!  60


greyscale: ((as integer! red) / 3) + (as integer! green) + (as integer! 
blue)

print [greyscale lf]

OUTPUT:
-= Red/System Compiler =- 
Compiling /Users/peter/VMShare/Code/Red-System/test.reds ...
Script: "Red/System IA-32 code emitter" (none)
Script: "Red/System Mach-O format emitter" (none)

...compilation time:     122 ms
...linking time:         10 ms
...output file size:     16384 bytes
...output file name:     builds/test
260

Oops, here's the proper code and correct answer:

Red/System []

red: as byte! 240
green: as byte! 120
blue: as byte!  60


greyscale: ((as integer! red) / 3) + ((as integer! green) / 3) + 
((as integer! blue) / 3)

print [greyscale lf]

OUTPUT
...compilation time:     133 ms
...linking time:         13 ms
...output file size:     16384 bytes
...output file name:     builds/test
140

I now have a working rudimentary motion detection algorithm.  Now 
it's time to tune it with my special formula.

In the meantime, appreciating all thee help really, I cannot still 
make choclats from the routine and #system* examples given. Kaj's 
from friday and Docs example from 11 may and explanation from Sat 
5:11/13. 

I now understand that the way I did things the process includes my 
Red/System source into my Red code and than compiling starts on the 
whole thing leading to the error I get. What my intention is, is 
not done, namely leaving Red/System code to be Red/System code and 
place this within the Red/System code generated from the Red compilation.

What I think I also understand is that in order for the Red compilation 
to know a function is not found in the Red source because it is not 
know at that time, because it is defined in the Red/System source 
there should be some action as to make it known. That the blancs 
will be filled in at a later stage.

ok. The same solution was made for adding time or now you provided 
earlier. Somehow the timer has to be read using a standard C library.

Having to add all #include for many of these kind of common functionality 
(time random i/o etc) is less friendly than having these integrated.

I didn't think it was very fast. :-) I had a hunch in the direction 
of corrupted printing all the time, but didn't think of CR

For anyone interested, I just published a JPG in the Files section 
under Misc called MotionDetect.jpg showing real-time motion detection 
performed by the Raspberry Pi running Red/System.  The top two frames 
are the actual camera video (shot at dusk) and the bottom frame highlights 
the areas of motion.  Thanks in huge part goes to Kaj for helping 
me finish this first project!

I am with Arnold here, but I admit that it might be a psychological 
aspect, nothing more. Simply put - we have some low level stuff available, 
and I fear bulding higher (Rebol level) commands will be waste of 
time, as Doc will most probably rewrite it differently?

You're not wasting any time on them, are you (except by talking about 
them)? I need them now, and so do others

As for news channels - if there is anything new, and my time and 
skills permit, I do post. It is a pity, it is not reposted to your 
blog, it looks really dated with latest 0.3.2 Repl release :-( I 
find it a bad strategy, the project seems a bit stalled, at least 
Git get propagated there ....

the question is, if you want to loose your time with such stuff .....

I certainly don't want to loose my time with that, but I need anyway 
to search for an alternative in order to be ready to switch when 
the right time comes.

I was thinking you would be happy with that move. As the newcomers 
keep showing up on Red, it's time to make it closer to the final 
form.

Also, once the encapped version will be done for all supported platforms, 
we need to set up a continuous integration chain, with tests and 
builds automated. That will take some time to get done properly, 
so better start now.

Bo: The issue I had to fight with in my hotel room was just that 
my own prebol replacement lib was adding  an extra layer of MOLDing 
to the input source, because of the workarounds to avoid the #include 
(and others) directive collisions. This resulted in disabling some 
parts of the code leading to  odd runtime errors. I couldn't focus 
enough on it to see it that night because I was too exhausted and 
wanted to listen to the discussion at the same time. :-) (For others: 
my room was a kind of meeting point in the hotel ;-)).


To debug that, I reproduced the preprocessing changes step by step 
in a console until I located the "disabled" parts of the code, once 
I PROBEd those parts in the console, the cause was clear and the 
fix easy.

its been a very long time (7 years) and I think its an undocumented 
feature he added just for me.  :-)

Osbourne syndrome is, when company announces some product, its features, 
not releasing it for some time, and customers stop buying their product, 
as they wait for new and better stuff to appear ...

That was REBOL. Red is released all the time, so you should start 
yesterday

Normally, you would bind low level interfaces or code using Red/System, 
or the DLL interface in R3, or an extension in R3. You would then 
marshall all the arguments of the low level functions back and forth 
to Red or REBOL all the time

Pekr: "alpha" means "feature-incomplete". See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Alpha


The alpha phase usually ends with a feature freeze, indicating that 
no more features will be added to the software. At this time, the 
software is said to be feature complete.

Just in time for some Red-based immersive 3D games?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1944625487/omni-move-naturally-in-your-favorite-game

I'm upgrading from 3GB to 12GB, I kept having "out of memory" error 
after opening a few dozens web pages and starting some heavy tools 
like Eclipse, Android Emulator or various VM...now I should be able 
to run everything at the same time. ;-)

I managed to get the fossildownload from the download.r script running, 
unfortunately everything ended in the downloads folder where the 
script was still placed. I reran the script from the folder I wanted 
the repositories to land. I copied the terminal information output 
to a text document for there are several passwords created for the 
repos and I had not yet time to store them properly..

You follow the news here do you? It has been mentioned several times. 
I look up the time of the post.

I know that. And they should know that I have no time to cater for 
them now

I wish it would be enough to state my position once. I know how others 
think about it. I'm making improvements all the time, but I haven't 
had time for a central website yet. Is that so hard to accept?

OK, I can understand that. I have a hard time understanding such 
things from an efficiency standpoint. I'm always forced to be as 
efficient as I can, because I am doing so many projects

The fundamental problem here is that my decisions are always driven 
by efficiency, while the code I open source for free is downloaded 
by people who want to play with it. I can't afford to loose any time 
to playing, so I must insist that people don't waste my time. I don't 
think that should be a big requirement for all the work I give away 
for free

Last time we looked at that, you said Fossil can't do that.

I link to them all the time

Cool, then post that link in the future. First time it was posted 
here.

I spend a very small part of my time typing

OK For your information about what I have done today for the introduction 
to the Perl Cookbok  just go to the REBEL BB forum and see my last 
post, it will be quicker to judge by yourself. - please you can comment 
too if you have some time. but LEt the others do the real work for 
revision and correction please.

Such things always take a lot of time

Nick, yup, this is know problem. The event handling is a bit unstable 
as I had not enough time for additional debugging before making the 
release (It's a "tax" to have the release now rather than wait one 
more week or so :-)). Will be sorted out in the next release.

I had been thinking over time about porting R3 on SDL when the time 
came, but it never did, so I have no plans for it now

No, as said I just used the docs dir and didn't went through it. 
Well, seems next time we prepare it a bit better.

As long as other people agree .. it would be painful for you to have 
to update the html docs each time the mdp ones are changed

Well, I wish him well too. OTOH he contradicts himself. He says, 
he is interested in Rebol, yet he is addicted in something completly 
else, not finding free time for rebolling. I hope you will meet him 
at Devcon, so that he gets excited about Rebol againt too :-)

I don't think it's contradictory. He focuses deeply on one thing 
at a time, and everything else is lucky to get any time at all. It's 
just that now, Roku is his focus.

I think that reason for not using R3 is not technology related. Carl 
even talked about it in the past, that - maybe one day. Imo the reason 
is two-three-fold - 1) RT's failure, to set up R3 in the wild, business 
wise 2) at the time Carl joined Roku, R3 was not open-sourced. 3) 
I also remember, that on R3 Chat, he asked about Gstreamer. So imo 
even a toolset problem - R3 lacking extensions to popular subsystems, 
and also risky situation - what if Carl would decide to leave the 
company? Who would work with his R3 code?

Any reason he doesn't wanna do such limited time chats here?

I had the same argument as you with a boss of a company, I did free-lance 
work for. I was able to convince them to buy REBOL/Command though, 
because the develop time went down by a factor 10 or so.


A bit along the same type or argument, I convinced a business partner 
of that company to implement XML-RPC instead of using SOAP based 
calling method across the internet. It saved us months of development 
time, and the other company could implement XML-RPC feature within 
days.


Just keep on arguing, also from a cost viewpoint. Don't give in! 
:) It pays.

Ah it's nice to read Carl's posts on stackoverflow, I hope he answers 
some questions time to time..

I use Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi.  It works very well.  However, 
I have switched to Raspbian at present as some of the components 
I need are not yet available on Arch Linux and I don't have time 
to port and test them.  However, my project is almost ready for the 
first site test.

Robert, if it's extra work to make it work with earlier versions 
of OS X, then maybe you shouldn't use too much time on it. We can 
just upgrade to latest OS X, which at least I will eventually do 
at some point. Maybe some hardware can't be updated, I don't know.

I've been rather dormant in many rebol spheres in the last months 
because I've been working a lot and most of it is commercial and 
private work, but I feel like its time for Rebolers to break out 
of their inferiority complex and show others that Rebol is better, 
more cutting edge than ever.  

And it still stays simple, overall, even in large projects.


I think the community has lost a bit of its resolve, and I am trying 
to make a point with the devcon.  Rebol has never gone away and its 
back on track.  


I think its up to everyone involved in public projects to promote 
this by actually playing on Its strengths.   I resisted the urge 
to build the site using public tools, and I think, Chris and I and 
building a super default framework just by catering to the needs 
of the devcon's web site.   Chris just added a news module to it 
(in one day).  we will show the site's internals at the devcon, showing 
how easy it really was to build up, using a centralized Git Repo 
to share the code and with the server, when ready for production.


Its ALL coded with REBOL.  at the devcon, we will look at packaging 
QM with cheyenne, Remark and making sure it all works with my web 
service API... with this l think the rebol community will have a 
pretty nice framework to rival RR and others.

I haven't used AsciiDoc, but it looks like it might be a nice standard 
to use, at a glance. I haven't looked at enough AsciiDoc source to 
say if I like the format though. It didn't grab me the first time 
I looked at it, but I'll look again. The header syntax puts me off 
a bit. http://powerman.name/doc/asciidocis a cheat sheet.

Sure you can roll your own, but if we want other people to learn 
it, you're running up hill all the time.

For people in Windows Word World (I know I know ... double pane), 
MarkdownPad 2 was released on 05-Mar-2013 with standard and Pro version.

The pro version includes GFM support.  Pro costs $14.95 USD for a 
single user licence.
http://markdownpad.com/compare.html

This is the kind of stuff that I use because time isn't free and 
Git seems to be the place to converge to.
[If already posted (or hate windows), ignore immediately.]

Can't wait to free some time and start working with this.

@Pekr: Part of the problem was that we needed to hook into the Windows 
kernel and also perform very fast operations because we're monitoring 
tens of thousands of files in real-time.  Plus, Kaj wanted to use 
the project to help Red mature, and I am completely in favor of helping 
in that manner.

Cost me quite some time to figure that out

I thought it would be OK. When I got there at 11 PM Thursday and 
the hotel clerk said "I don't have a reservation for you" I wasn't 
so sure.   He found one for Michael Michael who had not shown up 
but had the same dates booked as I wanted.    He gave me that room 
because me and Michael Michael have the same home phone number... 
   But it went straight up when I met Gregg at breakfast and I enjoyed 
my whole time there.

Not that I know of. Some time back I set up a wiki on wikidot, but 
it doesn't have to be hosted there. The main idea is to have the 
data in a REBOL format so we can use it in various places. That's 
a big job, and we need to figure out how to represent comparisons. 
e.g., is R2 the baseline, and other systems could be compatible, 
extend, restrict, or just not have that functionality? 

http://rebol.wikidot.com/rebol-like-languages

Time for some newer builds here?:

http://rebolsource.net/

Right. Builds from the community branch are still forthcoming. Unfortunately 
I didn't have as much time as I wanted during the last few weeks 
to work on this.

Just to clarify: Carl said it was his intention to stop by if he 
can get away from work for a bit.  I'm going to see if I can pin 
him down to a date and time.

I hope to find some time tomorrow to look at them. Otherwise on Monday.

that function just converts a string (rebol script/code) into :C 
encoded string".  Such C-strings are then used usually at R3 boot 
time to execute all the interpreter system or host code etc.

On the other hand, in human written languages, we use comments all 
the time (like this extra information here). So (as I said before), 
I'm not sure. :)

Geomol: "is this a good thing ?"
Only time and experience will tell.

But I am sure that if I write on the top of a web page a full line 
of code and the If you can understand this, you can write code in 
WORLD" people will feel they can.

Poul Henning Kamp wrote an article about that some time back. The 
need to move away from the ASCII character set.

I still want to update FOR, or LOOP as was discussed here some time 
back. It would be easy to include support for optional connecting 
words in that small context to see how it is received.

not finished imo. But I tried to put some code in a task - wait, 
print, and IIRC it did so ... console was freed, later it printed 
the message. But it was long time ago ...

Carl has been talking for some time about integrating streaming protocols 
into Rebol (probably like h264, mpeg4, mp3, wmv, etc.).  Is that 
something that could be plugged into the existing codebase rather 
directly, or will it take a lot of changes to make it work?

Hmmm...interesting behavior.  I am trying to use R3 to act as a TCP 
server on Linux-ARM.  Here's a code snippet:

	if probe port? prt: wait [1 camsrv][
		probe cmd: copy prt
		call/wait reform [cmd "> cmdout.txt"]
		insert prt probe read cmdout.txt
		close prt
	]


The probe at the top returns 'false when there is no TCP activity, 
but it returns "TCP-event accept" when there is, and then it just 
sits there.  Escape (ESC) and CTRL-C will not break out of R3 at 
that point.  CTRL-C just outputs "[escape]" each time it is pressed, 
but doesn't escape.