AltME groups: search

Mandelbrot
Syllable Server, AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (256 KB L2 cache)
						CPU Time	Relative
C (GCC -O2)				.025		1
C (GCC 4.4.3 i686)		.05			2
Red/System				.11 (0.3)	4
World (complex math)	4 (7)		150
World					6 (9)		250
Boron (i486)			7.5 (10)	300
ORCA (i486)				9 (12)		350
REBOL 3 2.100.111.4.4	9 (12)		350
REBOL 2 2.7.7			11 (13)		450
Ruby 1.8.7.248 (i486)	12 (15)		500

Brian: thanks for the input. 


Oldes: I think this has been discussed in same channel on Rebol3 
world long time ago. Basically, the problem is that it  breaks REBOL's 
syntactic rules (digits as first characters of a word are not allowed). 
Also, this kind of syntax looks cryptic, it's IMHO, and goes a bit 
in opposite direction of what REBOL wants to promote (readable syntax).


Maybe we can do some implicit casting when a float literal is passed 
as argument to a function expecting a float32!.

I still fail to see a real-world use-case where you need both negative 
and positive indexes at the same time (in other words, compute indexes 
*over* current position). Even in such rare case, you can still do 
the computation using INDEX? SKIP values (so switching to absolute 
indexes instead of relative ones).

Ladislav, thanks for bringing a tangible example that demonstrates 
our both points. I will try to be brief:


1) I will start by repeating again that nobody contests that having 
a continuous numbering is better than a discontinuous one (for pure 
arithmetic efficiency, as you've showed).


2) Brian showed that R2 is not "broken" as the head-index? function 
can be written. 


3) I have never needed to write such "workaround" in R2, nor did 
I remember seeing it in others code (if someone did use such workaround, 
please step in, we need real-world use-cases).


4) According to 3), I think the issue you are showing with head-index? 
function covers extremely rare use-cases. 


5) I often use series with an offset and I do index computation on 
them, but usually, in a single direction at a time (using only positive 
*or* negative indexes). In the very rare cases where I need an index 
computation "over 0", I switch to absolute (from head) indexing, 
but not relying only on index arithmetic, but also on series navigation 
using the INDEX? SKIP idiom. This short idiom gives exactly what 
your head-index? function gives to you, but using series navigation 
abilities rather than pure index arithmetic. Of course, it works 
because SKIP is an implicit 0-based system with no hole.


6) INDEX? SKIP in R2 solves the "hole issue", for the very rare cases 
where we need to solve it. So, allow me now to propose my own head-index? 
implementation:

    head-index?: func [s [series!] i [integer!]][index? skip s i]


It is not pure arithmetic for sure, but we are programmers, not mathematicians 
(except you who is both :-)), so this solution is IMHO as acceptable 
as pure arithmetic ones, from a programmer's point of view.


So, what I contest is the trade-off required for "fixing" index arithmetic 
in R3, resulting in IMHO "broken" PICK and path notation for 0 and 
negative indexes. Also, given that INDEX? SKIP is available in R2, 
the "fixing" seems even less necessary. Still, I am open to discussing 
options for improving index arithmetic but *without* having to break 
other features.


I think we will agree to disagree about the right trade-offs between 
R2 and R3.


So, can we now all focus on studying the different improvements proposed?

I do remember the times when Win95 came. All the world was claiming 
- your apps need the menu, a toolbar, etc. Free style Amiga like 
apps were a dirty world. Now, 15 years later, such aproach looks 
archaic, laughable. The time has changed. Let's target mobile platforms.

I remember now, how I solved my TO [a | b] situations in R2. It's 
what I call 'positive' parsing, where I all the time look for a positive 
all the way to either a or b is reached. It's easier to just let 
it skip to either a or b, whatever comes first, yes, but I was able 
to parse about everything the other way.


I need to look through all the R3 extensions to parse some day, when 
parse needs an overhaul in World. I guess, having parse as a mezzanine 
is a good thing to port it to also Red or other languages?

Well, once after already having been in the first REBOL world for 
some time, someone asked if I was a bot...

Well, now on to creating a new "save-the-world-open-source-license". 
Why is it so hard to just pick one like MIT and release the code. 
Every day we loose, we can't get back. I expect this licensing thing 
to take at least 12 months. It's just waste of time.

Ladislav - in 2004, when R# was slowly taking off, Carl published 
a blog article or announcement, describing R2 plugin feature. The 
supposed release was "imminent". Prior to that, Carl even contacted 
Doc to eventually stop working on R#, or so I remember. Of course, 
the announcement was just to distract ppl from alternative, keeping 
them interested in REBOL. 


Later on, I several times rightly identified some blog-post, whose 
purpose was nothing more, than to buy some time for RT, where in 
fact promissed things were not delivered. 


So - of course it is just my speculation, but with the history of 
R3 development I find it really curious to try to hype users to believe, 
that port to ARM could happen in 5 minutes, when RT was not able 
to deliver it is 5-6 years of R3 existence? And if so, it sounds 
a bit unfair to me ...


Simply put - wish Red, R3, World, whatever clone a success. It is 
just that what I would like to see is - a realistic estimates on 
any side ....

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.]

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.

Oldes, I don't argue with you and Bo about that. I think we all know 
the state of this technology. I've already did several prototypes 
of such "engine" so I have some ideas how this could be done for 
R3 it's just matter of prioritizing&time&resources.

I wrote about the drawing apis just so other people know OpenGL is 
not any Messiah if you want to do hi-quality 2d vector graphics in 
realtime.

I'm not against HW acceleration at all. It's just not easy topic 
in this non-ideal programming world as you pointed out.

I see the solution with good high quality rasterizer + HW accelerated 
compositing engine. That should be flexible setup at least IMHO. 
Plus this way also we got the classic 3d api for free.

It's almost easier to invent a time machine, go back in time, and 
standardize the world's decimal point.  And, maybe if there's a little 
extra time, standardize the date format too.

Long time.  I've never wanted to wait for this world to load (on 
this computer, which is in a loft).

now you can hide from the truth and invent the perfect world you 
think you have created but  the truth still remain and more time 
pass worst gets the situation but ... Here  is my next prediction 
in some more month lets say january 2012 Carl will make  his triumphant 
comeback wich will mobelise you all and has the effect of killing 
the red community and action as none will contribute to red anymore 
it will be on stasis like all other intents to break free from RT

A college class mate of mine had some nerv system issues. He was 
under medication. He already had a university diploma in physics 
but he wanted to get more practical programming experience so he 
attended to this college. Sometimes he forgot to take his pills. 
He was getting nervous at these times and he was insulting the teachers 
or other students, but in a very childish and mean way. I was around 
26yrs old that time and he was 36. I remember once he got jealous 
about a couple walking happily on the street on a nice and sunny 
sunday afternoon. He just went to them and started to complain how 
can they be so liberated when there are so many problems in the world, 
etc etc

Henrik - world password != master password? Long time since I set-up 
some world last time ...

i should clarify my point..   Community is just that.. community. 
 By telling someone what they can and can't talk about would be like 
telling your staff "If you want to talk about the weather, do it 
on your own time."  If you did this in the workplace, you would find 
yourself void of employees quick smart.  If it's inappropriate in 
the workplace, where you PAY people to work, how more inappropriate 
is it here?


If this world was limited to just Rebol discussions, I would probably 
only read it once every few months, or if I had a problem.  But over 
the years, I've come to know some of you very well, and appreciate 
your opinons and discussions.. not only regarding the MAIN topic.. 
Rebol.. but on various other topics as well.


I'm well aware that some of the folks here consider my opinions, 
discussions etc. 'out of place' and verbose, to say the least, however, 
as I've said before, feel free to ignore them.  If you can't, well, 
I guess you can try censorship, but that will not help the community.. 
not at all.

This world is not in my mail-reader, it's an executable, I have to 
launch it to view, read, and write... I really think that if I have 
good time on this world, if I can meet some friends, and read some 
interessant subject, then I'm going to connect often and often, read 
more, and participate more. If it doesn't, then I forgot this world, 
and I connect only if someone tell me about something in this world 
(or if I time to spend).

Oh boy. 


First, I *have* been contacted to ask if I could take certain actions, 
but not by RT. RT made me a world master here, which *I* consider 
to be form of moderator (with the main task being to assign and maintain 
accounts), though there is not a definite job description sitting 
on my desk. Now, I am also a regular user in this world, and there 
are definitely conflicts for me WRT those positions.


As I've said before, I enjoy a good chat as much as anyone, and I 
*don't* want to censor people here, but that may be necessary at 
some point, wouldn't you agree? If someone were quite obviously, 
in the opinion of 99.9% of the people here, abusive, rude, offensive, 
etc. should they be allowed to run rampant and ruin this world for 
everyone else? I don't think so; maybe you do.


When I joined the REBOL community, one of the main attractions was 
the high level of mutual respect, the generosity towards newcomers, 
and the complete *lack* of the venom you sometimes see unleashed 
in other language communities. *That* is what kept *me* coming back. 
The more argumentative discussions and personal jibes people see, 
the less likely they are to post, IME, because they don't want to 
be attacked themselves and if that's the tone they often see, it's 
what they will expect. 


When it comes to content, as a world master and a user *I* think 
that *most* channels here *should* be REBOL related. The world is 
called "REBOL", and I think RT created and sponsors it for the REBOL 
community. That's my view; that's how I view the ML as well. There 
are probably at least 20-25 non-REBOL, non-Technical groups here 
now; that's quite a lot IMO. There are times that I would really 
like to clean this world up a bit, and as a user I could, but as 
a world master I don't feel that I can because someone will complain 
that I'm trying to censor or control things here (so if I ever do 
that, get mad at me as a user, not as a world master :-).  


Petr, I'm sorry you feel that I'm trying to limit free speech here, 
or to control anyone's behavior; I made some *suggestions* I thought 
were appropriate. I spent a *lot* of time writing and editing my 
posts in the hope that they weren't too strong, but still got my 
view across. If you think that you should be able to use this world 
for anything you want, personally, I disagree; it's RTs world and 
we are guests in their house. If there is something specific in my 
posts that offended you, please let me know what it was.


As a user, I haven't been around much lately. Mostly my schedule 
is the cause, but maybe it's also because the technical value of 
the world has been diluted (IMO) by noise, so I'm just not as "driven" 
to come here and make time to participate. I'm normally on dial-up, 
so that affects download time, yes. Right now, I'm on a fast connection 
but the noise is still a problem because I have to visit all the 
groups that come up red to see what's new, and if I only have a small 
amount of time to spend, it may all get eaten up just skimming what 
others posted. Also, the more noise there is, and the more we get 
in the habit of talking about non-technical stuff here (again, this 
is all *my* opinion), the more chance there is for it to leak out 
into other groups, and it does. 


The camaraderie comes from the people; the technical value comes 
from the experts  who often focus on that aspect and may stop coming 
if there's too much noise here. When that happens, the value of the 
world is diminished. 


Well, my time is long gone for writing here, but I hope that helps 
clarify my position.

Pekr, what is proper marketing? Its a very difficult issue.. but 
you know that i assume.. I dont know what the difference is between 
europe and the rest of the world but I do know that it succes depends 
for 90% on "Accepted Vision of the product!" by the public (Public 
can be anything..) One thing is sure , Rebol is still its time ahead 
with many things and thats a disadvantage currently because of the 
mis-intepreted use of Rebol by the rest of the world. (thats what 
i think). Still i think the RT is overflowed by exciting and needed 
to publish towards the community "some" release. But i could be very 
wrong here as well because i only observe Rebol marketing from a 
birdview..

for example here in france macs are pretty well implented in university 
because they are simple to manage in hight number. In hoght schools 
you get windows but you get lesser computer to manage (In my hight 
school in 1997 they was only 30 computers equiped with windows with 
a controled acces for the students you can use it only on certain 
days of the weeks durring a gived time. When I ingress to university 
they was 200 macs for every one  to use every time 100 windows pc 
to be used on restricted time and 20 Alphas/linux debian + 10 Sillicon 
graphics 02 with IRIX + 3 data severs (2 sun ultra 1 (X11 sharing) 
 + 1 dec 50 (NFS, mail, web ) + 40 Xteminal box for former computer 
ingeneer  ) MAc and PC was used for office application LINUX/UNIX 
computers was used to form computer ingeneer .This shows pretty well 
I think the world clivage in informatic :)

Thanks. i try my best, but Altme and IOS are minority products, so 
they've got to be better than good to get to a shortlist..
Altme has at least three ways of losing data.

And having to rename the world every time there is a server crash 
doesn't make this group a useful reference site.

and does it allow to create an view of the world, in real time, or 
is that something which can already be done with the altme client 
version, when running a world?

Tomc, two of them are used every week, one of them daily just not 
alot of users.  One time all my worlds did the very same thing without 
an World Server problem.

Yet another wishing feature:
     World [ Subject]

Sometimes there is more than one subject going on at the same time. 
 This will allow you to focus on the Subject you want..  = )

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 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?

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

I've seen this error twice now, on machines where AltMe is connecting 
to this world. Once on a machine where the world has been for a long 
time, and it caused it to resync everything; the second time, just 
now, on a virgin machine:

I had lots of problems with this early on when trying to run multiple 
worlds.  At one time I had 4 worlds that I attempted to keep going, 
for free without reserving the world name (I know, i'm cheap), but 
found it was a pain to keep restarting the worlds in sequence one 
one of the worlds inactivated.

* Server clock check is now optional. You can enable or disable it 
from your Settings panel. This features checks that your server (world) 
clock matches your local clock (adjusted for time zone).

    * Fixes major bug in offline usage when you want to read your messages 
    while not connected to the net.

    * Fixes minor bug in icon pane when you right clicked on the help 
    part of the application icon panel, an error would occur.

    * Minor changes to AltME update notice. First, AltME will close when 
    you read the update news in your browser. Also, if you do nothing, 
    the update notice will close after 30 seconds. Both of these changes 
    are done to keep AltME from timeout problems.

    * Updates bug tracker applet (selected worlds). Removes unused fields 
    and buttons. Simplifies parts of the layout. Improves some of the 
    report modes.

it may have been a DNS problem, because I was connected to the r3 
world the whole time and could send messages just fine. of course 
it's no fun if there is no one to respond. :-)

Pekr, my limited experience with multiple altME worlds is you need 
to have the other worlds you are hosting running at the same time 
you create your new world.  It will assigne the next available port 
to that world.

it seems also to happen mostly when changing world from one to the 
other. I haven't been able to run multiple AltMEs on one machine 
for a long time.

Let me start over... host-port is what Gregg is talking about.  There 
is also a host-addr setting that might be the source of my worlds 
becoming unavailable all of a sudden even though they are used on 
 a daily basis.  I'll have to check that out next time my world locks 
me out.

I don't agree. Why should it be lost? Imo there is a bug somewhere. 
It seems like in-memory-only database or what? I can understand time-out 
of the world, if not used for some time. But not loosing world name, 
when the world is apparently running. That simply can't be regarded 
being a solid service ....

One thing is clear - our world was not available, wifi node was down. 
So at that time, there might be some check, and the rest depends 
on engine at Safeworlds. It is just that upon the description, the 
world name should be reserved for 10 days, while it was not even 
24 hours. But it was not a problem to renew. We just re-registered 
the world, and it mapped to the data of our world, without any problem 
...

Now trying to autostart at boot time but having a trouble...

su -lc '/.../altserve -s world -p port &' user > /dev/null

according ot altme guide
does not seem to launching...

I know the example is for altmeserve but I thought it would work 
for client as well

sorry, my issue was with re-creating a world.  I had multiple worlds 
hosted on the same machine at one time and I cheaped out and didn't 
register the world for $10 US per world.  When the worlds expired 
after 10 days of no usage (which never happened, but they expried 
anyway), I had to recreate the worlds, the order was important in 
that scenario.  Sorry for misleading you.

I will try, once I will visit the target PC. The existing world WAS 
running, and I was even connected to it from outside PC. Yet when 
registering new one, it ended up registered with port 5400. Next 
time (once it expires), I'll try to open rebol console and check, 
if port 5400 is regularly blocked by trying to: open tcp://:5400. 
 I will report back my experience ...

Could be Pekr, I never ran more than one world at a time.

The sync bug is a very old one.
Possible partial solutions:

-- leave world running for  a long time....some groups then resync 
if a message is posted to them

-- change your message limit, and then do a search for a fairly common 
word

-- send a message (just a dot is the convention) to every group you 
want to resync
-- delete all messages and restart the world.


http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?offset=-1&post=r3wp151x920

I'm a little worried about granting everyone group rights in the 
world I'm creating. It will be mostly NYC firefighters, many of which 
have little computer/internet/web experience and might delete groups 
accidently or maliciously as the are a group that is not always as 
well behaved as most reboler's. 


But at the same time I want them to be able to create private groups.


If a group is deleted how difficult is it to restore it...if possible...with 
previous messages.

So, it's important that if you intend to have two worlds running 
at the same time, to have your first world running (using port 5400) 
so when you create your second world it is given the next available 
port number (5401) and that is what Safeworlds will record for that 
second world.

This is the first time I lost my world and one has been running no 
problem for over a year...

amacleod -- it looks like AltME.com's world server went down for 
a time yesterday.
Could that have knocked your worlds out of orbit?

I think that last time Carl told that this world is already too big 
and the best way would be to setup a new one.

when the server is instable, I can confirm its not really better 
even when we are alone in the world.  I checked the last time and 
was the only one here a few times and it was as bad as when some 
of you appeared.

You must start your world at least every 10 days (or keep it running 
all the time), or you will lose your world name. If that happens, 
nobody will be able to connect to your world, and someone else can 
take your world name. You can keep your world safe for a small fee.

hmm, so now I understand it. I have to restart world at least once 
in 10 days, or it might loose registration? But my condition of "keep 
it running all the time" is met.

Carl, did you see the discussion with YueM? A new user who won't 
use AltME, because he claims it's broken, when in fact it's simply 
downloading all messages, which takes time and he can't post in the 
meantime. To him, the program appears unstable. An intended feature, 
I know, but maybe there could be done something to allow bulk downloading 
on first connect to a world.

there is one issue which is SO ANNOYING, I sometimes close altme 
before throwing out my computer by the window.

 when the display becomes a blue screen if the client loses its connection 
 with the server...


this is both useless and highly irritating, cause when the world 
re-connects (99% of the time on its own) you have to re-click on 
the group, which looses the "unread msg" beige highlight.  it also 
forces you to have to re-click on the text entry with the mouse.


when your internet connection is buggy or a server has troubles... 
disconnection may happen repetitively every few seconds.  the blue 
just makes altme unusable in a situation where it should just stall, 
until a new message is sent.


when a world disconnects, it should just change the color of something 
or put a label somewhere obvious in red color... but don't touch 
the GUI's functionality.... please

I looked up an old post (2007) talking about how to start Altme Worlds 
on windows start-up. Brock had the answer but I could never get it 
to work. Three years later, I decided to try again. Here are some 
lessons I learned along the way:

Precautions:

You may want to back up the altme folder just in case something goes 
awry. You will also need to know where the files are located.

You may also want to create another temporary worldmaster user and 
note the password. If you're like me, it has been a long time since 
I had to type in the user password.


1. Before you turn off your worlds, go to http://www.altme.com/check.html
and check your world(s). Note the port number and write it down.

2. Create a shortcut icon on your desktop to altme if you don't already 
have one. Do this by right clicking on altme and select "Send to/Desktop."

2. Right mouse click your "Start" menu (I only did this in XP so 
adjust for any changes you might have in your OS) and choose "Explore." 
An "explorer" window will open.

3. Go to the "Start Menu" folder in the the explorer folder tree 
in the left column. In the right column open up "programs" then open 
up "Startup."

4. Drag the altme shortcut icon from the desktop to the startup folder.

5. If you have more than one world, right-click on the just added 
altme shortcut icon and rename it to something like altme-worldname.

6. Show the properties of the just added altme icon by right-clicking 
and choosing properties.

7. There, in the "Target" field, you will add on to what should already 
be there. It should have something like: "C:\Program Files\altme\altme.exe", 
telling the OS where to find altme and the name of the actual program. 
As you may know, the quotes are there because the "Program Files" 
folder has a space in it. Leave it as is and add:

-s "yourworldname" - p the-port-number. E.g., "C:\Program Files\altme\altme.exe" 
-s "myworld" -p 5402. Do not close the properties window but continue 
to the next step.

8. Below the "Target" field you will see the "Start in" field. There, 
enter where altme and its server files exist. The top level folder 
is enough. E.g., "C:\Program Files\altme\" 

9. Apply the changes to the properties and try it out by making sure 
the world is not running and then clicking on the altme icon in the 
Startup folder. This saves you from having to reboot if a mistake 
was made. You should see the familiar altme server window pop up.

10. You need to also check by logging into the world through the 
client. If you can and the data is all there. Great. The only thing 
left is to reboot and make sure it loads by itself.

11. Repeat for all the worlds you have. You'll end up with n altme 
icons each with a different name. 

Things that went wrong:
Before the server could be launched properly via the icon

1. Getting the wrong syntax in the properties/Target. - I thought 
everything had to be enclosed in a single quote string but it doesn't.
After the server was launched

1. Couldn't connect to the altme world - Seem to be related to the 
port #'s I was using. I went back and launched the worlds the manual 
way and checked the ports on the altme website.

2. Could connect but no users. - This had to do with "Start in" info 
or lack thereof. Altme was looking for the data in the Startup folder 
as opposed to my regular altme folder. Your actual data should be 
fine and of course you made a backup, right?

3. Some data (posts) got mixed up - Who knows on that one. I made 
so many attempts, I may have confused something.

4. My user profile was gone or had a different name. - Again, my 
guess is that this was due to the "Start in" info. Worst case, try 
the default "Master" "pass" user. I ended up using another known 
user (hence, my advice to create a temp worldmaster user), then I 
renamed the user I knew was me to me. Weird but it happened in a 
couple of my worlds but only to my profile.

5. I made a copy of the actual altme.exe and named it altme2.exe 
thinking that perhaps this was the problem. The target was then changed 
to reflect it. Don't do this, it  is not necessary and may freak 
you out.


Now I have 4 worlds up and automatically running when I need to reboot 
the server. Yea.

#4085 - I think the submitter "-X-" is a certain individual who was 
active around that time (22-Apr-2006) and who was banned from our 
world.

Dates have natural ranges depending on their domain.

An expected due date of an unborn baby is (in theory) no more than 
9 months away.

The expected due date assigned to my mother before I was born is, 
now, a long time ago.


I don't'see how you can get around applying all due diligence to 
*any* input field. That may include asking for 4-digit dates on some 
occassions or disambiguating 24/oct/05 to ensure you know which part 
is the year.


Validation is one of the hardest parts of any real-world application, 
and one of the parts that most languages -- REBOL included -- offer 
only token support for.
Ideally, we'd have a range of to-xxx? words, like:
to-date? "29-feb-03"
== [false  "no such date"]
to-date?/strict "29-feb-04"    
== [false "ambiguous year/day]
to-date?/window "29-feb-04" [1975 2074]
== [true 29-feb-2004]

We lost no data.


But we lost the site for a little while.....Little things like this 
built up:
    -- you try to login
    -- we update your last-active time

    -- but that file write completely trashed your user-profile record
Or:
  -- we upload some more posts from this AltME world

  -- as we write them into our index data structures, it corrupts the 
  index, thus making the whole
     AltME archive unavailable.

Corrupt-on-write is a hard mode to recover from :-)

its time to show the world that R3 is starting to be usefull, stable 
and now finally actually better than r2 in few ways.  


Its gotten past the fun "prototype" stage and is now at the usefull 
"it works" stage, even if still alpha/beta

ladislav problem is even going in the right group if any  existed 
then you won't talk to me neither :) basically you don't feel concerned 
by what I say all you want is the job done what ever means are used 
to achieve that basically I used to think that way too ...  But time 
passed things degradated and now r3 alpha is stuck and side projects 
like script library and View/Desktop are stuck too since they are 
related and on suspend until R3 is released ... So to me it isn't 
a miss placed  converstation since R3 futur is related to scriptlibrary 
futur ... We could is that down time to try to reflect on making 
this better but that's not a discussion you want to have anyway... 
 That's why the whole rebol world in 2011 is pretty much the same 
as it was in 2005..

Why did I join the community? Because when I joined, REBOL was still 
pretty new.


R2 wasn't there yet - the first alphas for it came a few months after 
I started playing with the language. Most of the low-level behavior 
of the language was completely undocumented outside of RT, and they 
were still trying to position the language as easy to use, easy to 
learn, high level. It still looked like R1 - Scheme with a different 
syntax - but it was different.


A challenge. So I dug in. I tested every function, everything I could 
find out. I asked a lot of questions on the mailing list. If they 
weren't answered, I dug in further and figured it out myself. And 
I got into a lot of really interesting arguments with the people 
on the list, testing and probing the language until all of the undocumented 
stuff became clear.


Those early arguments became the low-level documentation of REBOL. 
And then came the books, and the community got bigger. I started 
using REBOL at work, even when it wasn't the language I was supposed 
to be using - code is easier to generate with REBOL than it is to 
write directly in other languages. More fun too. That's the hook: 
REBOL is fun.


There is a principle I read in a Heinlein essay years ago: The principle 
of Creative Laziness. He wrote about the guy who invented the automatic 
pilot, back in World War 2, because piloting back then was a big 
hassle and he was too lazy to do it. Instead of doing the drudge 
work he did the more interesting task of figuring out how to automate 
it. If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is its 
father. Laziness is a virtue.


That's what dialecting is all about: Automating the drudge work and 
wrapping it in a nice little language because it's more fun than 
doing it manually. More efficient too, a lot of the time.


Do you know who REBOL appeals to the most? Engineers, scientists, 
hackers, analysts, problem solvers. People with opinions, people 
with enough of a twisted sense of humor, of the world, that they 
don't want to just sit still and accept the way that they are told 
the world is - they want to figure it out and remake it if necessary. 
Interesting people: REBOL's other hook.

Welcome to the cool kids' table!

Patrick;  No problem about library entries.  :)  When REBOL grows 
we all benefit.  Nothing in rebol.org is 'official'.  It's a user 
maintained repository of 'stuff'.  Chris' form-date just happens 
to be one of the beauties.  It is close to but not the same as the 
C strftime function.  With form-date you can make up pretty much 
any date time output you'd like.  No one has to use form-date, I 
was just cheerleading.  So I'll cheerlead a liitle bit.  I you haven't 
yet, check out http://www.rebol.org.Sunanda and team have created 
a a world class repository of information and functionality that 
is all REBOL user community generated.

Hi, thanks very much for the fast replies. 

I have read the parse-tutorial and it seems very good for understanding 
how to create rules that will match patterns, however I only found 
one brief section that described using "copy" to extract the data 
from the line, rather than just confirming that a match was found 
(or not). I tried to use the copy examples but evey time I modified 
them I ended up with errors as I don't really understand how they 
work.


Peter, thanks for your example, it does almost what I want but the 
result in 'extract' does not contain the part of the string matched 
by "wanted". In my simple example I could just append the word "wanted", 
but in a real world case I would be using a patern match to find 
the "wanted" key word.


I also want to develop the code further to search for a different 
set of matches if the first set is found, in your example I am unclear 
where the block is that is performed if the string is found.  

Thanks very much for your help. /\/\

We were all newbies once! And we all are again every time we start 
learning something new.


I just remembered another puzzle/challenge I presented to the Mailing 
list, and got back a rich range of replies. This one is purely parse 
(including my first attempt), so trying it out, and then looking 
at others' code can help understand parse. As with the other two, 
it is based on a real-world need, rather than being a textboox exercise. 
(You experience the results of all three puzzles whenever you browse 
wwwREBOL.org).

Good luck with this one too!
http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlGPGQ

Yes, one thing we really need in the Rebol world is for someone to 
site down and create a full example set of what is possible with 
what we have.  I too am pretty weak with VID and View, but it's been 
something I think about every time I see a new Javascript library 
with lots of examples available.

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.

Anton - but there is some point in time we should start to make rebol 
bigger by adding unnecessary things, or we will never reach 100MB 
executable size and outer world migt not consider us being a rellevant 
alternative :-)

Steve said in r3-alpha world:

Sometimes some of my parse rules can take overnight to resolve on 
some complex random files...and I would like to be able to set a 
time limit in parse so that if it is recursively grinding on time, 
that I can halt it

So - I did some homework here, but I am at my limits (well, maybe 
not, but I will be very slow from now on), whereas we have ppl knowing 
C here, and ppl who did some hashing etc. for Beer (Ladislav), so 
guys, if you find some 10 minutes of spare time, please at least 
try to give me some pointers here. As I said - the world is upgrading 
mySQL to 5.0 now, so 4.11 is older, not to mention 4.0.1 or 3.23. 
It is about having mysql free scheme for rebol, or not. And don't 
think every admin will be willing to set old-password parameter for 
his server, as this can be regarded a security risk ...

hehe, Tom Halwerda got reply from someone from Syllable team apparently 
:-)
-------------------

 By Vanders (IP: ---.cable.ubr02.chap.blueyonder.co.uk) - Posted on 
 2005-07-04 22:34:20
Sorry Thom but you're wide of the mark on several counts.


Systems like the Amiga or BeOS failed for a number of reasons, but 
mostly because they were either tied to a minority hardware platform 
and through sheer poor management. It's fair to say that both were 
ahead of their time, which was certainly a contributing factor. We'll 
add NeXT to this list while we're here. Syllable and SkyOS are written 
for generic Intel PC hardware, and neither are old enough to know 
if Robert or I will kill either through bad management!


Sure we want to compete with Linux. Linux is a great OS on the server, 
it's a sucky desktop. I've been running it for over six years on 
my home PC and several years now in various real-world deployments 
in a server capacity. Year after year, Linux continues to dissapoint 
me as a desktop OS. Why shouldn't we compete with that? Saying "You 
can't compete with Linux!" is just deafeatism. The thing is, Syllable 
is not out to beat Linux. We want to co-exist with Linux and in doing 
so, enhance the Open Source ecosystem. Linux can run the servers, 
Syllable can run the clients. Makes sense to me.


Look, if in two years time us Syllable developers have nothing to 
show for it but an OS that only us six run and are happy with, well 
then that's fine with me! I'm sure as hell not going to roll over 
and pretend that I like using Linux on my desktop though. Why shouldn't 
we try to improve it? Because we might fail? Piffle.

Some quick points to finish off:


o Robert is a good developer but I don't believe he has the time 
or the hardware to have written every single driver for SkyOS from 
scratch. The video drivers are from X & if you asked him, I'd expect 
the NIC & audio drivers are BSDL.

o The Open Source nature of Syllable has never been in impedement 
to implementing features. We have a set or core developers and we 
make the decisions. We have a roadmap and we're following it. To 
paint Syllable as a band of wishy-washy Open Source developers with 
no direction who are somehow bogged down with arguments is misleading 
and dishonest. Just like SkyOS, if we decide a feature must go in 
it goes in.

o I'm not aware of a single company currently working with SkyOS. 
We can sign up for the exact same Developer Relations schemes as 
Robert can. Many companies don't seem to mind that Linux is Open 
Source, I fail to see how Syllable is any less legitimate in this 
regard.


Hard is the whole point Thom! What's the point in doing easy? Anyone 
can do easy!

With the download being a few MB, you save download costs right with 
our first large package. Especially on dial-up, which is also a large 
part of the world. And of course, the next time you already have 
it installed

I think part of the "mess" of OSS is the perception that it is a 
single movement, a unified army of developers. That is completely 
wrong, even though some of the louder proponents of open source work 
hard to make you believe exactly that. Even folks who understand 
the truth have their perceptions colored by all the from the Eric 
Raymonds and Richard Stallmans of the world. Then they wonder how 
this OSS army is going to take over the world when they can't get 
their act together and produce easily usable apps written in clear 
code. Individual developers and teams do all the time, but that's 
hardly an army.

In order to make the best use of everyone's time, please remember 
to stay on topic in groups. If you don't want to be bothered with 
a particular group, feel free to remove yourself from it. And remember 
that you can create private groups as well, though the topics should 
be REBOL related. After all RT is hosting this world for our use, 
so let's not abuse it.

Let me try this again. 


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


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


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


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

Here are a couple suggestions:


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


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

Thanks!

Since there is a lot of silence in recent days on this AltME world 
Pekr persaded me to put one announce here:


I'd like to announce important milestone in my personal(occasional 
weekend hobby ;)) JITteR project developement that has just been 
achieved yesterday.


JITteR is lightweight REBOL dialect that enables running JIT compiled 
functions directly from REBOL interpreter.

Such JIT compiled functions can be tens to hundreds times faster 
than REBOL equivalent code.

Usage of JITter is aimed on graphics routines, compressors, codecs, 
generators, number crunching algorithms and various other time-critical 
programming tasks.

The main idea of this project is not to clone all REBOL functionality 
but maintain compatibility in sense of JITteR -> REBOL way so any 
code written in JITteR can be executed(fallback) as plain REBOL function! 
without the need of touching the code.


Currently only REBOL2 version is being tested and x86 CPUs are supported. 
But R3 and other CPUs will be added in later stages of the developement.

Licensing is not yet decided (until the project reach full Alpha 
stage). But the code will be definitely free for non-commercial usage.


Since this release is only 'internal' I hope this announces doesn't 
sound to much 'vaporwarish' :-)


Alpha release is planned to be released to closed group of developers 
in ~2 months.
Feel free to leave any feedback in the Ann-Reply group or PM me.

project features log:


JITteR v0.1.23.3.1 (pre-Alpha version internal release) - 16-May-2010

---------------------------------------------------------------------

- currently only x86 32-bit CPU assembly supported (other CPUs planned 
in Beta stage)

- datatype support: image!, binary!, string!, integer!, decimal!, 
char!, logic! 
- path! lookup support on binary!, image!, string! byte arrays
- math operations: +,-,*,/,<,>,<=,>=,=
- boolean operations: NOT, AND, OR, XOR
- parens support: REBOL-like code evaluation precedence

- supported keywords (REBOL compatible): APPLY(currently on JITTer 
functions only), LOOP, REPEAT, WHILE, UNTIL, BREAK, IF, EITHER, PICK, 
POKE

You need to use the API to get the version resource from a PE file. 
It might be a standard resource , but I haven't touched that in a 
long time so I can't remember.


As an aside, this feature was so requested in the VB world, years 
ago, that Desaware created a commercial product called VersionStamper 
that did just that; and they sold a lot of them.

I know ... I just received email from old time reboller who's name 
I will not disclose, but he is right - why we are still pretending 
we have some secret weapon? The rest of the world really does not 
care:


  I don't want to know anything that the public won't be told. Why 
  do I
need a special handshake just to find out what REBOL intends 
  to do
someday? I just want to be a satisfied customer, I have no 
  desire to
be part of a secret club. Aren't plans and roadmaps what 
  you share
with customers? I have no need for secret organizations, 
  closed door
policies, or special preferential relationships.

Good 
  ideas need to withstand the harsh light of day, which is a
by-product 
  of openness and transparency. MS and other companies do not
care 
  one bit if REBOL is open-source-- they are so far beyond caring
about 
  that. RT has no first-mover advantage or special secret that
makes 
  REBOL a dangerous disruptive technology, and if it did,
open-source 
  or not, they could recreate it within a year (maybe not
compact, 
  but no one will care). Remember MS employs some of the top
scientists 
  from functional programming in their labs.

so as i'm  actually  stuck with the  text cursor full handling concept 
 Coccinelle use this  time to build a widget  based to view algorithm 
 and exploiting VID  cursor concept (T___T CRAPPY  cursor selection 
way  if that could be changed in rebol 3.0  i would be the happier 
man in the world ...)

Brock, as a company that is working very hard to make everything 
compatible between all the browser I can tell you that what it comes 
down to is that there are rules, but each browser company (or group) 
interprets the rules slightly differently.


The simplest example of goes wrong the most are the "assumptions." 
 EI for example will except <center> to mean center the page, and 
center pretty much everything until you turn </center> off.  


But Firefox follows the letter of the rules, and expects each object, 
like a table, to have its own <center> tags.


This is a simple visual example, it gets worse when JavaScript enters 
the picture.  Safari for example DEMANDS everything ending in a ";" 
or it simply ignores stuff.

They are almost always easy fixes, but time consuming.


Maarten, shame that Breeze will not work.  I looked at Breeze and 
voted not to use it to do a Rebol lesson.  Looked great on their 
page, but I read a lot of similar comments elsewhere on the web that 
it simply failed for too many people.  I was hoping that someone 
smart in this group would know what we could use both to solve our 
DevCon needs and the Rebol Newbie Lesson needs.


We need a way to broad cast at least one video signal, and allow 
moderated chat in the same environment for people all over the world. 
 This should be easier.  I have an Idea that might work, but will 
require some research.  I might just do this in Qtask.  Then anyone 
can log in from anywhere, talk in a group, have sub topics.  All 
we have to add is video streaming (which is actually pretty easy 
for us).  The trick is setup up the incoming real time stream, which 
I was not planning to do for a while.

It will support custom servers, and there will be a public server 
that everyone can use to search for Reb Services.  For example, if 
someone offers a service like World Time, then you can search for 
this, and then start using this service.

yes Reichart - I simply wanted to hear something concrete, but OK, 
here comes the list, out of my head:


1) Will rich text and rebcode became part of all rebol distributions 
from now on?

2) we heard answer for async kernel in regards to LNS - some time 
ago Carl mentioned proper tasking or even timers could be added - 
is that anyhow realistic?

3) I realised VitalNeeds removed all Rebol related info from their 
website - is the partnership lost?
4) what will be the next focus of RT?

5) there was some talk about "rebuilding the team" - will RT employ/contract 
more developers?

6) some time ago Carl talked about opening some of rebol code - parts 
of View, console etc - will that happen? Part of that plan was "Rebol 
as a library" IIRC - is that concept still valid? What happened to 
/Platform vision? I was not present last year at Devcon, but my understanding 
was, that /Platform is about modularisation, language plug-ins were 
planned too ...

7) not to mention BCD, rebin, RIF, of which only RIF was mentioned.

8) RAMBO is cool - but what about shared roadmap? I was contacted 
privately by one former Rebol developer, who felt Rebol plays on 
elite and that not knowing what is the plan for what product is really 
badly frustrating. Will RT create more SIGs, to fasten developments 
in certain areas? I talk about kernel areas, which general rebol 
user can not affect and waiting for enhancements can take years. 
Some ppl are already crying for better sound (if we want to use rebol 
for video-over-web for eg.)

9) We heard about spreading rebol x-times. What is RT's vision of 
how to achieve this? Such claims should be supported by some more 
concrete plan? Is still outer world (development companies) interested 
in Rebol, so maybe more of VitalNeeds partnerships could come?
10) What is Carl's preferred drink? :-)


Thank you very much, sorry if some questions sound strange, they 
were put on "paper" as fast as I could type on my notebook. Enjoy 
the community in Treviglio, guys!

Q: Yeksoon asks "Reichart, there is a whole bunch of pple under Rebol 
SIG in QTask, .... are a lot of them working on QTask etc?"

A: Yes.



These are answers from Carl, Gab, Richard, etc. from the last day 
of the conference.  I sat them all down, with many others from the 
conference, and we reviewed and tried to lock down answers.



1) Will rich text and rebcode became part of all rebol distributions 
from now on?


A: Carl said "Once Rich Text and Recode are added (which was agreed 
on to be by Nov 14) ….yes."


2) we heard answer for async kernel in regards to LNS - some time 
ago Carl mentioned proper tasking or even timers could be added - 
is that anyhow realistic?
A: 


Carl said "Tasking is special, and is pushed off to Rebol version 
3."

No date has been set, but it will not be now


Carl said "Timers could be done now, and this could be done in a 
few months."


Carl wants more feedback that people "need" them.  So give him feedback. 
 This also goes to say we need a common place where we all (in the 
Rebol community) can create a complete list of what is wanted, and 
then "vote up" the things we want done first.  So RAMBO for now, 
perhaps Qtask soon, since it will have Voting.


3) I realized VitalNeeds removed all Rebol related info from their 
website - is the partnership lost?

A: Carl said "No, but they are talking…"

4) what will be the next focus of RT?

A: Carl said "Altissimo"


5) there was some talk about "rebuilding the team" - will RT employ/contract 
more developers?


A: Carl said "Yes, and we are doing , send in your Resume and show 
us your cool app you wrote that is as good as Canvas!"


6) some time ago Carl talked about opening some of rebol code - parts 
of View, console etc - will that happen? 


A: Carl said "Yes, this is happening and is happening in pieces. 
 The console is a good example.  Nothing would make us happier than 
having people make it better, and not have Rebol be the bottleneck."



6.2) Part of that plan was "Rebol as a library" IIRC - is that concept 
still valid? 


A: Carl said" It exists today!  Look in Windows directory for the 
DLL.  You can call it. More is being worked on. Talk to Jaime."


6. 3) What happened to /Platform vision? I was not present last year 
at Devcon, but my understanding was, that /Platform is about modularisation, 
language plug-ins were planned too ...


A: Carl said "Platform is being sold to Safeworlds…"  I will comment 
on this later.


7) not to mention BCD, rebin, RIF, of which only RIF was mentioned.


A: Carl said "We found another aprouch to BCD, so it was good we 
waited, Ladislav will be making this happen."



8) RAMBO is cool - but what about shared roadmap? I was contacted 
privately by one former Rebol developer, who felt Rebol plays on 
elite and that not knowing what is the plan for what product is really 
badly frustrating. Will RT create more SIGs, to fasten developments 
in certain areas? I talk about kernel areas, which general rebol 
user can not affect and waiting for enhancements can take years. 
Some ppl are already crying for better sound (if we want to use rebol 
for video-over-web for eg.)


A: Carl said using Sound as example "Sound: a good example of code 
Rebol plans to make open.  AGG for sound, would be perfect for Rebol. 
 I am more than happy to publish this info."

 


9) We heard about spreading rebol x-times. What is RT's vision of 
how to achieve this? Such claims should be supported by some more 
concrete plan? Is still outer world (development companies) interested 
in Rebol, so maybe more of VitalNeeds partnerships could come?


A: Carl said "This is complicated question…and answer.  My belief 
of the world is that application have to be simple to use, and to 
make.  That is what changes the future of computing.  So I see a 
world with thousands of developers, making all sorts of applications, 
with that it will grow faster than anything else that has been done."
 
10) What is Carl's preferred drink? :-)


A: Carl says "Non Alcoholic.  POG.   Otherwise…Vodka Martini, with 
Green Olive…very dry…(stuffed)"

From Yeksoon:


1. RT official statement on current products line like View, IOS 
etc?

Is it going to be replace by other range of products...support etc? 
How does moving 'beyond' View, IOS affect the current product offerings 
and hence the way alliance partners operates.


A: Carl says "Yes, we are going to move beyond, the new features 
WILL make this more usable and faster, and more open than in the 
past."



1.2: For partners like myself, who are on the alliance program, we 
would appreciate if RT works closer with us on their commercial offerings, 
roadmaps etc. We need such info to make decisions ...


A: Carl says "what we will be doing for Alliance, is help them move 
foreword on the new tech that is introduced, and with the minimum 
amount of effort."


2. How does the above decisions from RT leads to X% growth next year? 
Are there any change in the way business is done?


A: Carl says "Yes, it is going to change a lot, and this will happen 
over the next year.  This should bring you much better range of features, 
and enhanced as necessary by your teams."

I've spent quite a bit of time looking at Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) 
and it seems to be the only / best SVG game in town (their command-line 
driven SVG to PNG conversion seems to be particularly well regarded). 
Looking forward to their 0.42 release as it supports OS/X as well.


The Clip Art site that they link to (http://www.openclipart.org/) 
is also a treasure trove of Public Domain files (which solves the 
GPL concerns I had with many of the dedicated KDE / Gnome icon sets). 
I'm also looking forward to their release 15 which seems to be just 
around the corner.


Lots of good news in the SVG world, I wonder how long before mainstream 
browsers start supporting it? (without plugins).

Yes, I know. I would like to write Rebol as well but I can't reinvent 
the world all the time. And Haxe is c-ish enough to get it into my 
brain :-)

Q: What does the world on Nov-15-2005 look like?


A: Our main goal is to get REBOL into the hands of more users, not 
just programmers and techies.... by the millions over time.  By doing 
that, we create a market for not only handy free REBOL apps, but 
also for commercial apps and entire businesses that are related to 
REBOL.



Q: Given that  window transparency is OS specific, will there be 
a dialect that covers both Windows, Linux and 40+ other OS?  In other 
words, does RT plan on continued support of so many languages, or 
are we entering a new era of specific OS support?


A: Our plan is to make that a window option that is part of the face/options 
for a window.  If an OS does not support this mode, then the option 
will be ignored, but the application will still be fully functional.



Q: I hope it is still valid that cooperation with RT is possible. 
I mean - last few weeks I play with some Win32 functions (thanks 
to Gregg) and I would like we would have proper app behavior in multi-monitor/multi-desktop 
environments .... so I wonder if any SIGs will be created, some ppl 
will be invited to participate, comment etc., or if RT is gonna cook 
it all themselves?


A: Yes, there are many such special interest projects currently going 
on. (Most of them are occurring via private projects in AltME and 
IOS.)  These days 90% of REBOL changes are done in cooperation with 
the REBOL community.



Q: Hi .... with recent Rebcode releases, we can see that internally 
new Core is marked as 2.7 and View is marked as 1.4 Is it just working 
"title" or will those products be marked as that? And if so, can 
we know, what other changes will go for 1.4 View release target? 
Will there be any AGG fixes/additions (to support SVG RebGUI progress), 
or even VID changes? I still think, that VID is missing few fine 
styles as tab, group-box, better list as was introduced on IOS Developer's 
server, (eventually tree, menu), to allow novices to start using 
VID/View more productively. Any chance RT can tell us, what is the 
plan for 1.4 release?


A: Regarding 2.7 and 1.4 question: we change the revision numbers 
(the second number) whenever there is a major change in REBOL that 
may be unstable.  The /core 2.7 kernel (that is in /view 1.4 as well) 
adds new datatypes to REBOL, and they are the first datatypes added 
in several years, so we consider this to be a major change, and marked 
it that way.
Yes, we do plan to be making a few AGG fixes very soon.

Oh, and regarding VID: we plan to be making very big changes there. 
More to come soon.


Q: Could you add struct! support to /Core?

I keep on having situations that would be made much easier by struct! 
when I don't need libraries. For instance, conversions from external 
binary data encodings to internal REBOL values, say for file formats, 
network protocols and so on. Now rebcode has added other forms of 
strong typing like the type-specific opcodes and the vectors. Having 
structs with their constrained field types, their specific data layouts, 
would be a perfect match for the low level operations of rebcode. 
They would be helpful later when implementing your own data types 
as well.


A: On structs: yes, we will enable this feature on core, but it should 
only be used for lower level code.  Objects are more powerful.


Q: Could you add an APPLY opcode to rebcode?

    apply: ["Apply function or path to arguments, save result" word! 
    word! | path! block!]

In rebcode:
    apply x f [arg1 arg2 ...]
Is equivalent to this in REBOL:
    x: do f arg1 arg2 ...


The advantage to doing function calls this way is that the arity 
of the opcode is fixed, even if the arity of the function called 
can't be known ahead of time. The value assigned to the function 
word could be either a function or a path, or for efficiency you 
could have a seperate opcode APPLYP for path values (I'd prefer just 
one opcode for generality but it's your call).


A: I'm not sure what is meant by the path for it. You mean for refinements?
That may actually slow down the apply interface.

...it should not be a luxury item either that you have to pay for

 Well, this all depends on the conditions.  You can expect this as 
 free stuff in Java world with much bigger developer base. But I don't 
 believe anyone here in our small comunity have enough time/resources 
 to spent hunderds hours on such project just to make some people 
 from the comunity happy and provide solution for their commercial 
 app for free ;)

I would like to have answered:


1) what technique to use for "timestamping" - do we continue with 
timestamps against one central time, or do we use hashes, or sequencing 
numbers, or mixture of mentioned techniqueues? We might look how 
others do it ...


2) better support for possible conflicts - imagine following scenario 
- you have some reblet, e.g. Contacts - one person starts editing 
it, then another person starts editing it too. First one syncs (saves 
changes), then second one does the same - changes of first ones are 
lost. How to aproach this - introduce some kind of resources locking? 
(not real locking, but we are message based, so could be queued)


It could work as follows - person 1 wants to edit some record. Edit 
button posts request-for-lock. Lock is assigned. I other person tries 
to edit, it will not obtain lock. We could even introduce protocol 
level support, so that the person is informed, who has the lock, 
and how long. The trouble usually comes, when person goes off-line 
after the edit started - we need to remove dead-locks, so by default, 
I would lock for 20 minutes e.g. and the lock would have to be renewed, 
if person 1 wants to work longer with the given document ...


another scenario is, when you actually start editing something which 
might require locking, but you start already being off-line. We could 
create lock-request, just not synced yet. Once you go on-line, you 
simply check seqno, if the lock is possible, and the given record 
not modified. But what if it was modified in the meantime? e.g. you 
might be working with stock system and someone else in the office 
sells few units, for which you may start writing offer for to another 
customer. Tough scenario - would like to know your opinion. Maybe 
some things simply need to be done on-line only?


3) I needed small file-sync scenario - could use IOS, but IOS can't 
sync and "forget". Simply idea is to have different kind of syncing 
techniques, so e.g. for file transfer you have dir to sync, if correctly 
synced, log it, forget it, delete it on client and or server (or 
not, it depends)


as for IOS, local storage could be encrypted (or not), imported into 
RebDB (no single better solution so far introduced for rebol), sync-per-record 
or record-set could remain (record=document). RebDB on Serve would 
speed things up significantly too ...


another possibility is to think outside the IOS terms, in more general 
way - simply thinking about world of objects, being in various states, 
with various life-time around internet and on-line or off-line devices. 
I think that maybe we could find some simpler solution than SyncML 
and the likes ...


another point - such techniques should be transport independent, 
so I would not like to hear that it needs this or that ;-)

So, anyone?

they should probably realize, that like IBM, their time is up. (but 
like IBM, they're going to be around and profitable. just give up 
the world domination thing.)

I think, that for the sake of the world, it is a bad news, that JS 
is getting better and better. Guys trying to claim web-apps can be 
real-time, are almost true. However - hopefully no matter how they 
try, JS (web) based app will be crappy stuff even for few years coming, 
no matter how fast they get it running, as the problem is overall 
complexity of the whole web aproach ...

You talk about the protocol all the time, I talk about generally 
Google submitting another thing and world swallowing anything they 
drop onto us. The protocol might be actually good. I just hate things 
being accepted just because they are provided by the "beloved one".

Geomol - sometimes I wonder about your ignorance(?), sorry. You are 
very clever guy, so I really wonder, what is the reason to hear argument 
like in point 2) Henrik is right - who is more informed than the 
community members? I remember the time when Carl invited me to R3 
GUI world. You all gurus were there, yet he had to invite person 
like me (causing a noise many times), because of lack of input. So 
what are we complaining to? Replies to blogs are similar matter. 
Just don't tell me, you are not informed.


Te link to beta project plan - http://rebol.com/r3/docs/project.html
was posted here, was posted in November status update IIRC. Twitter 
message says, Carl is working on Host code NOW. Yesterday we posted, 
that Carl reported on R3 chat succesfull separation of Host vs kernel 
and that he is working on MinGw support. The host code is being worked 
on NOW.


So how can you post argument like you posted in point 2)? Isn't it 
a bit ignorant and disrespectfull to those who care to work on R3? 
How much support do you expect? I do care to remind Carl to update 
blogs, we do care to spread info even here, yet you claim "do you 
expect ppl to wait forever?". 


And even more so - do YOU expect anyone to wait for mysterious ORCA 
like project to be closer than R3 is? ORCA actually IS open sourced, 
for many years. How is that it did not bring competing environment 
to R2 at least to date? (not to mention its architecture is arcane 
compared to what R3 provides us?)


We are really small community. Everyone of us, can weight his own 
free time. So now decide for yourself, where do you put your free 
time REBOL wise. Boron, or R3? As for me, the answer is clear - my 
energy goes to project, which currently has chance to be completed 
in close future. Splitting our efforts at this stage can't bring 
anything usefull imo ...

I think it will be a long time before R3 is usable in the real world 
... so my understanding is that there will still be 2.7 releases.

There is so many other things. But we need to input. In fact - I 
don't agree with www.rebol.com world release, unless RT finds time 
to discuss other things. Because - I want R3 to be successfull, so 
I would prefer to prepare on other fronts, as I said  ....

I can understand your situation and it's an unfortunate thing. The 
only thing I can say that might help, is that there have been suggestions 
about a plan to extend the alpha to the users in this world, so experienced 
REBOLers can take a look at it and "kick the tires", so to speak.


The problem with doing that is that it creates talk. Lots of talk. 
"why is this there? why does this function do that? I don't like 
this!" We have had a TON of discussions over the design of VID3 on 
how to do this and that, and we're not done with that yet. It's very 
time consuming to do that, when one man (Gabriele) wants to sit quietly 
and work out the design on his own until it's ready. It's just faster 
that way in the long run. Every time a new guy comes in, 500 questions 
need to be answered and it's usually the same 500 questions as the 
last new guy. :-)


Ideally, no questions should be asked until after about a week of 
use and start testing it right away. If there is a problem or a bug, 
consult the bug tracker or the documentation database, look at the 
discussions and the design documents and keep out of particularly 
Carl's, Gabriele's and Cyphre's hair until they crawl out from their 
holes on their own.

petr: no matter how much time does vid take, either we release in 
whatever state it is, or we wait until it's finished. inventing something 
unrelated like adding pop just takes time from the end goal of R3, 
and does not help anyone. people want a toy to play it? so, let's 
just release early and often, no matter how badly it crashes or how 
much it destroys your hd - we put a warning in there. people want 
a finished product? then, just wait until it is there, and don't 
tell me you want a date for it, because noone in the world is able 
to give you one.

Chris - I know, I remember your position. Was it REBOL2 or REBOL1 
world we were discussing that? VID 1.3 time. I too, asked Henrik/Gabriele 
about CSS. Because it would be cool, if we would be close to standards. 
Not because of standards themselves, but because of easy of deployment. 
But, as far as I understand the situation - Gabriele understands 
CSS, and so far, VID3 seems more flexible. If it would be upon to 
him, he would even more separate (completly) app logic and user interface.

want text ports, just make a liquid which spues out text on the console... 
need that logged, just plug in another node which spues out stuff 
on disk as it comes in... but you don't even have to change anything 
in your systems... and can even easily connect your logger to other 
nodes, so you can track the flow of traffic, or the end effects some 
root events are having on the outputs of the system.  sometimes its 
not obvious to see the real world relation of inputs and output... 


liquid allows you inspect all states at all points in time of you 
system's processing and compare it.

I can imagine complete cute app for DevCons. Not video and sound 
till Rebol 3 and proper plug-ins, but imagine this - kind of server 
(Cheyenne), accepting outer connections. Each presenter would have 
to send his slides to conference organisers, who would put it into 
structure - Schedule, with time slots. I know that schedules are 
missed, or skipped, but once connected, you could see what session 
is actually broadcasted, you could see progress bar of the estimated 
time left till the end of the session, and as presenter would go 
via slides, it would be "broadcasted" to outer world ...

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

Call for topics and presenters placed in the checklist.
Sent out an email on the mailist to inform and gather input:

Dear Fellow Rebolers (of the mailist faction),


There has been some interest in a virtual gathering of Rebol developers 
and users. These discussions have been taking place in the Rebol3 
Altme World. I know there are many here that do not regularly go 
there but nonetheless would be interested in participating. The date 
and time that has been looked at is December 27th from 12:00 PM. 
How does that sound to you?


There has been no decision on the technology to be used but you're 
input would be much appreciated. We are also in need of presenters 
and/or desired topics.

To summarize, we are looking for:

An agreement on the time and date
Topics desired
Presentors
Ideas for technology to be used
Other

Agreed...


I'm open to.  My goal is to get some of the Qtask team to be present 
for a simple and real time Question and Answer session.

As you saw from the number Sunanda's source code counter showed, 
Qtask is a GIANT REBOL program.  


It may not be the best or the smartest code in the world, but we 
have learned a lot, and would like to share some of it.