The week ending 2nd July 2006

Announcements:

Windows/COM Support
Anton has released 'COMLib-anton' (Benjamin Maggi's COMLib, reengineered).
COMLib is an interface library that allows REBOL to talk to windows applications using COM.
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/os/windows/COMLib/

Callbacks have been removed to assist with implementation so that the behaviour is no longer asynchronous, and errors are now thrown as Rebol errors so that they can be trapped with normal Rebol error trapping.

RebGUI
Cyphre has been contracted to bring 'grid' support to RebGUI. Grid support will allow features like visibility of columns, scrolling, keyboard navigation, programmable navigation and other cool stuff. License will be BSD.

NOTE: Improved systray support for windows will also be looked into.
Timeframe : 3 weeks.

Plugin

After an initial announcement that the Plugin was being deferred for work on Rebol3, Carl agreed to "multiplex" work on the Plugin if developers can define a set of features that define what is required to complete the plugin. So, up to us developers to finalise this list if we want to see the plugin this side of Rebol3!

and from our man in gay Paree

Carl "Just so you know for sure: we do plan to make a 2.6.3 (1.3.3) update to fix various R2 bugs, including a range of OSX related issues."


MySQL Driver
Dockimbel release a fix for MySQL driver released today (v1.0.7):

o Fixes a comptability issue in handshaking with new servers using old passwords format.

See http://www.softinnov.org/rebol/mysql.shtml



Puzzles

To make sure our readership is not entirely passive, we are going to give you, our dear gentle readers, an intermittent task. Every so often you will be asked to tackle a simple Rebol puzzle, and we shall name the winner of the best solution with or without our reasons. If there is only a single entry, our task will be much simpler :)

Here's the first one - a parse task.

We have a string of text, and inside that text, some words are capitalized, and end in a colon. So, we have words like "TITLE:" and "SECTION:". We wish to identify all such words, and mark them up with <strong &gt; and </strong > for printing in an html page. You can choose either to modify the string in-situ, or return a copy with the markup.

TIP OF THE WEEK:
A question on converting binaries to different bases brings up the usage of enbase.
eg.
USAGE:
ENBASE value /base base-value

This week tip is brought to you by Anton.

The week ending 24th June 2006

A quiet week this one ...

Copy large files

Carl has written a robust file copy utility that copes with files larger than available memory, and also calculates a checksum.

Sintezar

Rebolek has released his first public beta "The Digital Phase Distortion Synthesizer PM-101", The Digital Phase Distortion Synthesizer. Batteries not included but it does come with some instructions.

Mailing List

Quiet here also. A question was asked about how to read Gmail using plain core. Basically it can't be done without SSL which only comes Rebol/Command. If you've got a spare US$349, you can purchase it here.

VID+

There were some discussions about the new VID for Rebol3 on AltME. Gabriele posted his RFC but unless you have access to Rebol3 world, you won't be able to comment! Hit the mailing list instead with your comments.

The week ending 18th June 2006

Mysql v.1.0.6

Dockimbel has finally decided, after 4 years of beta-testing, to release a version 1 of his long standing and useful mysql driver!

"I've just run a big stress test with 40'000+ requests generating around 2Gb of traffic without any trouble ! No bad handshakes anymore if you're using v5+ tables and new passwords." - Nenad

Mailing List Tagging Project

Not nearly as long in the making, but the library team has managed to tag each message after a 2 year effort

"Every thread on the ML archive has been eyeballed by hand (and / or some semi-automated tools) and many threads have been tagged as to their "purpose" /semantic content" - Sunanda

Rebol Plugin

RT have announced a new beta release of REBOL/Plugin. This release includes several new features, including:

• Multiple instance support -- you can now have up to 5 instances within one IE process.
• Automatic updating -- after this release, backwards-compatible updates will come automatically with user consent (no uninstall required).
• Smooth install for FireFox and Mozilla.org-based browsers
• Now compatible with Opera and all Mozilla browsers compatible with npruntime.
• do-browser now functions in Mozilla.
  

Note that the old demos have not been updated yet and so will not work with the new plugin. However, you can try it with the synapse chat demo. Hopefully someone other than Eliza will be online!

Rebol.org

Brett has released his parse-tree script which ".. is a function that returns nested blocks and words that represent the structure of your input, based upon parse rules that you give it." - Brett

Checksums on large data

Ever wanted to do a checksum on a large bit of data such as an iso image but found that Rebol crashed or appeared to lock up? I've always used external md5 utilties to do this for me, but it now appears that Rebol has been able to do this for some time using a checksum port!

We do have to ask why this information has not been documented some years ago ... and wonder what other Easter eggs remain hidden.

The week ending 11th June 2006

"well, after too many coffees and in between too many projects, here it is finally... my first visible contribution to 'The REBOL Week', this week's post and a new layout. I hope you like the new look and feel. It should be easier to read and a bit less cluttered in general." -Max

REBOL v3

Unicode!
It is now official, Rebol 3 will support Unicode natively, Yippee!!! There seems to be several options open, like how to treat unicode encoded rebol scripts. There is mention of support for at least Utf-16 and Utf-8 within a new unicode! datatype. RT also plans to support the usual series functions on unicode! strings. Don't miss your chance to voice your opinion here: http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r?view=0032

TO-HEX considerations for 64 bit integers
Follow the topic here: http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r?view=0031

REBOL Browser Plugin News

It seems RT is working on auto-updating the plugin and allowing more than one instance of the plugin to run within on browser instance. more details here: http://www.rebol.net/article/0277.html

REBOL Community Project Updates

OpenGL Server
John Niclasen's OpenGl server improvements continue: "New version uploaded! Added some new functions like gluBuild2DMipmaps, which can build mipmaps for textures." Still only for the OSX, there is a good chance that a client running on Windows will be available shortly. http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/OpenGL/

RebelBB
Although not released yet, the RebelBB team continues work on their cool 100% REBOL bulletin board system. Did you know you could get the source to this tool by clicking on the "code" button of the BB itself? http://www.digicamsoft.com/cgi-bin/rebelBB.cgi

MySQL
DocKimbel has released a new version of his MySQL protocol driver.
"Good news : I've finally reached a very stable version of the mysql driver with v5+ servers ! The stability garanted only if using a database created with a v5+ server, copying old 3.x files in v5 server works but results in a big mess and unstable behaviour. Exporting/Importing v3.x data in v5 server using SQL flat files works very well (except for user with passwords, better recreate them in v5 directly)."
http://softinnov.org/tmp/mysql-protocol.r

Rebudoko-It!
v1.5.0 is now featuring:
+ 30 new special Sudokos
+ an editor to create your own Sudokos
+ a solver for automatically solving Sudokos
web: http://www.TGD-Consulting.de/Download.html
Reb: http://www.TGD-Consulting.de/index.r

A few announcements from Ryan Cole
A simple to use progress indicator I use in my automation scripts...
www.practicalproductivity.com/files/progress.r

Snip and splice, must-haves for text processing...
www.practicalproductivity.com/files/snippers.r

Some tools for working with headers and allow you to disable http redirects... The following is not well tested, so feedback is welcome.
www.practicalproductivity.com/files/http-tools.r

Try Joystick Navigator If you have wrist issues from using the mouse (windows) . No rebol inside, but it may help make more rebol software.
www.practicalproductivity.com/joy-nav/

Ryan also has a patch for sending html emails. Its pretty rough at this point, so contact him if you must have it.


Beer!
The release version has been finalised and is ready for distribution. It is expected in the following days.

New Tools On REBOL.ORG

metadata.r - Gives access to OSX Spotlight Metadata
download it!

ngbg2.r - Download the current picture of the day from nationalgeographic.com
"Saves images to a location of your choice. This new version can now download all past POD (pictures of the day) images starting from 2001-04-21 to current date."
look for more details within the code's header itself!
download it!

rm.r - Remove part of a string using parse
This is a short One-line which might be helpful for learning or just a nifty func to add to your utility belt.
download it!

vprint.r - advanced, flexible, selective output/tracing/logging module
features: Extremely easy to setup and use (drop-in equivalents to Print/Prin/probe/?? ... even in logs! :-), hierarchical nesting of any output (tracing), transparent logging, on-the-fly selection of output, "allow and deny" any combination of individual tags to be output/logged , postponed output buffer for tight loops (not implemented for log).
download it!

Updated Tools On REBOL.ORG

printf.r - Wrapper for the printf and sprintf C routines
Are you missing the good 'ol printf or sprintf? Did you know, they've been wrapped for REBOL? The only downside is that you need a license of rebol which accesses dll (SDK, command or view/pro)... but for those of you who do... its a welcome script. Also a good script to look at for learning library usage... clear and concise. :-)
download it!

That's it for this week. Remember that you can promote any of your REBOL efforts to 'The REBOL Week' compilation by posting to the REBOL Mailing List , or on either the 'announce' or 'rebolweek' groups of the Rebol3 AltMe world.

The week ending 4th June 2006

Looking like a quiet week. So I (this time Volker) collected everything :)

Recent questions from the ml:

How to get a directory-list?
'list-dir shows directory, but how to get the files in a block?
simply "myDir: read %/c/temp/".

As usual the questioner was pointed also to "use the source, luke".
Still an unknown fact that rebol includes most of its source, as in "source list-dir" :)

Alessandro tried a bit networking and asked how to send data from the server back to the client. "serverPort: open/lines tcp://:80" and so on.
Gregg noted "WAIT returns the client port, so you can INSERT data into it.", from there on its easy :)

"I'd like to know if Rebol can extract system informations ? like processor type and speed, ram size, mac adress, netbios names, hostnames, installed softwares ... and so on"
the suggestions got toward using shell-commands. "Ms Windows can use "ipconfig" to get info about network; "net" let you get info about folder sharing, "route" about routing, etc...)". In that thread there is also some info how to check on which os the script runs, Gabriele has a nice function

Rebol I/E plugin and accessing page objects?
Does not really help, but yes, there is an ie plugin an even an alpha firefox/windows-plugin. And the ie-plugin can call javascript somehow. And Chris has done that before (Source).

On altme:

Sometimes questions can be asked like this:
view layout [box red key 'f5 [print "how do I capture F-keys?"]]
Single message :) btw the answer is:
view layout [button "F5 Button" keycode 'f5 [print "got F5"]]

Geomol continues work on his opengl-server, has mouse support now.

Anton has a patch for ftp. Because the inbuilt make-dir/deep with ftp does not work correctly.
http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/patch/ftp-open-new-patch.r

Henrik wanted to let user send prefilled email and was pointed to "browse mailto:". Interesting what "mailto:" can do, as DideC pointed out by this link.

DocKimbel, who wrote the mysql-interface, seems close to a fix for a rare but nasty handshake-problem.

Robert & Cyphre have published some cool features and fixes for RebGui but the trac documentation for these have yet to appear.

Altme-beta goes 1.2.3 . Main feature: no auto-syncing of all files in the shared folder, better for people with low bandwidth connections.

Henrik notes "looks like rebol/view ubuntu version runs fine on ubuntu dapper". (which is important because dapper is fresh released and everything :)

Carl Sassenrath, author of rebol, is using Mac/Intel as development system. The growing number of Mac-users here look happy. :)

Rebolek: "http://krutek.info/rebol/hardcode.zip - This is first version of Search'n'replace-kind of utility. Please, let me know what do you think about it."
(that was addressed to our more private altme-circle, but.. ;)