The fortnight ending November 5th

The Rebol Week had a one week vacation!


Well in fact, it was quite the opposite... I was responsible for that week, and well, I was so busy preparing all my releases, that I missed the deadline. Sooo, feeling a little bad, but with great news to bring, here is the article for the latest TWO weeks in the fun world of all things REBOL-related.

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REBOL Technologies

OOPS, NO shift in REBOL direction, Mea Culpa!

Carl Sassenrath, has provided an in-depth coverage of current priorities and on-going projects he and others at REBOL Technologies are working on.

Here is the article: Quick Update: Same Direction, Same Goals

This seems to be in direct relation to our last blog, where we wrote that there had been a shift in the direction of priorities at RT. (We are stated on Carl's page as being the culprits ;-)!

Wow, We are now a reference, even for REBOL Technologies... so we'll have to be more carefull from now on, IMHO, to be as precise as can be. I'd also like to give a thanks to all the readers of this weekly updates page, for making us feel like its worth the effort.

Altme

John Niclasen (aka Geomol) shares 3 cool space related scripts

first one is related to looking a mars from the rover's perspective, in an interactive 360 viewer! and two others for viewing (new and older) images of V838 Monocerotis star's "Light Echo".

do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/space/McMurdo.r 
do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/space/v838_06.r
do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/space/v838.r 

You can also look at his other (very interesting) stuff (http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/) which contains (amongst other things) an updated version of his excellent NicomDoc format to produce math output.

SQLite release
1.0.1 available at: http://www.dobeash.com/download.html

Ashley G. Trutter, writes:

"Bumped version to 1.0.x as code is no longer "beta" (I actually had a few people email me about that!)

Incorporates new IMPORT function (twice as fast as a tight INSERT loop) and Robert's nested transaction handling logic (so nested BEGIN, COMMIT, END and ROLLBACK statements are correctly handled). Also changed logging behavior so all logging is off by default (i.e. use /log to turn on *all* logging)."

Gregg Irwin shares a TOUCH (file date set) function!

; Here's a TOUCH function if you still want one.
    touch: func [
        {Set the modification timestamp of the file.}
        files [file! block!] "The file, or files, you 
                              want to stamp"
        /with "Use a specified time rather than 
               the current time."
            stamp [date!] "The date and time to 
                           stamp them with"
        /local read-only?
    ][
        if not with [stamp: now]
        either none? stamp/time [
            stamp/time: now/time + negate now/zone
        ][
            if 0:00 = stamp/zone [stamp/zone: now/zone]
        ]
        ; We have to turn off the read-only attribute
        ; if it's on.
        foreach item compose [(files)] [
            read-only?: not get-modes item 'owner-write
            set-modes to-file item [
                owner-write: true
                modification-date: stamp
            ]
            if read-only? [set-modes item [
                owner-write: false
            ]]
        ]
        ; Should we return the time, even though it
        ; may not match the actual stamp on the files
        ; due to OS differences?
        ;time
    ]

New build of RebGUI available!

Ashley G. Trutter, writes:
"Build#39 available. Fixes the above issue and makes two other minor changes:

1) Bumped the min required View version to 1.3.2
2) Deleted the last line of %ctx-rebgui.r (which issued a halt if the script was invoked in isolation - see Ladislav's comment in the SQLite group from 2nd Nov)"

Mailing List

Wayne Pierce setup a REBOL themed Google Co-op search engine Its configured to only search a set of specific REBOL-related official and community sites:
http://knowngood.com/rebol/

Warning, shamefull plug follows ;-)

Well, I guess its always a bit touchy to be one of the editors and also author of some tools, so I hope people wont mind that I write this small column on the relaunch of the STEEL website.>

I'll add that any one wanting to write a little column for their tools can do so, by submitting information on the rebolweek group of the Altme REBOL world. we will be happy to include your stuff here, but we need to know about it first!

STEEL Libraries and Tools

Web Site

The STEEL web site has moved to a new server and was rebuilt from scratch.

I hope it will be more usefull as I have better organized what is there and will be adding/updating content weekly

I am also now switching to the MIT license for many (if not all) of the tools which are being released under the STEEL banner.

I added a (still embryonic) new section to the site called ReTools, where I will document and share many of the tools I have written in REBOL over the years.

Liquid
after Years of work, and several prototypes allowing more or less features, I have finally released liquid. Its a very capable dataflow programming core. Using plugs you can create dependencies, synchronize data and much more. Best of all, it supports lazy computing out of the box! There are already some docs for it here: liquid site

GLayout
GLayout gets a few updates, and now starts maturing near broad usability. You can get the new version, on REBOL.org, like all of STEEL's code. Glayout also finally gets a cool demo application which allows you to test it and get a feel for it. glayout demo

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