A summary of what's happening in the REBOL community.

The fortnight ending 23rd July 2006

Like Carl who took 3 weeks off recently to tour France, we took last week off and are catching up now :)

Rebol.org

An interesting set of scripts have been released including these that caught my eye:

Spellchecker for Linux to be used with VID text areas from R v.d.Zee
Network Tools including ping, netstat, finger etc with a VID front end from François Jouen

Mailing List Announcements

Analyse-It! is a new, cross-platform web site traffic analysis software from the prolific TGD Consulting

AltME
Henrik released his 0.0.5 version of his toolbar . This turned out to be quite tricky in handling the event code, and Anton pointed to his prior work in this area with his event demo code.

Henrik ( ever multitasking ) also continues to work on his tester program, and a screen shot is available with version 0.0.6. I believe it allows you to trace variables, and as you can see, uses his toolbar.

Anton also gave us this little tip on how Rebol/VID allows us to do the same thing in many different ways - in this case, to set the text in an area field to wrap:

  • view layout [area wrap]
  • view layout [area para [wrap?: yes]]
  • view layout [area with [para: make para [wrap?: yes]]]
  • view layout [area with [append init [para: make para [wrap?: yes]]]]
Phil released an update to readmail 4.14.3, and also has started a blog on the same.

RebGUI
a new more bug fixes this week with a nasty recursive bug spotted by yours truly, and quickly fixed by Volker. Cyphre has also posted some table changes and fixes/enhancements to the SVN.

File Transfers
Over this last weekend I found myself stuck with the problem of transferring large files from one PC to another. My own hosted account had run out of ftp space, Google has a 10Mb limit for mail attachments, and it was out of the question to use a USB drive to take the file from New Zealand to the USA!

Since I was logged in by remote desktop on a live very busy web server, I did not want to install any applications in case something went wrong. After tearing some hair out, I realise that I could use my own synapse-chat server which has file sharing! I just dropped the chat client in a directory, fired it up, and connected both PCs to the chat-server and did the file transfers. It's good to know that the software one writes turns out to be useful!

Reichart tells me that qtask has file sharing as well, with recovery for both sending and receiving files as well as a https mode. It uses a Rebol script called qfile, which is apparently open source .. so I shall look forward to seeing this source when it is released.




The week ending 9th July 2006

Sorry, somewhat late. Was melting. (Volker)

Some fun:

Cyphre: Well, here you can play with the Superformula:

do http://www.rebol.cz/~cyphre/superformula.r

Full discussion on the ML


Some windows:

Anton:
Added demos/ado.r - ActiveX Data Objects read and manipulate data from a data source.
Updated COMLib website a little bit. Amongst other small changes, added demos/speech.r (text-to-speech)
(see last weeks "Anton has released 'COMLib-anton'".

Some VID:

Henrik:
TOOLBAR version 0.0.3 released.
Toolbar is a new layout function for creating a MacOSX or Windows style toolbar for VID.
Files:
http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/toolbar/toolbar-manual.html
http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/toolbar/toolbar.r
http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/toolbar/toolbar-demo.r

Got some "cool" on altme :)

Some script-library:

%call-spellchecker.r new on rebol.org.
Needs ispell, usually found on linux. And the path to it must be edited.
A quick search finds ispell for windows, http://www.projectory.de/ispell/ (not tried)

Sunanda mentions: One other spell checking in the Library, complete with open-source english language word list:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=spellck.