http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r A few words from Carl Sassenrath, REBOL's inventor and leader of the X-Internet revolution. en-us Carl Sassenrath 2008 REBOL Messaging Language http://www.rebol.com/article/0368.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:52:30 -0700 Some of you are hanging around asking: \in Dude, where's my 2.7.6 OSX SDK?" /in My reply is: \in Did you try the colormap fix experimental version for View 2.7.6? /in Yet again, testing is the wall blocking progress toward Brian's moon robots. I think I've received zero comments on that release. (Or maybe it just seems like it because I've been in 3.0 land too long. Correct me if I'm wrong.) Now, if I hear it's working great, then we can move forward with SDK 2.7.6 for OSX. \note And, just a side query: BTW, did you ever hear "I want my Amiga" in the tune of "I want my MTV?" Great artistry - very well done. Our old Amiga friend Greg Riker produced it while he was still rocking at Electronic Arts back in the 1980's. (Of course, he went on to be Bill's right hand man, but I somehow believe he never produced an "I want my Windows" rendition of that song.) Anyone have a copy? I'd like to track it down! I still get a card from Greg each year, but I think he lives on a Belizean beach and is difficult to reach these days. /note http://www.rebol.com/article/0367.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:30:33 -0700 Here's a commonly repeating pattern: you need two pick one of two values based on a condition. For, example, say you need to pick one of two strings. Sure, you can write: str: either cond ["this"]["that"] Of course, that line seems inefficient because you're evaluating one of two blocks. You're forcing the interpreter to nest (and nesting is for the birds unless you're really computing something.) Instead, I often write the more optimal expression: str: pick ["this" "that"] cond The pick action is fast, but cond better be TRUE or FALSE (or 1 or 2) or boom - throw exception. Yet even further, if the values are actually variables the above becomes a bit longer... str: get pick [this that] cond Being a greedy block-miser, I must say I'm dissatisfied by any of these methods. (Insatisfait, as I am learning to say.) So, these days I've started writing: str: pick1 cond this that Of course, since pick1 is a user-defined function, it's not really more efficient in evaluation, it just looks better. All of this is really just nit picking... but it's funny how little nits eat away at you during long coding sessions. But, dreaming... if pick1 were a native... now maybe we have something there. (Would take maybe 10 minutes to add it.) Of course, then we'd need a good name for it, and you know what that means... What do you think? Is this food for thought or nits for picking? http://www.rebol.com/article/0366.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Tue, 1 Jul 2008 7:23:27 -0700 Last week was tough... but I hope things can get back to normal now. Ukiah is still quite smoky, but the fires around us appear to be under control (see my Mendocino Fires and Smoke blog for details). There's been no official announcement as of yet, but judging by the thermal satellite images and the changes in smoke patterns, things seem to be looking up. Let's hope the wind remains calm. Although I never stopped working on R3 over the last week, the fires made life on the ranch a bit worrisome... and, you can only breath so much forest fire smoke each day. The office and house still smell like a chimney (like I was back in the Mosaic farmhouse in southern France.) I think it's going to take a few weeks for things to air out. Anyway, one good result was that I had the chance to try the Wordpress blogging system, and I'm impressed. As you know I generally use my own software (such as the blogger where this message is posted), and I've tried www.blogger.com a few times over the years, but I wasn't satisfied. Wordpress, however, was generally a good experience (once I figured out a "defect" in their "theme" system), and if you are looking for a good blog host, I'd recommend it. In fact, I'm tempted to use it for my own personal blogging... because I constantly have to pull myself back from posting a lot more personal notes here on this REBOL blog page. http://www.rebol.com/article/0365.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:20 -0700 On June 20th, an evening lightning storm ignited more than 100 wildfires locally. Most of these fires are burning on sparsely populated mountain ranges within Mendocino county, but the smoke level in inhabited areas such as Ukiah and Anderson Valley is intense at this time. I've moved all information, summaries, and links off this technology page (not really the best place for it). You can now find them at Mendocino Fires and Smoke. http://www.rebol.com/article/0364.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:24:56 -0700 Wow, between the R3 project and personal life, it's been a busy spring this year. I've not had much time to write blogs and talk about the details of REBOL, but there are some major things going on. I should mention that the goal for the summer remains the same, to release R3 in a much bigger way, to a lot more users, and with much more source code for community participation and contributions (both C and R code)... moving it toward a beta and then final 3.0.0. I have another important goal related to R3 that I'm not going to say much about it right now, and it will be the primary focus of R3's built-in functions at the user level. This goal will become more clear as we get closer to the release. http://www.rebol.com/article/0363.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Thu, 8 May 2008 17:10:15 -0700 There's a nice little word I use from time to time: pooff. It comes from the Amiga days, but when I Googled for it, I found nothing within the context of Amiga! So, here's something for Google to chew on... It all began back in early Amiga Computer days of 1983, when we were busy inventing the future. Dale, RJ, or I would drop by Glenn Keller's desk (one of the main VLSI chip designers) and ask about how we use a specific feature of circuits... perhaps how to control one of the 25 built-in DMA channels. Glenn would answer, "Well, here's how... blah, blah, blah... pooff." What Glenn added at the end, that little word pooff meant: "unless of course it's not!" Glenn informed me that the word is spelled pooff, not poof, which puzzled me for a while, until I looked at his name again. I guess that's like holding down a key too long on the keyboard. So if I said, "REBOL is the most advanced language the world has ever known, pooff." Then, in fact, I am making a valid, authoritative statement... but hedging just a bit. "REBOL is the most advanced language the world has ever known, unless of course it's not." The reason this word is so useful is because we scientists like to make many statements that we feel must be true, but may not be. We don't want to diminish the power or dramatic effects of our statements, so we just add that little asterisk, pooff, and all is well. We can say things like, "Barbecued beef is really good for you, pooff," or, "R3 will be released this summer, pooff" or, "Global warming is unstoppable by humans, pooff." You know that your statement is safe and cannot be seriously challenged because you have protected it with your special little footnote. So, there it is, a nice word, and the history behind it. Use it frequently, use it well, but use it wisely. It's a great word, pooff, pooff. \note Just a note. I Googled around a bit more and found a rather odd meaning for this word... but let's just ignore that and overpower it completely with a positive meaning, the one that it is truly intended to have, pooff. /note http://www.rebol.com/article/0362.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Fri, 11 Apr 2008 9:56:14 -0700 For several years now we've received feedback from people in China asking about REBOL, and more specifically when REBOL would be able to work with better on Chinese computers. We were quite surprised how many messages we received. Our reply to people was: we need REBOL 3.0 with Unicode in order to handle Chinese. However, that has not stopped Jerry Tsai, who has found ways to make REBOL useful with Chinese already, and has become one of our main alpha testers for REBOL 3.0. What Jerry has been doing is impressive, and he has been a major contributor in feedback regarding design issues of R3, in more than just Unicode but other areas as well. I really like his insights and ideas. Jerry has also been writing a blog and publishing articles about REBOL throughout eastern Asia. He has his own Chinese REBOL blog going, with a variety of articles written in Chinese, and it is updated often. To read it in English, click the translate link on the right side; it does a good job translating. Jerry has also offered to help us promote REBOL throughout China. (I guess I need to learn Chinese now too, in addition to the French I am learning, n'est-ce pas?) Thanks Jerry, and keep REBOLing! http://www.rebol.com/article/0361.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:54:09 -0700 Ok, Vista has been out for a while now. So, what do you think of it? Yes, I want to hear your opinion, because I get a lot of mixed feedback about Vista. Some like it; others hate it. So, this is a bit of an informal survey. I'm interested in your opinion, but don't get too crazy. Make your point clear. http://www.rebol.com/article/0360.html Carl Sassenrath <no-spam@rebol.com> Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:05:21 -0700 I've read the various comments to my What's up with Time? article. Some of you felt I was too harsh. One person felt I was not being professional about it. Was I too harsh? Let's back up just a bit, and let me restate some basic points: #Advances in computing are supposed to make computers easier, not more difficult. #If I have problems doing something fairly basic on a computer, considering my background, I would think many other users could have problems as well. #If I Google around, I see others have the same basic problem. So, I'm not alone on this. #Most individuals and small companies do not have an IT team to fix their time/clock problems. #It should not be necessary to hire a consultant to fix your clock. #If fetching the time from the network fails, it would sure be nice to know why it failed. DNS? Missing host? IP problem? Bad stratum? (That's my guess.) Note, the Time control panel nor the Event Viewer tell me anything useful about the failure. #All of my Apple OS X machines work fine and in fact were trivial to setup. (Yes, I know, many of you don't want to hear that.) #Network time (NTP) has been around a long time. Other than time servers going off-line, it has been reliable for me. So, am I being too harsh? I really don't know. My blog seemed like a fair critique. It's difficult to judge, reflectively speaking. Also, I suppose the more fundamental my complaint (time is pretty fundamental) the more I may come across as harsh. The bottom line was that it did not work, and it is a pretty simple thing that I consider essential these days. I have no doubt that large managed enterprises with thousands of clients have it working nicely. And, yes, I could take the time to set up my own local time server... but somehow, that's not a good response to my basic complaint. PS: Finally, today, I got it working, at least on this particular XP laptop. It appeared to be a combination of factors and using some of the notes found on Google, typing some commands in the shell, rebooting, etc. I got it working. But, I'm reluctant to believe that my parents, or for that matter most people in my hometown, would go through all that trouble, or even know where to start. And, after all, that's my main point.