I just wanted to point out a new English REBOL programming E-book that has been written by Peter W. A. Wood and Olivier Auverlot.

You can buy it here.

The design of the UI for the forum is largely complete. It's possible to navigate the forum pages like you should be able to on the finished version, i.e. there shouldn't be any dead links. It works this way, because it links to a mock up database that contains information on how to display forum lists, threads, messages, etc.

This has also made me write a new version of the HTML dialect with a few more capabilities and better code. I hope to release as that soon as the documentation for it is updated.

I'm still going to keep the URL to myself for now, until a bit more of the work has been done, so we can get the specs done for the database. The specs is a collaborative effort of the REBOL/Forum group, while the UI has been done by me. The document for the specifications will be opened when it's ready.

I was also approached with the suggestion to add better search engine friendly URLs, but this capability depends on whether Cheyenne can rewrite URLs. I don't yet know whether it can do that.

An interesting side effect of this stage of development is that the only thing keeping the forum running is the very small mock database (i.e. a few small block of objects and strings), which means the UI and the back end database are well separated.

As a total, I've spent around 12 hours on this effort.

We'll see where this goes! Have a good day.

Right here and now somewhere in Cyberspace (or rather in an AltME world) a new web forum is being born. There's been a lot of debate on how to build one and why we want to build one and why the heck we aren't just using phpBB or some such, like everyone else. Well, it wouldn't be much of a REBOLlion if we were, would it? Read More...

A new release of REBOL/Core for intel mac was published today. You can read more about it here.

Here are some cheap benchmarks on MacOSX Leopard on a 2 Ghz Santa Rosa Macbook with 4 GB RAM and Leopard on a 1.25 Ghz G4 PPC Mac Mini with 1 GB RAM:

>> t: now/precise repeat i 10000000 [set 'a true] difference now/precise t  

== 0:00:13.598378 ; PPC G4

== 0:00:06.310057 ; Rosetta

== 0:00:02.427662 ; Intel

Inserting 1 into a block 100000 times (because you know, we do that all the time):

>> a: make block! []

>> t: now/precise repeat i 100000 [insert a 1] difference now/precise t   

== 0:05:57.933257 ; PPC G4 (wow!)

== 0:00:22.498992 ; Rosetta

== 0:00:06.623004 ; Intel

Looks like I struck a nerve with the G4 here. I ran the test twice to make sure it wasn't erratic or that the machine was swapping, causing the test to slow down, but I got 0:06:11.605227 on the second run. Interesting. If you get anything else with a similarly specced machine, sound off in the comments.

The console benchmark test from rebol.org:

PPC G4:

>> do http://www.rebol.com/speed.r

connecting to: www.rebol.com

Script: "REBOL Quick and Dirty Speed Test" (none)

Running...

........................................................................



Console:   0:00:04.612143 - 109 KC/S

Processor: 0:00:01.722944 - 501 RHz (REBOL-Hertz)

Memory:    0:00:03.01248 - 15 MB/S

Disk/File: 0:00:02.041244 - 14 MB/S

I knew the terminal under MacOSX Leopard was never going to be a speed demon with a G4 mini, but 14 times slower console output than Intel native?

Rosetta:

>> do http://www.rebol.com/speed.r

connecting to: www.rebol.com

Script: "REBOL Quick and Dirty Speed Test" (none)

Running...

........................................................................



Console:   0:00:00.665528 - 760 KC/S

Processor: 0:00:00.872422 - 990 RHz (REBOL-Hertz)

Memory:    0:00:02.083128 - 22 MB/S

Disk/File: 0:00:00.62334 - 48 MB/S

Now the console might be off here, since it's Intel native, which makes it gets an automatic speed boost here, so the comparison in that respect might not be fair.

Intel:

>> do http://www.rebol.com/speed.r

connecting to: www.rebol.com

Script: "REBOL Quick and Dirty Speed Test" (none)

Running...

........................................................................



Console:   0:00:00.355696 - 1423 KC/S

Processor: 0:00:00.30406 - 2841 RHz (REBOL-Hertz)

Memory:    0:00:00.567992 - 83 MB/S

Disk/File: 0:00:00.42605 - 71 MB/S

That's more like it!

I'm impressed, both that the Intel version is much faster, but Rosetta, the PPC emulation is not too bad either, as it easily outruns my trusty old G4, sometimes by up to 50 times. Looks like Steve Jobs made the right choice when switching to Intel, or there are some things left to optimize for the PPC version.

Unfortunately we can't do any graphics tests, as this only is a port of REBOL/Core. REBOL/View does not yet work on clean installs of OSX Leopard due to font problems which causes a crash and REBOL/View never starts. As some time has been scheduled for working on a REBOL 2.7.6 release this week, REBOL Technologies will be working to fix this problem.

Happy New Year!

And now for something more serious: As it turned out, turning off the spinning terminal indicator is not only important in the console. It's also important, if you are launching your process as a service using Launchd, the standard way to handle background services under MacOSX, because Launchd logs all output from a process in /var/log/system.log. Read More...

It's always a joy to see newcomers to the REBOL language. You may be one of them and if so, welcome! We don't serve any beverages or ask you to sit in a comfy chair, but we hope you'll come to enjoy the language as much as we do. Unfortunately there are separated pockets of users in different places, mainly shaped by the communication form and ease of access. There isn't really one universally accepted place to hang out. But these places are where there is some action. Read More...

DevBase went online yesterday for a few internal testers. It shows great promise as one of the main tools that we will be using for managing source code submissions around REBOL3, but also of the DevBase code itself and REBOL/Services. In fact the REBOL/Services code was not there in the beginning, but was uploaded in a couple of minutes, ready for the world to scrutinize. Read More...

Some are discussing doing video tutorials for REBOL and putting them on video sites like youtube or google video or delivering them as podcasts via iTunes.
I'm a big advocate of video tutorials, as it's the closest thing to having a professional sitting next to you, showing you all the cool stuff that you might otherwise have had to dig through for hours yourself.

In doing this, there is also some debate over the format: Long? Short? Video resolution? Is audio needed? Who's a good speaker? What should a tutorial be about? Such things are important to consider.

In the meantime, a bit of experimenting with iShowU and Quicktime Pro yielded this little video in OSX. It's encoded in h264 at 640x480.

OSX is great for this kind of stuff, since most of the video features required are already built in.

Sorry for the low framerate, but my 1.25 Ghz PPC apparently doesn't leave room for a better framerate.

Carl Sassenrath has been interviewed at the Obligement magazine website, and what an interesting interview it is!

Furthermore, the interview has been mentioned on OSNews and AmigaWorld, spawing a debate on REBOL with a few bits of advocacy thrown in. I'm handing out a few beginner's pointers to the features of REBOL on the AmigaWorld thread. Come join the debate and ask some questions!

So you want to play with the effects attribute of a face, but find it difficult to get the right look? You may want to speed up the feedback between writing the code and looking at the actual results. There's nothing like near real time feedback from the code you are currently writing, as it can shave many seconds and trivial debugging off your code refinement cycle. Seconds become quickly become hours, if you refine your code a hundred times, before you are happy.

Therefore I usually build a small helper tool to make things more interactive when doing REBOL graphics. These tools are purposely kept really simple, usually around 10 lines of code. You don't need more than that.

For processing the effect attribute, you could build a small tool that presents a face of a comfortable size to view your effect in and a text area for you to write code in:

The code is almost as simple:

view layout [

  space 2 across origin 4

  ef-box: box 300x300 with [color: none] edge [size: 1x1]

  ef-text: area 500x300 font [name: "courier"] [

    if attempt [load face/text] [

      ef-box/effect: load face/text

      show ef-box

    ]

  ]

]

You can now type in your effects code and the face in the left side will update, when you unfocus the text area.

When you are happy with the effect code, you can copy the code and paste it inside your source code. Quick and simple.

A while ago, I made a small face which puts an image inside an face and allows you to pan it around with the mouse or the cursor keys if it's too big. I've just uploaded it to the Downloads section.

Here are some simple instructions:

1. Download the source.
2. do %pan-image.r in a console.
3. PAN-IMAGE is now available as a style for layout and you can write something like:

view layout [

  pan-image http://www.rebol.net/photos/carl-france-cahors.jpg

]

Now move the image by dragging it with the mouse. The face takes arguments the same way as an ordinary image face.

Enjoy!

Ever wondered how to make your own VID style and how to make those dialect words work for your own style?

Anton Rolls has written a very nice and straight forward document regarding this.

Be sure to bookmark it.

A quiet period indeed! There is a lot going on, that unfortunately is not related very much to LIST-VIEW, Tester or other blog related subjects, but are still at least REBOL related. I expect that the rest of June will go with this side project. It's intense and there are many milestones left to reach. That's all for now...

While I like VID very much, some things are just not present in VID that I usually need often. One of these things is a proper tab panel which, when clicked, will do some kind of action, say, change the layout in a pane.

I think this is a very common operation and should be simplified as opposed to be cookbook material.

Therefore I've created TAB-VIEW, which is a segmented button style with a few tricks up the sleeve to shave off the tedious implementation of layout switching in panes and let you create a complex layout control in a few lines of code.

Also it looks a little prettier, I think.

A test demo can be downloaded from here.

There will be a release as soon as the documentation gets organized.

I want a simple tool to publish information regarding REBOL for the tools and libraries I expect to develop during the course of this year.

RapidWeaver looks like it could be it.

Although it's a bit stiff in what you can do with it, what it does, it does well. Granted, it has very little of the lightweight programmable approach that REBOL has, but for me that's OK, as long as the job is done with excellence. If I can keep this up, I may actually end up paying for it to exceed the 3 page limit. Gosh. Golly.

Anyway, one excellent thing could be a method to integrate MakeDoc2 documents directly in RapidWeaver. That would make it easy for me to publish them in a more eye-pleasing theme.

That would probably require it to be able to grab the HTML code from elsewhere and dress it with its own template code.

But I'll have to look into that when I get more time.