Re: How to set the printPaperOrientation

[Peter Alcibiades]

I don't think it works, then.  What I did was write the contents of the field
to a temp print file, then call a shell script which in turn calls a little
awk program which formats the temp print file into an output file, and pipes
the results to kprinter.  It works fine, though of course you don't get to
do styled text.  It is a bit ridiculous to have to go through these hoops. 
I also raised a bug on it.  Some of my printing issues appeared to be Debian
related, but I reproduced this one on both Debian and on Mandriva 2008.

I think, pending 3.0, that the only thing you can do is write your field to
an external file and process it for printing from that.  I didn't try
revPrintText, interesting to hear that it seems to have the same issue.

What happened with my attempts was that regardless of settings, it would
always print in portrait and always at the same size - thus truncating the
content.

Peter


Éric Miclo wrote:
> 
> Well, it was not to print a card but to print a field with  
> revPrintText or revPrintField.
> 
> 

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Re: How to set the printPaperOrientation

[Peter Alcibiades]

This is what I do, and it works perfectly:

   set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
   print this card  from 10,10 to 800,455 into 100,100,800,600

On the other hand, I gave up on revPrintField, and just export the data to a
file, then format the file with awk, and pipe it to kprinter for printing.   
This is 2.9.  On 2.7 I could never get printing to work properly.

Peter


Éric Miclo wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Does anybody on the list know how to set the printPaperOrientation to  
> "landscape" under Linux?
> I've tried all sort of settings but each time printing is achieved in  
> portrait orientation and I need to print in landscape mode
> 
> 

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OT: Discovering kdialog for shell script gui

[Peter Alcibiades]

It may not happen often or to many, but if you ever have a Unix shell script 
you need to give a quick graphical interface to, kdialog is a superb neat 
package.  I had this need lately for some awk scripts, and looked briefly at 
some of the others which include xdialog, zenity, getgui (far the lightest 
but not real pretty).  Here is a basic page on kdialog with more examples 
than you'll need:

http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Shell_Scripting_with_KDE_Dialogs

Classic KDE stuff, detailed, thorough, more options than you can shake a stick 
at. 

Yes, you can invoke a script in Rev, and I have, but the KDE people have 
integrated the shell itself with the gui, its not a bolt on.  You call dcop 
directly.  For instance, a  progress bar on the progress of an OS task is a 
native element you just call.  

Well, not very experienced in these things, you all may tell me this is old 
hat, but it seems really neat.

Peter
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Re: a regular expression question, or at least a text manipulation question

[Peter Alcibiades]

Thanks a million everyone!  I'd never have found this stuff out without some
pointers, and these are exactly what I needed.
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a regular expression question, or at least a text manipulation question

[Peter Alcibiades]

How do you do the following?

I have a series of lines which go like this

|  [record separator, new record starts]
AAA consectetur adipisicing elit, sed
BBB lorem ipsum
CCC consectetur adipisicing elit, sed
CCC laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea
DDD ut aliquip ex ea commodo
| [record separator]
AAA adipisicing elit, sed   [new record starts]

| is the record separator.

In the above, its CCC that is repeated, but it could be any prefix.  Also CCC 
is next to its repetition.  This will always be the case.

I want to go through the file.  When I find a single prefix (like AAA) this 
should be written to the output file.  when the next line starts with the 
same prefix (as in the CCC cases, I want to put both occurences on the same 
line.  So the desired output would be

AAA consectetur adipisicing elit, sed
BBB lorem ipsum
CCC consectetur adipisicing elit, sed CCC laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea
DDD ut aliquip ex ea commodo
EOR
AAA adipisicing elit, sed

How do I detect a repetition of that sort and do this? 

A similar question, if the line is

CCC  adipisicing elit, sed TAB CCC  adipisicing elit, sed

How do you detect the multiple occurence (I can do this with regex) and then 
write out in place of thie above expression (this I don't see how to do) the 
following:

CCC  adipisicing elit, sed CCC  adipisicing elit, sed

Obviously, the pseudo latin is different in each case, so no way to check 
using that.

Peter
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Re: Linux Version

[Peter Alcibiades]

Pierre,

Does RevPrintField work properly?

Do virtual desktops work properly?

Peter
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Re: OT: Windows Vista security 'rendered useless' by researchers

[Peter Alcibiades]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080811-the-sky-isnt-falling-a-look-at-a-new-vista-security-bypass.html

has a more complete account.  If its correct, Firefox seems to be vulnerable
also, at least to some variants, but the problem is considerably less severe
than represented in the popular press.  Moving to OSX?  Hardware is the
problem of course.  You cannot 'move to OSX.  I guess you can 'move to
Linux', but even I recognize that few will find this practical or
attractive!



Chipp Walters wrote:
> 
> 
> Wouldn't it be much easier to just switch browsers from IE to Firefox?
> 
> 

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Re: Standalone - Using stack as DB

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, very true.  This is, now its pointed out, obviously the underlying
source of my power off/saving problem.  Its also an argument against using
the traditional splash stack and then a real program + data stack, is it
not?  One should rather have a program main stack, and then data substacks. 
No need ever to save the program stack since it never changes, just save the
data stacks as changed.  Is this what you usually do?


Eric Chatonet wrote:
> 
> 
> I should have added that this way of doing never mix any line of code  
> with user's data in the same file.  And I think it important.
> 
> 

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Re: quick question about splash stacks

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richard Gaskin wrote:
> 
> 
> Your handling of that sounds good, but I'm curious:  have you pinned 
> down what's causing these saves to be interrupted?
> 
> 

I think it must be something to do with the on/off switch.  Maybe when they
switch off using that, if they hold it down long enough, it just causes
power to be cut, and this is in the middle of a save?They do not do it
often, and probably when they do, they mostly don't hold it down.   The only
thing I can think of.

The moral may be that no matter how much training you do, and no matter how
many notices you put up or stick to your machines, if you're dealing with
people who basically use the app without knowing they are using a computer,
and are seriously computer-phobic to boot,  things like using the on-off
switch and not the mouse to close down, are just going to happen
occasionally.  Have to live with it.

Peter




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Re: quick question about splash stacks

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richard Gaskin wrote:
> 
> 
> Corruption of a stack file per se is very rare with Rev
> 
> 

Yes, and strictly speaking this is not what is happening.  What seems to
happen, single number of times a year on a stack in daily use, is that
quitting produces an abortive save.  The stack script calls for save this
stack on close.  The stack itself is not corrupted, it is saved as eg
stack.rev~.  But the file stack.rev which is created by the save is corrupt
and cannot be launched by the splash.  The only solution seems to be to test
for the existence of the ~ file in the splash stack.  If found, delete the
stack.rev file, rename stack.rev~ to stack.rev.  And pray you haven't failed
to think of something else!

Peter

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quick question about splash stacks

[Peter Alcibiades]

What do people usually do when launching an app using a splash stack, to check 
if the main stack successfully opens?

Do you use try, or do you write a custom error handler?

I am wondering how to take care of the case of main stack corruption.  I'd 
like to have something that if the stack doesn't load, it does a series of 
things to restore from the ~ file.  

How do people usually do this?

Peter
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Re: locking, permissions, data

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, this could be it.  They do every so often close it down using the on-off
switch, which invokes the shutdown procedure, but too fast for rev to close
and save properly.  Could be.  Thanks - at least it frees one from worrying
that someone is trying to use a text editor on it.

Now what to do about it!  At least it is fairly easy to recover from.  

Peter


Martin Baxter-4 wrote:
> 
> Peter,
> 
> I believe the .rev~ file is made by the revolution engine automatically
> when you do a stack save. It is a backup of the exisiting stack file
> prior to the save command. If the save is successful it is deleted, so
> you only see it if something went wrong.
> 
> Assuming this is correct, this would suggest that the stack save
> operation is failing part way through, for some reason.
> 
> Martin Baxter
> 
> Peter Alcibiades wrote:
>> Here is a very weird situation.  The program consists of a launcher, call
>> it 
>> launcher, and the program proper, call it program.rev, and they are both
>> in 
>> the same folder.
>> 
>> I get a call that launcher is not starting up the program.  On inspection
>> of 
>> the folder, one sees the following:
>> 
>> launcher [executable, 2.5mb]
>> program.rev [unknown, 20k]
>> program.rev~ [unknown, 300k]
>> 
>> So, I delete program.rev, remove the tilde from the other name, and
>> everything 
>> works fine.
>> 
>> The only way I can think of to account for this is that someone opened
>> the 
>> program.rev file in a text editor, and then saved it.  All Linux text
>> editors 
>> I know seem to make a backup copy with a tilde to distinguish them, on 
>> saving.  
>> 
>> Yet, the users at the time are definitely incapable of opening a file
>> with a 
>> text editor and then saving it.  This is the second time its happened.  
>> 
>> 
>> Any ideas on how it could happen, and what to do, gratefully received!
>> 
>> Peter
>> 
> 
> -- 
> I am Not a Number, I am a free NaN
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locking, permissions, data

[Peter Alcibiades]

Here is a very weird situation.  The program consists of a launcher, call it 
launcher, and the program proper, call it program.rev, and they are both in 
the same folder.

I get a call that launcher is not starting up the program.  On inspection of 
the folder, one sees the following:

launcher [executable, 2.5mb]
program.rev [unknown, 20k]
program.rev~ [unknown, 300k]

So, I delete program.rev, remove the tilde from the other name, and everything 
works fine.

The only way I can think of to account for this is that someone opened the 
program.rev file in a text editor, and then saved it.  All Linux text editors 
I know seem to make a backup copy with a tilde to distinguish them, on 
saving.  

Yet, the users at the time are definitely incapable of opening a file with a 
text editor and then saving it.  This is the second time its happened.  

What to do?  One could make program.rev read only, but then it would mean that 
all the data would have to be stored in external files, and then read in for 
any processing, which is getting very complicated.Is there some way using 
finely grained permissions to stop this happening, but to allow data to be 
added to the data fields and custom properties?  Should I perhaps make the 
default application for the .rev extension something totally harmless like 
maybe mplayer?  

Any ideas on how it could happen, and what to do, gratefully received!

Peter

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Re: Multi-dimensional arrays explained..

[Peter Alcibiades]

I did offer.  But it seems they feel able to manage without me.
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Re: Multi-dimensional arrays explained..

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, very nice article indeed.  The xml to array conversion mentioned at the
end is dynamite.   A pity to  have to wait for the release of 3.0 to try it
out!  But it will have been worth waiting for when it comes.

Peter


Chipp Walters wrote:
> 
> Trevor's got a SUPER write-up on the new m-dim arrays in Rev 3.0 in the
> latest newsletter
> 

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alternative desktops in Linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

http://beginlinux.com/index.php/desktop_training/ubuntuhardyheron_cat/112-ubuntu804/1035-ubuntu-804-desktop-options

Basic article, but might be of interest to anyone who has never tried 
alternative desktops in Linux - maybe just used the Gnome that comes standard 
with Ubuntu.  Its written by a Ubuntu user but of course any desktop works 
with any distro.

The resource consumption data is quite interesting.  My impression is that KDE 
(not listed obviously) is more resource intensive than Gnome, but I haven't 
seen this documented. 

Peter
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Re: Parallels mystery

[Peter Alcibiades]

Not that I know anything much about this!  But logically, isn't the first
thing to do, eliminate the possibility that it is Parallels and not Windows,
by trying it on a non-virtual Windows machine?

Peter
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Re: Hello... Its good to be back. Is this the place to be or is the forum now it?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Malte Brill wrote:
> 
> 
> So, how do you like Rev on Linux. I haven´t done any dev work under  
> Linux yet, only checking if the standalones do work. Does it feel like  
> other apps you are running under Linux?
> 
> 

Yes, viewed from here it looks pretty similar to other Linux apps.  Since
like most people I use a mixture of packages from the two large Linux
denominations, and also a few from one or two of the splinter churches,
there isn't exactly much of a standard look and feel, but Rev behaves
perfectly acceptably in these terms now that the file dialogs have gone
native, with 2.9.  

There are still some difficulties with printing.  One is that at least under
one particular Debian installation, where every other application finds and
uses the printer, Rev does not.  It could be an oddity of the installation,
but it seems strange that Rev is without exception the only app to have a
problem.  The other issue is printing fields (bug filed).  Printing cards
works fine.  But I haven't been able to get printing fields to work properly
on a couple of installations, even ones where the printer is found and used
correctly.  Not completely sure that in a standalone, default folders work
exactly as one would expect either, but I fixed that by making the user set
the default folder explicitly at first use. 

It still does not support multiple desktops properly.  This is probably the
only remaining really large way in which it does not work like all other
Linux apps.  You cannot, for instance, put your dictionary on a separate
desktop.  The only way is to open a second copy in the second desktop.  This
is serious, and its been a filed bug for a long time now, but we seem to
have to live with it.

Peter
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Re: SPAM-MED: Re: Time to upgrade my technique...

[Peter Alcibiades]

Well, there is one advantage of using fields and not variables - your users
can see those fields chuntering through and incrementing before their very
eyes.  Never underestimate the value of cognitive dissonance.  Its working
hard, so it must be worthwhile.  The variable is not nearly so satisfying,
it just happens.



Richmond Mathewson wrote:
> 
> Is there anything INTRINSICALLY wrong with using
> fields instead of variables ?
> 
> 

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Re: Is RR too easy? Or too hard? (was) Is RunRev marketed to

[Peter Alcibiades]

One big gap in Rev as a general purpose environment seems to be getting data
out in a structured form.  Or maybe this is just personal ignorance in how
to do it?  If so, corrections would be welcome.

You have lets say a tab separated file with data in it.  This seems to be
the approved way of storing a few thousand or tens of thousands of records
of data, and indeed it does work fine for storage.  Now you want to produce
reports out of it.  The recommended way (which I've done) seems to be one
field per item of information, lay out the card so that it looks halfway
decent, and then print card. 

However any report is quite capable of having 50 -100 cells, more, in it. 
Now, it may be that there is an easier way, which if so it would be great to
hear about, but addressing all those cells individually in a script so you
go through the file and extract and calculate what is wanted is immensely
tedious, inflexible, lengthy and error prone. Also, your reports may well be
multiple pages, in which case layout again becomes problematic.  The card
metaphor does fine when you are dealing with screen fulls of info, but when
you're dealing with page fulls, less so.  Maybe there is a good way to lay
out a field with totals and subtotals and percentages in it, and that does
not involve addressing all the cells individually?  Even then however, in
Linux, I would have to re-export it to a text file at the moment in order to
format it properly for printing it.  (Yes, a bug has been filed on this.) 

Consequently in this, as in formatting a field for printing, your average
dinosaur sighs and reaches for awk (animals of more recent period will
probably reach for Perl), while reflecting that this is for at least this
purpose an incomplete environment.  Not only does it take a fraction of the
effort and an even smaller fraction of script length to do it in awk, but
the thing actually looks like a proper report when you are through by
default - you don't have to mess around with setting the field parameters
and alignment of the boxes so that it all displays nicely.  But, you feel,
this is the sort of thing I should be able to just do natively, without
going out to shell in different ways potentially in three different
operating systems with all the complexity that introduces.

Could you do it in Quartam?  Probably, but not in Linux at the moment.  

I don't do this for a living, , and restrict my OS environment, so its an
irritation not a showstopper, and its balanced by other eases of use in
other areas.  If I did it  for a living, and on multiple platforms, it would
make me think long and hard before adopting Rev as the general tool of
choice. 

A second issue (again it may be ignorance of best practice) is the sense of
fragmentation.  As the apps you take on become more complex, the tendency is
for the code to spread itself across many objects on many cards.  Now, for
maintainability, I'd like to track all uses of a given variable name or
object name in every script.  Its not obvious how to do it.  What I do
(please, tell me a better way) is patiently copy and paste every script into
a real editor - Geany or Kate.  In fact, I now have started to write the
scripts in Geany or Kate, having first drawn up a list of objects and
variables.   Then at least they are addressable as a whole, and in Kate you
have the double or triple window into the text, and global search and
replace works.  Its a bit tedious replacing all the scripts when written,
and tracking what you've done, but its possible given pencil and paper and
check lists.  It works, but one keeps feeling, surely an environment which
is bound to lead to lots of bits of individual scripts should have some
built in way of dealing with this better?  Maybe it does, and I've
idiotically not noticed?  

Its probably called GLX2 - but again, not for my chosen OS.

If I were 20 and had learned programming starting with Rev, these two things
would probably be what would make me 'move on'.  
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Reply to both (is RR too hard / easy?) and (is RR marketed to dev'rs only)

[Peter Alcibiades]

Two thoughts.

One, a big gap in Rev as a general purpose environment seems to be getting 
data out in a structured form.  Or maybe this is just personal ignorance in 
how to do it?  If so, corrections would be welcome.

You have lets say a tab separated file with data in it.  This seems to be the 
approved way of storing a few thousand or tens of thousands of records of 
data, and indeed it does work fine for storage.  Now you want to produce 
reports out of it.  The recommended way (which I've done) seems to be one 
field per item of information, lay out the card so that it looks halfway 
decent, and then print card.

However any report is quite capable of having 50 -100 cells, more, in it.  
Now, it may be that there is an easier way, which if so it would be great to 
hear about, but addressing all those cells individually in a script so you go 
through the file and extract and calculate what is wanted is immensely 
tedious, inflexible, lengthy and error prone. Also, your reports may well be 
multiple pages, in which case layout again becomes problematic.  The card 
metaphor does fine when you are dealing with screen fulls of info, but when 
you're dealing with page fulls, less so.  Maybe there is a good way to lay 
out a field with totals and subtotals and percentages in it, and that does 
not involve addressing all the cells individually?  Even then however, in 
Linux, I would have to re-export it to a text file at the moment in order to 
format it properly for printing it.  (Yes, a bug has been filed on this.)

Consequently in this, as in formatting a field for printing, your average 
dinosaur sighs and reaches for awk (animals of more recent period will 
probably reach for Perl), while reflecting that this is for at least this 
purpose an incomplete environment.  Not only does it take a fraction of the 
effort and an even smaller fraction of script length to do it in awk, but the 
thing actually looks like a proper report when you are through by default - 
you don't have to mess around with setting the field parameters and alignment 
of the boxes so that it all displays nicely.  But, you feel, this is the sort 
of thing I should be able to just do natively, without going out to shell in 
different ways potentially in three different operating systems with all the 
complexity that introduces.

Could you do it in Quartam?  Probably, but not in Linux at the moment.  

I don't do this for a living, and restrict my OS environment, so its an 
irritation not a showstopper, and its balanced by other eases of use in other 
areas.  If I did it  for a living, and on multiple platforms, it would make 
me think long and hard before adopting Rev as the general tool of choice.

A second issue (again it may be ignorance of best practice) is the sense of 
fragmentation.  As the apps you take on become more complex, the tendency is 
for the code to spread itself across many objects on many cards.  Now, for 
maintainability, I'd like to track all uses of a given variable name or 
object name in every script.  Its not obvious how to do it.  What I do 
(please, tell me a better way) is patiently copy and paste every script into 
a real editor - Geany or Kate.  In fact, I now have started to write the 
scripts in Geany or Kate, having first drawn up a list of objects and 
variables.   Then at least they are addressable as a whole, and in Kate you 
have the double or triple window into the text, and global search and replace 
works.  Its a bit tedious replacing all the scripts when written, and 
tracking what you've done, but its possible given pencil and paper and check 
lists.  It works, but one keeps feeling, surely an environment which is bound 
to lead to lots of bits of individual scripts should have some built in way 
of dealing with this better?  Maybe it does, and I've idiotically not 
noticed?  

Its probably called GLX2 - but again, not for my chosen OS.

If I were 20 and had learned programming starting with Rev, these two things 
would probably be what would make me 'move on'.
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Re: PRINTING IN RUNREV 2.9

[Peter Alcibiades]

 I just filed bug 6478 after verifying today exactly what goes wrong with
revPrintField in Linux.  Needed to get to a system where Rev printing works
fine in all other respects.  Have not experimented with Mac or Windows, but
its probably specific to Linux from the lack of other reports.

However, this bug is not about it failing to print all of a field on
multiple pages.  It does that just fine.  The problem is, being unable to
adjust scale.

Even when this is resolved, I think I will still use awk for printing
reports.  Its so easy to reformat the field exactly how you want, and this
may not be the same for reporting as it is for entry of data or on-screen
reading.   So if you are going to reformat to print anyway, why not use a
tool designed specifically for that?  The shell is very easy to invoke
without the user having to worry.  And Awk of course comes for Linux,
Windows and Mac.

Peter



Joe Lewis Wilkins wrote:
> 
> Hi Leonard,
> 
> This has been a recent topic of discussion on this list. revprintfield  
> works for me.
> 
> Good luck,
> 
> Joe Wilkins
> 
> On Apr 27, 2008, at 6:53 PM, Biocentric Solutions wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> I don't know if anyone knows whether it is possible to print and  
>> entire
>> scrolling field in Revolution 2.9. I've not been able to do it with
>> Revolution 2.5.1. The idea is to be able to print the entire scrolling
>> field, including that which is not visible in the card on the  
>> screen. (If
>> anyone knows how to do it in 2.5.1 I would also like to know.)
>>
>> Any help with this is greatly appreciated.
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>>
>> Leonardo Wild
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> Joe Lewis Wilkins
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 
> 
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PRINTING IN RUNREV 2.9

[Peter Alcibiades]

> I don't know if anyone knows whether it is possible to print and  
> entire scrolling field in Revolution 2.9.

Yes, export it to a text file.  Then go out to shell and print it.  Use awk 
and printf if you need to format it.  If on Linux, or presumably on OSX too, 
you can just pipe the result of printf to a print driver.   It works, its 
quick, its easy. 

I have not been able to get revPrintField to work on Linux.  It does print, 
but the resulting page setup does not affect the layout or size and the field 
comes out truncated and with strange tab settings.  

When I've tracked down if this is due to the page setup dialog or to 
revPrintField, later this week, I'll file a bug report. 

Awk is a complete antique, but it works.  If you need a reference on it, get 
Sed and Awk from O'Reilly.  The Aho Kernigan Weinberger book is out of print 
now..

Peter
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Re: Getting things the wrong way round . . .

[Peter Alcibiades]

Mark, you're quite right, I cannot find it either.  Thought I'd filed it as a
bug, but maybe it was only raised in correspondence with development in
connection with the others.  I will first check it out in detail on Mandriva
as well as Debian, and then file it.  I'm not completely sure, thinking
about it again, if its a bug with revPrintField or with the Rev print setup
dialogues.

Roughly what happens is that revPrintField, when it brings up the Rev print
dialogues, any changes you make to sizings have no effect on the output. 
Now since I don't have the system print dialogues available here on Debian,
I don't know if this is just Rev's dialogue, or it is also applies when you
have the system dialogues available, so will check this out properly before
posting.

Peter


Mark Schonewille-3 wrote:
> 
> Hi Peter,
> 
> Under which number have you entered your revPrintField bug in the  
> QCC? I searched for revPrintField, but all bugs that show up are  
> fixed, except for one enhancement and one that is actually a menubar  
> bug.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Mark
> 
> --
> 
> Economy-x-Talk
> Consultancy and Software Engineering
> http://economy-x-talk.com
> http://www.salery.biz
> 
> Get your store on-line within minutes with Salery Web Store software.  
> Download at http://www.salery.biz
> 
> Op 20-apr-2008, om 22:24 heeft Peter Alcibiades het volgende geschreven:
> 
> 
>> Quite a bit of very useful stuff.  sqlite is great to
>> have in Linux.
>>
>> revPrintField howeverthat still doesn't work.  And I seem to be  
>> the only
>> one who notices!
>>
>> This is rather a pity.  I had hoped and expected to get all  
>> printing working
>> properly out of 2.9 and the beta program.  But, I did get 85% of  
>> what I was
>> hoping for.  Maybe it will be fixed one of these days.  Meanwhile,  
>> there is
>> a workaround at least.
> 
> 
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Re: Getting things the wrong way round . . .

[Peter Alcibiades]

I am happy too, with one smallish reservation.  Participating in the beta was
fine - one ought to do that, its the only way to get it done fast enough and
well enough.  If Rev wants to make gestures to active participants, that's
fine, but I certainly didn't expect it, and would participate regardless. 
Rev has always been very fair with upgrades, so one ought to respond in the
same spirit when one can help.  

I thought the responses from Development were rapid and competent and quite
thorough.

2.9 is a great step forward.  Native file dialogues is nice.  Print Card
works properly now.  Quite a bit of very useful stuff.  sqlite is great to
have in Linux.

revPrintField howeverthat still doesn't work.  And I seem to be the only
one who notices! 

This is rather a pity.  I had hoped and expected to get all printing working
properly out of 2.9 and the beta program.  But, I did get 85% of what I was
hoping for.  Maybe it will be fixed one of these days.  Meanwhile, there is
a workaround at least.

All in all, the beta was fine, and 2.9 a great step forward for Linux.  

Peter
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Re: Alphabeticisation ?

[Peter Alcibiades]

We should caution non-native speakers to be a bit careful with this English
technique of forming different parts of speech out of words!

Its a practice frequently poked fun at.   Its commonly found in
police-speak.   '-ize' is a common culprit, as in 'alphabeticize'.  But also
as in 'mirandize' (to inform a suspect of his rights, in the US, in which we
make, or try to make, a transitive verb out of the name Miranda).  

'-ate' is another.  As in the need to exclude the public while we
'forensicate this crime scene', which has caused excessively literate people
to burst out laughing when they first heard it.

You notice the common practice of adding extra syllables, usually  '-ic' as
in 'alphabeticize' which really adds nothing to 'alphabetize'.  

W. V. Quine as an arbiter of usage, well, that's another story also.  It was
Quine who invented the doctrine of the indeterminacy of meaning, according
to which, it was impossible to be sure what exactly he had said in it.   Not
coincidentally, Quine's version of propositional calculus also ran headlong
into paradoxes of self reference.   Its a fairly perilous authority to cite
in a forum dependent on precision  

So one's advice would have to be, whatever you do, try not to compilate or
revolutionize any of your code, and do especially avoid revolutionicating or
compilicizing it!
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revPrintField seems to be broken still

[Peter Alcibiades]

Is this just me?  Or does anyone else find that revPrintField fails to work as 
it should?

The way it works for me both in Debian and Mandriva is that the page prints at 
the same scale and truncates the field, regardless of printer settings.  In 
Debian, because the printer is not seen by Rev, I have to verify this with 
print to file.  In Mandriva, the printer is seen, and print Card now works 
perfectly with the released version of 2.9, but revPrintField does not.

I have overcome this by writing a little awk script.  First we export the 
field to a tabbed text file, then we run a shell script which calls awk and 
does printf, then we pipe the result to kprinter.  You have to make sure you 
have the right filter installed for the conversion.   

It is truly crazy to have to do this, but it does work.  But is it just me, or 
should I be filing another bug?

It is also baffling that in Debian, Rev print card brings up a quite different 
print dialogue than any other application installed.  How can this be 
possible?  Every other application bar none, and this is quite a richly 
populated installation, brings up the standard dialog, the printer is 
visible, and it 'just works'.  In Rev, and only in Rev, a slightly different 
dialog appears in which there is no printer.

Surely Rev should be as robust as say Gedit, Kate and Geany in terms of 
finding the printer?

To answer Sarah's question:  what did you expect from being a Beta tester?  I 
expected to get printing working, properly, on all systems.  I did get it 
improved.  But not enough!

Peter
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Re: Smallest PC that can run Revolution?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richmond, try Slitaz.  It is only 25mb, should be even smaller and faster
than DSL.  Can't imagine a lower spec distribution than this.  Admittedly it
only comes with two fonts, but then there is the font packaging tool with
Rev.  Might need it.
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Re: putting numbers into parentheses

[Peter Alcibiades]

Ken, I think he wants to put brackets AROUND the field, in response to some
conditions.  Like if they were labels and the field was between them.  Could
you do it with label fields, and make them visible and invisible?

Peter
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Re: SQLite database file from third-party sources?

[Peter Alcibiades]

I downloaded the file and tried opening it with the firefox plug in.  
Which reports it is corrupted.  sqlitebrowser reports its not an
sqlite 3 database.  Tksqlite, which does both 2 and 3, opens it
however.  So its probably v 2 and just needs converting.  Tksqlite
might do that?

Peter



Mark Schonewille-3 wrote:
> 
> Ian, Peter and William,
> 
> Can you think of any reason why a SQLite 3 file wouldn't work with  
> Rev? The reason why I ask is the problem discussed in the forum:
>   >. It really intrigues me why people have problems using SQlite 3  
> databases.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Mark Schonewille
> 
> --
> 
> Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
> http://economy-x-talk.com
> http://www.salery.biz
> 
> A large collection of scripts for HyperCard, Revolution, SuperCard and  
> other programming languages can be found at http://runrev.info
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 11 apr 2008, at 22:46, william humphrey wrote:
>> I created my SQLite database with SQLite Manager and access it all  
>> the time.
> 
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SQLite database file from third-party sources?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, I made an sqlite database using both sqlitebrowser and also the firefox 
plugin sqlite manager.  Both were super easy, but the firefox plug in is a 
lot faster, it did 15k records in a flash, whereas squlite browser choked.  I 
imported a tab delimited file to sqlite.  Saved it.  Then I connected to it.  
This was from one of the 2.9 linux betas.  Connection seemed OK.  I didn't 
try queries or adds, just wanted to verify connection.  The db had never been 
touched by Rev until the connection was set up.

This is Debian Lenny, pretty much up to date.

Around the same time there was a correspondence about how tab delimited files 
and custom properties or arrays were as good or better, and I thought OK they 
are going to be a lot faster and easier to write.  So didn't pursue it 
further.

Did you have trouble with queries after it reported the connection was made?  
Or could you not get it to make the connection?

Peter
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Re: Stack Translators

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richmond, isn't it a simply huge task to write a decent cross compiler?  And
there's the problem of picking a language to do the cross compile into? 
What do you pick - Python, Ruby, Lua?  You notice even PythonCard didn't
ever seriously consider imports from HC.  And its not obviously in Rev's
interest.  And then, when you have it, how are you going to use it?  Like
all insurance, its going to sit there and wait for the day when an asteroid
strikes Edinburgh.  And that's when you'll find that oops, it doesn't quite
work as well as we had thought it would

It would be nice if it existed as insurance, but its a bit hard to see it
happening.  Surely the answer, if one is really worried about getting locked
into Rev, is to move to something one is not worried about getting locked
into?  Or is the motivation quite different?  

In the Hypercard days, it was to run it on Windows.  It was visible all
along that getting locked not only into a programming language and an OS but
also hardware from one particular vendor was a bit of a risky bet.  But Rev
is cross platform and on any old hardware, so its much safer, your only risk
is a similar risk to any other language.  After all, what happens if you
picked Python, and the Pythonistas all one day move en masse to Ruby or
whatever?

Peter



Richmond Mathewson wrote:
> 
> 
> I wondered whether a set of stacks that could convert
> RR stacks into 'compilables' for other computing
> languages might be useful. 
> 
> 

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Re: why does this not work and how do you do it?

[Peter Alcibiades]

OK, thanks, its now clear why the send to card doesn't work.

But still, surely in the two object one script example, focus should work? 
That is, the only script on the card is from the very first example:

on mouseUp
  ask "think of a number"
  if it is not a number then
  put empty into field "Field"
  focus on field "Field"
  else
  put it into field "Field"
  focus on field "Field"
  end if 
end mouseUp

Focus not going to field in this case when you type in  is a bug, yes?

Peter  
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Re: why does this not work and how do you do it?

[Peter Alcibiades]

OK, this is really simple to do.  You make a new mainstack with one card
whose script is:

on mouseUp
focus on field "Field"
end mouseUp

Now you create a button with traversal off and a field with traversal on. 
The button script is:

on mouseUp
  ask "pick a number"
  if isNumber(it) is true then put it into field "Field"
  if the result is "Cancel" then select the text of field "Field"
  if isNumber(it) is false then send mouseUp to this card
end mouseUp

Select text as you and Jacque suggested works fine.

Now, what I expect is that if you enter say xyz at the prompt, it should
send mouseUp to the card, and this should be exactly the same as clicking on
the card.  Maybe this is not right?  At any rate, it doesn't activate. 
However, if you then click on the card, the field is activated.  So what
seems so strange to me is that doing mouseUp on the card works fine, but
sending mouseUp to the card from the button doesn't work.

I did put in a line to answer it, and the alpha stuff really is in it, so
definitely we should meet the condition of isNumber(it) being false.

Be glad to see someone else duplicating this!

Peter
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Re: why does this not work and how do you do it?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Jacque and Mark -  thanks, "select the text of" does indeed work.  I'd
previously
tried 'select after' which did not work.

It must definitely be a bug then, and apparently specific to the Linux
build?
Its a very specific problem.  Its not that focus on field does not work.  On
the
same screen I have a backup handler at card level to trap miscellaneous
mouse clicks and
restore focus to the field.  That one does work fine.  

The thing seems to be, if you start out with the cursor in a field and focus 
on the field,  then do something which places focus on another object, 
even if the handlers for that object try to restore focus on the field they
cannot do it with 'focus'.  Though they can do it with 'select'.

Obviously this is not what you'd expect, its inconsistent behaviour.  You'd
expect focus on field to work the same wherever it is found, and it don't.

Its also not very good, because from the user point of view, what he/she
sees
is the cursor flashing normally in the input field, but for some reason the
keyboard fails to work.  My dear users are totally baffled by this, so I get
calls saying the keyboard is broken!  Well, it must be.  You push the keys
and nothing happens!

The other odd thing about this is,  there is a card script which just does
focus on field
if there is a mouse up.  This works fine if you click anywhere on the
screen.  But it does
not work if it is invoked by 'send mouseUp to this card'.


Peter
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why does this not work and how do you do it?

[Peter Alcibiades]

One card, one button, one field (called Field)  Traversal is off on the 
button, on for the field. There is only one script - for the button - which 
goes:

on mouseUp
  ask "think of a number"
  if it is not a number then 
  put empty into field "Field"
  focus on field "Field"
  else
  put it into field "Field"
  focus on field "Field"
  end if
end mouseUp

What I expect to happen is that in either case the user will be able to enter 
from the keyboard.  But what actually happens is that the cursor flashes in 
the field, but the keyboard is dead.  To activate the keyboard you have to 
double click in the field (why double?).

There is going to be a simple and obvious answer, but I cannot find it.  Oh 
dear.

Yours, fully expecting to feel very foolish in a few minutes from now!

Peter
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system requirements linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richard Gaskin wondered about which distributions Rev apps will run on.  
Almost certainly any that any customer would have.  I've run them on DSL, 
Mandriva One KDE, Debian and the extraordinaily minimalist SliTaz, and one or 
two other live distros.  No-one is running anything below 2.4 kernel now.  
I've not yet found one it will not run on.

They will also run under a variety of window managers.  I have tried fluxbox, 
Gnome, KDE, Xfce WindowMaker and one or two of the tiling minimalist WMs like 
WMii and dwm and ion2.  It was fine.

The thing that is much more likely to be a problem than just does it run, is 
fonts.  Linux ships with a quite limited set, and you cannot count on the MS 
display fonts being there, so it might be prudent to either package any fonts 
used with the app, or else confine the app to the fonts you can be sure of 
having installed.  Also, its prudent to check that Rev can actually get at 
all the installed fonts in all sizes.  My experience is that on Debian at 
least it cannot.

Don't worry about emulating the Gnome window borders and stuff like that too 
closely.  They are going to have non-Gnome apps installed in any case, so 
they will be used to different styles.  Huge amounts of the HIG stuff that 
Mac users are used to considering part of the design of the OS interface is 
simply one option among many for Linux users and considered a matter of 
personal taste.

For instance, double click or single click to open a file.  Spatial browsing 
(multiple windows) versus browser style navigation.  Menu bar at top, bottom, 
both, left, right or none.   Right click on desktop to open the 'start' menu, 
versus having it someplace in a menu bar someplace.  Tiling versus overlay.  
Number of virtual desktops.  Different file managers.   We are not in the 
world of "the Finder".

Written from Gnome, but on Kmail, and using xfe not Nautilus as the Finder, 
and sometimes KOffice rather than OO, for the sake of the excellent Kexi and 
frame oriented KWord.  As an example!

Peter
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If you are looking for an embeddable Linux to package....

[Peter Alcibiades]

Look no further!

Distrowatch has a review of Slitaz Linux.  Its a 25mb live/installable CD with 
a full graphical desktop.  25mb is not a typo!   It seemed so unbelievable 
that I immediately downloaded and fired it up.  Its real, and it works, and 
its graphical, and being totally memory resident, its very fast indeed on 
just about anything.  Modern kernel, and uses JWM as the window manager, and 
SLIM as the display manager.  Even includes Firefox in its 25mb.

I'm enthusiastic about the many odd and quirky manifestations of open source, 
and many will not share this, but if you are ever looking for a tiny, very 
fast, fully functioning OS to package with your application, this is worth 
looking at.  It runs Revolution just fine - at least, it runs compiled 
applications, and StackRunner.  I did not try the IDE yet.

There is an issue with fonts, font sizing and fields.  Unlike with the 
standard distributions, the fit of the text onto buttons was not perfect.  
This is probably due to not having all the fonts, its something one would 
have to tweak.  But probably also, though I haven't done this, you would get 
around it by running the IDE itself on Slitaz and tweaking that way.

If you do try it, you'll probably want to mount a flash drive to try out apps, 
and its not totally obvious how to do this.  At least in this incarnation you 
have to use the manual mounting tool, and I had to specify sdb1 manually.

If you want something a little less barebones, then of course Slax or 
PCFluxbox or Puppy.  But this one is where for some reason you want something 
even more minimal.  The kind of system that will only run Win 98, but you 
need proper security.  The charitable sector comes to mind.

Peter
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question about default folders and shell (linux)

[Peter Alcibiades]

Problem:  how to make sure that the default folder is set to the folder the 
app is in, and that this is also the one where shell("script.sh") will be 
exectuted?  Otherwise, I've encountered the problem where, when the shell is 
called, its in /home/user, and cannot find the shell script, which is 
in /home/user/app along with all the other app files.

Is this a reasonable way to go about it?  Say in the open stack script?


get the specialFolderPath of ("Home")
put it & "/tmp" into tfilepath
set the defaultFolder to tfilepath

It seems to work from the message box - the default is indeed set to tmp, as 
an example.  Is this the approved method?

I don't want to hard code it in case they move the app from one machine to 
another with a different setup.  This way they do have to have the app folder 
in /home, but that is reasonably understandable.

Peter
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Re: Keeping a clean XP machine

[Peter Alcibiades]

Agreed that an up to date XP, running as limited user, with a decent firewall
and AV is pretty secure.  But you could also duplicate the cafe function
with less
trouble by going to Virtual Box or similar and reset after each use.  

Nothing is going to get out from VB into the base system if its running on a
different 
OS.  Debian or PCLinux would be my choice of distro on older hardware.

Interesting to hear someone mention Acronis.  Yes.  Never lets you down.
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Re: Exporting Images of Buttons ?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Its a classic example of the difference.  Someone wants to know how you
order dinner in Spanish.  You could hand him a dictionary, and he would
maybe eventually figure it out.  Or you could hand him "See it and say it
in Spanish".  

We have a great dictionary.  What we are missing is the book of how
to put the words together for various purposes, like ordering dinner.


Richmond Mathewson wrote:
> 
> 
> .so, why did it take me so long, and why did I think it
> was possibly not doable?
> 
> Frankly because the DOCUMENTATION was fairly shakey on
> this..
> 
> 

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Crashing while printing card in Linux 2.9 rc2: the answer

[Peter Alcibiades]

The answer is, there is a bug, helpfully tracked down by Rev development: If a 
field color and pattern is set to anything, printing will cause an instant 
crash.  

So the answer is to do CLEAR on all the settings in colors and patterns for 
all fields.

Hope this is helpful to someone else.

Peter
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Re: a weird crash - any suggestions?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, release candidate 2.  Printing didn't work at all on 2.6.1, which is why
I moved to 2.9 as soon as it came available.



BILL HUMPHREY wrote:
> 
> set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
> You must be using the beta release?
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Re: a weird crash - any suggestions?

[Peter Alcibiades]

And now it gets even weirder.  I tried to set the systemPrintSelector to
false, doesn't seem to help.However now when I go back to the original
script, it now no longer prints properly even from the ide.  It now seems to
print the second of what might be two pages, with a few lines from the
bottom of the card.  Before that, the script quoted in the original post was
working from the ide, just crashing from the standalone.  Now it doesn't
even work from the ide.

Its completely baffling.  Every other application without exception prints
just fine.  But whatever, how many weeks can one spend trying to get this to
work?
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Re: a weird crash - any suggestions?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Its Debian Lenny, 2.9 rc  2.

The script is very long, slow and amateurish, basically a brute force
solution to something I could not get to work any other way.  It goes
through and zeroes out the 30+ fields, then it puts the file into a
variable, and uses filter to get the right subset of the file.  It totals
the subset and puts totals into the fields.  It doesn't do anything other
than the most basic commands - add, filter, case, if.  I would not be
thanked for posting two or three pages of this stuff!  But it does work, and
it is accurate as compared to test runs against a spreadsheet using the same
input files.

But what is weird is the following.  You start this up in the ide, both
buttons get you to a report card with fields with white backgrounds, and the
print card script from the button on the report card works fine.  It also
works fine with development tools suspended.  

You launch the same stack from a splash stack, or from StackRunner, and in
both cases, a go to with update results in the report being done correctly,
but  the fields are all greyed out, and there is a crash from printing using
the print button with script given above.  Go there from go without update,
and the bottom leftmost field is blue, the others grey, and printing causes
a crash.  Why going there without update should produce a different result
from going there from a button that updates is mysterious.

Maybe this is connected to the difficulties with the Linux print dialog, so
maybe there is a way around it by disabling this and using Rev's.  But I
don't understand why it should work from ide and not from either stackrunner
or standalone.

I had the thought why not go back to 2.6.1 if there is no printing anyway. 
But you can't.  Save as legacy does put a file with the save as name, but
its not openable in 2.6.1.

Maybe I am the only one having so much trouble with Linux printing?  It is
not a question of lp being set wrongly.  Even after you set lp correctly and
confirm it, and can confirm it by putting the printer name in Rev, the print
dialogue still fails to recognise it.  I just filed this as a bug.

The problem is, you can work around it if printing a field by using the
shell and calling an awk script to process and then pipe the result to
kprinter.  But there seems to be no way to do anything like this with a
card.  And anyway, why a difficulty on just this particular card, not the
other one, with the identical script?

If anyone wants to see this horrible script I'll happily send it privately. 
But I don't see how it can be that if it runs fine from the ide.  Running
out of ideas.

Peter


Mark Schonewille-3 wrote:
> 
> Hi Peter,
> 
> Which operating system are you using, which version(s) of Revolution,  
> and what is the exact script of button A?
> 
> 
> 

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a weird crash - any suggestions?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Can anyone shed any light on a weird crash?

There is a card with around 30 fields on it.  You can get to it two ways, 
Method A is to update the fields.  In this case the script for the button 
goes to the card and updates the fields from a text file.

Or, because this updating takes a while, Method B is you can simply go to the 
card from a different button without updating it.

When you do this in the ide everything works fine. Method A everything works 
fine.  Method B, when you do it having started either with a splash stack or 
with stackrunner, the fields are all grey except for one which has turned 
blue.  I cannot figure out where this is coming from, since they are set in 
properties to be white, they show white in the ide, and they show white when 
development tools are suspended.  The script is simply go to card.

In addition, I have a print button for this card once you get to it.  Its 
script is identical to a button on another card:  

on mouseUp
set the printerName to (line 1 of the availablePrinters)
set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
print card "reports" into 100,100,800,600
end mouseUp

On the other card it works just fine and out comes the card.  On this card, 
when the colors are all peculiar, it produces an instant crash.  But if you 
go to the card from the update button, the fields are normal, and the print 
button works fine.   The splash stack was saved as standalone in dp-5 by the 
way, if that makes any difference. 

Probably something obvious, but what?  Its not the print script clearly.  It 
is some combination of the print script and the card properties.  But what?  
And why does running the update work but just going to it not work?

Peter
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Re: question about splash stacks

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, this is what was happening.  Must be getting feeble minded.  Though I
seem to recall
doing the same thing in 2.6.1 and it working fine.  That is, on saving as
standalone,
the splash and the main showed in the stack file, the splash only as the
program file,
and the box for separate files checked.  This way the only thing being saved
is the
splash, and it calls the main as a separate .rev main stack.  As long as it
works though!  

Thanks to you and Richard for helping.



> My guess is you're saving changes to a different main.rev than the
> splashscreen executable is opening. 
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Re: question about splash stacks

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, this must be what is happening, but its hard to see why.  What I
am doing is quitting the ide, then restarting.  Then opening the source 
for both stacks and setting the main and substacks to empty.  I first 
have to disable the script in the flash stack that does the startup of main.

Then save and close the ide again.  Then start up, open both, and do the 
standalone settings, edit the splash script to make it start main,
then set their main and substack properties, then save.  Of course, I
do check the parameter to put stacks in separate files.  And it looks like
it is doing that, because I do end up with a splash and a main.  However,
the splash contains the main, and changes to the main are no longer
saveable. So I end up with, in the build folder:

splash (which seems to contain main)
main

The quick way around it will be simply to make a brand new splash from
scratch, which is not a lot of trouble, but its a bit odd.

This is not what is supposed to happen, is it?  Of course, maybe I am having
a memory lapse and doing something silly.  But if so, why do I end up with
both main and splash in the build folder?

Peter

What seems to happen however

Chipp Walters wrote:
> 
> Peter,
> 
> My guess is you're saving changes to a different main.rev than the
> splashscreen executable is opening. Or...you're not really saving the
> changes. Remember, you must issue an explicity 'save stack' for the
> changes to be saved, unlike Hypecard where they were always saved
> automatically.
> 
> best,
> Chipp
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A DVD or e-version of Day One....

[Peter Alcibiades]

Like the other poster, I would be interested in a packaged version of some 
sort.  Doesn't have to be a DVD though maybe that would be easiest, with 
downloadable files maybe?  Or perhaps just the presentation materials?

There are probably quite a few people who are conscious of being able to get 
the things done they need to do, but who also are aware that they are not 
following best, or maybe not even good, practice, and would like to get more 
exposed to it in a structured way.

Peter
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question about splash stacks

[Peter Alcibiades]

You make a standalone with a splash stack that just fires up the main one, so 
as to be able to save changes to the main one.

There are two stacks in the folder, splash, the executable, and let say 
main.rev.

Why is it that when you make and save changes in main.rev from the ide, they 
do not show up when you start main from the splash stack?

And is there a simple way of editing the main stack without having to resave 
as a standalone each time?

I was using stackrunner, which was perfect for this, and will do again as soon 
as Ken releases the 2.9 version.  But in the meantime, why is it working this 
way?

Peter
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how to print to file in landscape mode?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Mark, it says in my dictionary (2.9 beta 5) that printRotated is now 
deprecated and does the same as what I have used, setting to landscape mode 
which is preferable.

What is also very odd is that when I check in the message box, the mode does 
indeed return landscape.

It is possible, from a communication from support, that you have to use lp to 
print.  I'm not, I'm printing to a jetdirect seemingly using socket, which 
has been set up in CUPS - don't quite understand all this stuff.  

But surely none of this should matter if we are just printing to a file?  The 
problem is not with printing once I have the file.  I can print the file fine 
using kprinter.   The problem is generating a ps file in landscape form to 
print.  Or does it use lp to generate the ps file?  if so, there should be 
someplace a script to change its parameters.

The problem seems to be a bit narrowed down by the discovery that in page 
setup invoked from the script, if you change the paper layout from portrait 
to landscape, the height and width measurements do not change.  So this 
suggests an oddity in Rev's handling perhaps?

Peter
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how to print to file in landscape mode?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Does anyone know why this would not work?

on mouseUp
  set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
  set the printerOutput to "file:/home/peter/Desktop/printfile.ps"
  print card "reports"
  --put shell("kprinter /home/peter/Desktop/printfile.ps")
end mouseUp

I commented out the actual printing part, which works fine given that the file 
is the right file to print.

What this does is print to the file ok, but in portrait.  

To try to track this down, I did in the message box:

set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
put the printPaperOrientation

the result is landscape.

So, if the paper is landscape, why is the print to file producing a portrait 
laid out ps?

This is the root of the problem.  If I cannot get it to deliver a landscape 
ps, then its hopeless.  If I can, then there is a workaround for the printing 
problems.  This is 2.9 beta 5 Debian, as usual.

In hope,

Peter
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found some lost printing in Linux 2.9

[Peter Alcibiades]

OK, the following seems to more or less work for printing cards.  

First you have to set the printerOutput to some file.

Then print the relevant card using print

This results in a postscript file appearing in the default folder.

Then you do

put shell("kprinter ")

which brings up a dialogue box from which printing can happen.  You can 
probably use a2ps also, but kprinter is safer - a2ps is an optional install. 

It needs fixing.  Both in documentation and in practice.  No other modern app 
requires you to invoke kprinter or a2ps from the command line to print.  If 
this is how to print cards in Linux, its has to be prominently documented.

Peter
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Still in search of lost printing

[Peter Alcibiades]

"Cross-platform note:  On Mac OS and Windows systems, the print command uses 
the current printer. On Unix systems, the printcommand creates a PostScript 
file and runs the program specified in the printCommandproperty, with the 
file as input."

This is from the 2.9 dp-4 dictionary.

Does anyone know where this PostScript file is created?  It would help track 
down the problem to know if it is failing to create the file, or failing to 
print it once created.  If the latter there would obviously be workarounds 
using shell().

Peter
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Printing problems -- is this the answer?

[Peter Alcibiades]

What may work is set the systemPrintSelector to false!

Answer printer then brings up a print dialog with the printer in it, which is 
dramatic progress.


Peter

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Printing problems

[Peter Alcibiades]

Tom Johnson writes:  "I'm having some major problems with printing. All I want 
to do is print a single card. It's not a big, elaborate deal."

Quite so.  Very familiar.

To try out the script, I created a new stack, put a button on it, pasted in 
the script which was posted, clicked the button.  Nothing happens.  2.9 dp-4, 
Debian.  Rev is the only application that doesn't print.  I turned off lock 
screen, all that stuff is working fine.  I also posted it into the message 
box.  There were no error messages, but again, nothing at all happened.

Starting to wonder if Rev actually does printing.

Peter
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printing problems

[Peter Alcibiades]

Still having printing problems.  Still 2.6.1 Linux

revPrintField works, but puts large fonts very spread out on too many pages, 
and in landscape for some reason.

This at least has a workaround - put it into a text file, reformat it in awk 
and pipe it through to kprinter using shell().  Yes I know

print card doesn't work at all.  This one I have no workaround for.  The card 
in question has 35 or 40 fields on it, the result of several pages of script 
to produce a report.   Is there any way of copying a card and all the 
elements on it, and then pasting it into something that will print, without 
use intervention?

How you wish in these cases to have followed intuition in the first place, and 
written the thing in awk when (a) it won't take all those pages of script and 
(b) you can just pipe the output to kprinter!But we are where we are.

Notes.
  
2.6.1 answer printer does nothing.  

lpstat -a returns the name of the printer and says its accepting requests 
since last boot time.

2.9 beta put the availablePrinters returns the same printer as lpstat -a.  But 
you cannot actually use it.  I haven't tried using revPrintField in 2.9.


Peter
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DP 4 for Linux: Aaaarrrggg!

[Peter Alcibiades]

Viktoras, you are quite right.  I have just tried out a few window managers.  
On Xfce multiple windows work fine on my installation also.  They also work 
fine on fluxbox. 

However they do exactly what I described earlier on both kde, which I just 
tested, and gnome, that is, all the windows collapse onto one desktop.

This is on Debian testing, pretty up to date.  Default settings for all WMs.

Could you try on Ubuntu using gnome or kde?  If you can bear the bloat!

At least there is a workaround - just use xfce, which I quite like these days, 
though whether it is any longer the low cholesterol desktop is another 
matter...  And if it works on two WMs it should be a fairly simple matter to 
make it work on kde and gnome.  

Or maybe it is a bug in kde and gnome?  Seems unlikely.

Peter
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DP 4 for Linux: Aaaarrrggg!

[Peter Alcibiades]

Andre, you say "well, it works on my EEE PC with multiple workspaces, I can 
carry rev to workspace 1 to 4 with no problem..."

Yes, of course.  So can I.  

But that is not what is meant by "working with no problem".  Can you put the 
different windows on different workspaces, in the way Sarah describes, and 
work on them?  Can you, for instance, put the script editor and the 
application browser on one desktop, the dictionary on a different desktop, 
and your app you are designing on a third, and have them all stay where you 
put them and work in the different windows as you choose, by flipping from 
one desktop to another?  I cannot.  They all move instantly back to the same 
desktop the moment I use anything.

I'll have to do some research on locking. Maybe there are hacks.  But at the 
moment, it does not work like I expect it to - like OO works for instance, 
where the dictionary equivalent can be moved to a different desktop and just 
stay there while you work on your spreadsheet.

Which, thankfully, I do less and less these days...

Peter
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DP 4 for Linux: Aaaarrrggg!

[Peter Alcibiades]

Oh dear guys, I am sure it is wonderful in other ways, BUT  BUT  BUT!

It still does not do multiple desktops right.  Or at all, really.  First thing 
I tried.

It has the little icon in the top left, that works fine and moves your windows 
to another desktop, whichever you want, but then, as soon as you use one of 
them, back all the windows fly into one desktop again.  Just like it always 
has.

This really matters.  What it means is, I have at the moment 6 empty desktops, 
and I cannot even put the dictionary on one of them.  All my 7 Rev windows 
have to clutter up one desktop while the others are empty.  No other Linux 
app behaves like this.  All others, you put whichever window you like on 
whichever desktop you like and then use them.

For instance, OO.  I usually have the dictionary open on one desktop and the 
spreadsheet open on another, when I'm doing spreadsheets.  At the very least 
I would like to do the same with Rev.  

I know this is peculiar right now to the Linux desktops - but all of them have 
pagers like this, Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox.  Whatever people think about 
this in HIG terms, its the way Linux people work.  So its got to be 
supported.  I think Apple will supports it in Leopard.  So it it is going to 
have to be done sooner or later.

Or hey, tell me I am idiotically missing some simple way to make it work.  
I'll be overjoyed!



Peter
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2.9 dp-3 for linux has expired...!

[Peter Alcibiades]

OK, all good things come to an end.  

So where do I get the next one?

Peter
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mimicking awks fs and ofs

[Peter Alcibiades]

How do you do this?  Its super easy in awk.  You just set the item delimiters 
for the input file and the item delimiters for the output file independently.  
Then if you write, for instance, items 1 and 2 to the output fie, they may 
have been tab separated in the input file but will now be | separated or 
whatever in the output file.  Its very simple.  But there doesn't seem to be 
the same thing in Rev.  

Or maybe I am too hung up on the awk model and can't see it?

Peter
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2.9 b4

[Peter Alcibiades]

Well, having only 2.9 dp-3 available at present, just one question about b4:

Does it do multiple desktops properly on Linux yet?

Or is it time to give up, accept that the HIGs were right all along, all we 
ever needed was one, just a bigger one,  and buy a 30 inch monitor?

Peter
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Many Cards vs. Lists vs. XML

[Peter Alcibiades]

Sivakatirswami, thanks for a most interesting and thought provoking post and 
approach that would never have occurred to me.  Perhaps the disadvantage of 
it might be that exporting the data in a way that can be used by another 
application might require extra work, if you feel the need to provide for 
that?   

But apart from that, its very interesting and I'll try it.

Peter
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AW: db encryption and multiuser question

[Peter Alcibiades]

Three open source sqlite editors:

sqlite manager (firefox plugin - the best)

tksqlite

sqlitebrowser

Peter
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Filtering array vs plain list

[Peter Alcibiades]

Len Morgan wrote

> Why are you writing off using a database?  I think you would find that
> for the amount of data you have and the way it's organized, it's going
> to be MUCH faster than anything you can do with arrays and scripts.
>
> For example to select all the Red Sox fans born in 1960 you would write:
>
> SELECT * FROM people WHERE baseballteam='Red Sox' AND birthyear='1960'
>
> To use your example of changing the baseball team:
>
> UPDATE people SET baseballteam='White Sox' WHERE baseballteam='Red Sox'
> AND birthyear='1960'


And the scales fell from his eyes and Lo, he could see!  Thanks.

What the database actually is giving you is a much more powerful filter 
command.  Filter is great but it doesn't do columns.  Its great but doesn't 
do real regex, only wildcards.  Yes indeed, why reinvent the wheel, just 
figure out the database commands.  If it were awk it might be different, 
where in effect you have a sort of built-in implicit filter with column 
addressing.  But in Rev sqlite has to be the way to go.  

I sort of half knew this from using filter and switch to get reports done, 
which does work, but it runs to several pages to do quite simple things, but 
hadn't got it explicitly till reading this comment.

Peter
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ide not himself

[Peter Alcibiades]

It was a (not very good) joke, but it does seriously happen and its not clear 
why.  

Sometimes, the ide slows down dramatically for no apparent reason.  Like, it 
takes a half  or quarter second to type a character in the script editor.  Or 
entering data into a field suddenly slows to a crawl.  If you carry on typing 
normally, the characters back up in the buffer and then continue after you 
stop typing.  Very irritating if you put in too many backspaces for instance.

I didn't bother reporting it since it would probably be hard to reproduce and 
may well be fixed by the wholesale revisions in 2.9.  Very odd.

Jim, thanks for the improvements!   

Peter
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Testing conformity of xml data (tidy)

[Peter Alcibiades]

Availability of tidy.

It and its docs are installed on my copy of Debian and I don't recall having 
done it.  But even if not part of the base distribution, which it might not 
be in stuff like PCLinux or Vector or Zenwalk or the one cd distros, its 
going to be a simple download from the repositories.

Mandriva has come with it since at least 2006.  Its probably a safe bet that 
its installed or available packaged for any distro you want.

Peter
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another question about finding duplicates

[Peter Alcibiades]

Thanks everyone, what's amazing is how you can solve the problem by such 
completely different approaches.

My own approach was best thought of as an attempt at the new literary genre 
of "programming jokes" and has the same relation to the others as PDQ Bach 
has to music.  Here is it is:

set the itemDelimiter to tab
put field tData into tmp
repeat for each line theLine in field tData
put item 1 of theLine into tagg
get tmp
filter it with tagg&tab&"*"
if the number of lines in it >1 then  put it & CR after field tError
end repeat

When run against a two hundred line file with one duplicate pair, the screen 
flickered for several seconds, after which it notified us of all four of 
them.  The IDE somehow did not seem quite his usual cheerful self after 
having got through this exercise.. ...

Peter

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another question about finding duplicates

[Peter Alcibiades]

There's a file which goes roughly:

1   anything
2   anything
3   anything
4   anything

etc

It can always be sorted by the first item.  Sometimes a duplicate entry will 
creep in, so the file will look

1   anything
2   anything
2   anything
3   anything
4   anything

or perhaps

1   anything
2   anything
3   anything
3   anything
4   anything

What's the quickest way of checking for this condition  - when the two items 1 
of any two adjacent lines are identical?  I have found a brute force way to 
do it using filter, but it is really clunky and slow.

Cheers

Peter
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Stupid, yes, often; ungrateful no, never!

[Peter Alcibiades]

Ian Wood writes:

"Sure it doesn't do anything - you've got "tStock" instead of text of  
field "tStock" in the lineoffset line."

Yes, quite right, how silly.  Thanks.  Embarrassed to admit how long I had 
stared at that without seeing it.

Peter
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question about how to update an item in a field in batch mode

[Peter Alcibiades]

Trying Sarah's suggestion first, but cannot seem to make it work:  

on mouseUp
  set the itemDelimiter to tab
  repeat for each line L in field "tSales"
get lineOffset(item 1 to 2 of L, "tStock")
if it > 0 then subtract 1 from item 5 of line it of field "tStock"
  end repeat
end mouseUp

It does nothing.  The reason being that variable it is always 0, though there 
should be a match for items 1 to 2.  If I make it just match on item 1, same 
thing.

Then if I take out the condition, something even stranger happens.  It writes 
as many zeros as there are items doing the match before item 1 of line 1 of 
tStoc.  (there are two items which should match in the sample file, and for 
some reason the only one it finds is the second one!)

But I can't understand why it doesn't work.  It doesn't seem to violate the 
rule about not changing a variable during repeat.

Seem to be making heavy weather out of this one.  On to Jeanne's suggestion 
now.

Peter
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question about how to update an item in a field in batch mode

[Peter Alcibiades]

There is a sales file with a varying number of lines, tab delimited.

Each line records one transaction, the sale of one product.  These lines 
accumulate throughout the day.

At the end of the day, I want to take (for instance) item 1 & tab & item 2 & 
tab, and use this to look up the line in the stock list that corresponds to 
that sale.  Then item 5 of that line in the stock list, which is the stock 
level, should be decremented by 1 to show one of these items has been sold.

And so on for each line item in the sales file.

Not sure if this is quite clear, so here it is a bit more specific.

The sales field might look like this:

1   XX  2.30RRR 6/1/08
2   YY  4.20RRR 7/1/08

where the items are number, description, price, department, datestamp

then the stock field might look like this

1   XX  2.30RRR 100
2   YY  4.20RRR 150

Where the items are:  number, description, price, department, no in inventory.

So what I am trying to do is go through the sales field using the number and 
description from each line, one after the other, and match each line against 
the record for that product in the stock field, then if there is a match, 
knock down the no in inventory in the stock field, which is item 5,  by 1.  

If I could make it work, the result of running it in the above instance would 
just be that the no in stock would fall to 99 and 149.

The sticking point is how to do this match and decrement using repeat.

I can do it easily when dealing with it one record at a time - when there is 
only one record in the field, so there is no repeat loop.  But I'm having 
great trouble figuring out how you do it when you have to run through a 
series of records from the first field one after the other against the second 
field  Part of the difficulty may be the thing that was referred to earlier 
on the list, that you cannot modify the repeat for variable.

Any thoughts or hints very gratefully received as always.

Peter
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docs

[Peter Alcibiades]

Ken, I think I know what he means.  You are starting out learning Rev, and you 
have a problem of some sort that goes beyond the tutorial materials and whose 
solution is going to involve using a bunch of different features in the 
correct way together.

Lets say its my own case:  this large file that I'm trying to do a nice report 
from, but it could be anything.

You simply do not know what to start to think of using.  As soon as someone 
says to you, use X Y Z, its almost not a problem any more, because the 
dictionary entries about them, if you know they are what you need, will let 
you figure out how to use them.  But without knowing this, you end up 
searching for things that sound like they may be relevant, but each time you 
find one, you have no idea whether it is, or which option on it it.

For instance, Jim Ault a while back suggested using filter for one of my 
tasks.  I'd never thought of it.  Maybe stupid, but hadn't.  As soon as I 
know to use that, the problem is over and the docs are perfect.  Before that, 
I have to go through, find filter, read all the options, realize its the 
thing that's needed...  But I'm doing this along with reading about find, 
match, offset, if, switch, repeat, arrays, custom properties, a whole bunch 
of stuff, and without even knowing whether one of them in combination with 
something else will do what's needed.

You'd get in the same situation with Linux or Unix if all you had was the Man 
pages on commands.But fortunately we have the cookbooks, like Carla's, 
which go the reverse way:  here is a problem, here is step by step the 
various things you use.

I guess no-one is very interested in it,  but I still believe it would be a 
huge asset to promoting the platform if it existed.

Peter
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docs

[Peter Alcibiades]

"supercard docs leave the user reverse enginering for dollars"

Yes. Yes, so true.

The problem is not with the existing docs, which are just fine for what they 
do.  The problem, for people learning it, is that they are like a cookbook 
all about ingredients but with no recipes for dishes.  Its like trying to 
find how to make apple pie from a book which has very fine informative 
entries for apple, pastry, sugar - but no entry for pie.

What you need when you are learning however is a cookbook that starts from 
tasks.  The great Carla Schroder's Linux Cookbook is a fine example.

By the time I have learned Rev properly, if I am spared that long, I'll have 
personally written one in the form of notes on topics encountered as problems 
to solve, and so will many of us.  It would be a great collaborative project 
were something like this to be done right.  It would probably make a 
significant contribution to Rev's success and adoption if there were one 
available.

If everyone on the group just contributed one a month, it would be a fantastic 
resource, and would grow to a respectable size very fast.  I'd be happy to 
help.  Not with writing recipes  (which might be a bit of a disaster) but 
with editing and so on.  

"Revolution Recipes".  It has a nice ring to it?

Peter
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Jan, Dick, Mark, thanks!

[Peter Alcibiades]

Thanks so much guys for this.  One sees how easy it can be when you know how.  
I will hack away and try these.  And actually, they are a lot more terse than 
what I'm getting in awk.

Its sort of academic about 2.6.1 and linux printing now, since we are moving 
to 2.9, but it is really weird.  On my debian system, the printing doesn't 
work at all, and I only get a few of the fonts, but the ones that can be used 
look quite good in the sizes they can be used in, which is not all by any 
means.

On Mandriva 2006, there were more (but not all) fonts, and they all looked 
good in all sizes.  Don't know about printing.

These were both running gnome.

Now on Mandriva 2008, running KDE, we have all the installed fonts, which is 
good, but they look terrible!  Jagged or blurry.  And here unaccountably 
printing seems to work though without bringing up any print dialogues from 
the system.

What a relief it will be when 2.9 final hits!

Peter

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Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

[Peter Alcibiades]

I seem to have cracked this one now, by brute force.  But the solution really 
shows how much this must be the wrong tool for the job - unless there is a 
much better way, which there probably is, and I'd love to hear about.  And 
also would be interested to hear how one was supposed to find it!

For each of the 30 cells, I'm just doing two filters on the file in a temp 
variable till the temp variable only contains records of the appropriate 
kind.  Then add the relevant items up into the right cell.  No switch, no 
match, no branching.

Then clear the variable by reloading the whole file into it, from another 
variable to avoid endless disk reads, redo the filter with different criteria 
for a different cell, and so on.  So this is basically 30 snippets of script 
to produce 30 different subsets of the file, one after another, one for each 
cell.

On a 2G Athlon, you watch it going through its paces  But it does work 
after a fashion.

Then I will do printing by going to full screen and doing Print Desktop from 
the shell.  What a horrible kluge!  Awk and a text editor for printing has to 
be better than this.  It would be embarassing if the people who will use it 
were to find out just what a kluge it is.

Peter
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Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

[Peter Alcibiades]

I have to admit to not having been able to make Rev work as a storage and 
retrieval language and am getting close to giving up after a couple of weeks 
hard trying.  Its mostly the documentation probably.  It must be possible 
since people on the list are doing it, but there seems no way to find out how 
from the documentation. 

The problem is not storage.  Nor is it retrieval.  It is reporting.

Its a childishly simple problem.  There is a file with 15k records.  Tab 
delimited.  Each record has five fields and is of the form:

number  eg 123
description  eg Pen, Pencil
price eg 2.00
category eg AA, AB...
date eg  12/4/2008, 21/5/2008 (UK style)

We then have 30 fields, which are the combination of a category and a month.  
So for instance we need to look at each record, if and only if it has both AA 
in item 4 and /4/ in item 5,  then add the price item 3 to field AAApril.  If 
and only if it has both AA and /5/ then add it to AAMay, and so on.  6 
months, five categories = 30 fields..  

Its a five minute job in a spreadsheet, but its defeated me for a couple of 
weeks now in Rev.  

There must be a way of combining switch, break and if-then to do this.The 
different ways I've tried sometimes go into loops.  Sometimes they 
accumulate, as if case is leading it to retain previous totals and add new 
match totals to them.  Sometimes they put all zeros into the fields.  
Sometimes half the fields go blank when I know there are matches.  Sometimes 
it records half of the AAs, or a quarter.   Sometimes it works with some of 
the months, or some of the categories. 

What is also deeply discouraging is that even can one get through this, there 
will be the problem of how to make Rev print it in Linux.  This seems 
insuperable.  It doesn't see the installed printers.  Like it doesn't see the 
installed fonts.  No idea why, everything else does.  Maybe going out to the 
shell and using a2p will work?  Maybe a different distro than debian?   But 
this could well be another black hole

Peter
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Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

[Peter Alcibiades]

"Does rev offer a table object?"

Yes, theoretically, you can drag and drop table fields onto a card, but the 
general opinion here seems to have been to stay away from them.  Even could 
you do it, you're still storing 10s of thousands of records in a text file, 
its just a rather inaccessible one.

I considered using an ordinary field on a card for tab delimited storage.  But 
that implies writing the reports in Rev because the data in the card field is 
not accessible from other programs.   Once you've decided to use a text file 
of any sort for storage, and to awk that file, it has to be external.  Well, 
you could put to it from a card field and then awk it.  Is there any 
advantage to that?  Be nice to know if people think there is.

I will move from an external text file to an sqlite file as soon as 2.9 is 
released in final form and has an sqlite driver.

No sort of expert - well you all know that - just trying to find a logical way 
through the problem, so if this is all wrong, it would be great to be given 
some guidance.

Peter
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Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

[Peter Alcibiades]

Maybe I don't understand the question (does happen!) but isn't the answer 
something like this.

1)  Once data storage gets serious, more than a few thousand records, Rev 
alone is not what to do it in.  If you want to do the rest of the app in Rev, 
you have to add a real database.  This means sqlite, mysql (if you need multi 
user and networked), Valentina, whatever.
  
The issue is not one card versus many, the issue is tab delimited fields 
versus real databases.  

2)  If data storage retrieval and reports is the primary or only need, its 
incredibly much quicker to do that sort of thing to some level in Filemaker, 
but it may not come for your OS and has other limitations.  But you do get 
point and click relational database and report construction.  

This is a real issue about Rev + sqlite, but its also an issue about 
alternatives to Rev + sqlite.

3)  Even if you can live with tab delimited files for storage, getting reports 
out of them in Rev is not much fun  So you have to add Quartam.  Or Perl or 
Awk.  This too is much easier and quicker in FM.  But the same comment applies 
to the alternatives to Rev. 

Is there a gui package  (except the database packages with end user 
pretensions like FM) that does data storage and retrieval and reporting much 
better than Rev?  Most seem to be a lot worse.  Python for instance, I think 
you have to use a real database for just about any storage.  Nothing is 
perfect.

This is my own case:  15-20k records of sales during the fiscal year.  I 
accumulate them (with some trepidation) into an external tab delimited text 
file.  Then we need to go through and extract sales by product by month for 
some 200+ items.  After a prolonged meditation on switch, if and repeat, and 
the prospect of creating a 200 x 12 matrix of fields with each one 
individually named and scripted, I broke out "Effective Awk Programming".  

Its like reaching for a plane, after trying to get a smooth finish with a 
chisel.  But chisels have their uses too, and are often the right tool for 
the job.  Don't try doing a mortise with a plane!

Well, please correct if this is not right.


Peter

  



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HyperNext ? Worth a look ?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Doesn't it fall between two or three stools?  First its operationally 
challenged (ie its restricted to Windows and Mac).  

Second, its free as in beer, but its not Free as in OSS.  Which is fine, if 
you know you can count on the developer being around and sticking with it.  
But can you count on Tigabyte?

If you want cheap and closed source and simple, I'd go with Rev Media as a 
better and reasonably safe long term bet, which hopefully will soon include a 
Linux version.

If you want cheap/free and powerful and OSS I'd go with one of the many Python 
ides, and if wanting the card metaphor, with PythonCard.  

But I can't really see the niche for this.  Maybe not fair?

Peter
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failing to find printer from ide in linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

Rev seems not to find the printer.  Using the IDE in 2.6.1 the attempt to 
print crashes it.  Using the IDE in the latest beta, it brings up a screen 
where the printer is not found.  Its not a system problem, since everything 
else finds the printer.  Is there some place where you have to tell Rev 
(either version) where the printers are or which one to use?

Peter
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Alphanumerics only

[Peter Alcibiades]

Eric,

If you ever feel like writing more tutorials, one on how and when to use 
Custom Properties and one on how and when to use Arrays would probably 
lighten the hearts and smooth the furrowed brows of many a newcomer to 
Rev

Peter
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How download revolution 2.9 beta ?

[Peter Alcibiades]

OK, tried it on Fluxbox - exact same thing.  Second blank window, and the 
download never completes, or if it completes, it doesn't move to the next 
stage.  So this is a completely different window manager, the same display 
manager however (wdm).  Can't really see how it could be the display manager.  
Using xfe as the file manager and starting it through a double click.  Cannot 
be Gnome therefore.

Tried it on Ion2 also, with the interesting result that Rev will not run at 
all.  Or it seems to run to some extent but it sort of flickers and scrolls 
so it doesn't really run.  So this shows that Rev still likely isn't handling 
XWindows properly. 

Ion2 is a minimalist and eccentric desktop, there is no particular reason why 
Rev should work with it, just that it is standards based, and everything else 
does.  It is a tiling window manager.  

This is probably connected to Rev's insistence on not using multiple desktops, 
because Ion tries to put every window into a separate pane.  Whether this is 
right or wrong, its standards based, and so Rev really ought to work with it 
out of the box.

Peter
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How download revolution 2.9 beta ?

[Peter Alcibiades]

Tried to get Beta3 from within the Beta2 program.  It does indeed download, or 
says it is, and then a small window appears, and it appears from the progress 
bar to complete the download, but everything then freezes.  Tried a couple of 
times.  The small window seems to be showing a snapshot of the desktop 
contents under it when it was created.  If you drag stuff across the window 
it shows a sort of stripy repetition of what was dragged across. Never seen 
this before.   If you click all over the small window, nothing happens.

This is on Debian Lenny, Gnome.  I'll have a go with a different desktop 
manager just to make sure.

Peter
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sqlite and csv again

[Peter Alcibiades]

Guys,

Have you experimented with the sqlite manager plug in for Firefox?  This is 
just totally amazing.  It seems to come out with another dot release every 
few days with more features.  The latest does csv imports.  So I fired it up, 
did one, and importing a few thousand records is almost instant.  My 
goodness.  I thought sqlitebrowser and tksqlite were very nice, but this 
thing is absolutely superb, and going places!

Peter
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sqlite tksqlite sqlite browser

[Peter Alcibiades]

Sorry, sqlite browser will not import a 15k record csv file.  Gave it about 10 
minutes on a sempron 2G, with 1G memory, and it seemed to be frozen.

However tksqlite did import it, almost instantly.

Peter
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import textfile into SQLite DB?

[Peter Alcibiades]

I did it with sqlitebrowser, in Linux.  Create table, then do import.  There 
is it.  Simple.  Mine was not very big, don't know how it would do with more 
than a few thousand records.  Worth a try though.

Peter


> can anyone give me a hint, how I can import a big tab delimited file
> into a SQLite Database?
>
> Thanks
>
> Till
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Quartam and Galaxy on Linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

OK, one can live with this given authoritative reports of someone running it 
happily on Ubuntu.  

What about Quartam, which does have a trial version?  Am I doing something 
completely idiotic, that I cannot get it to unpack for a trial on Linux?  
Trying to unzip the installer leads to a message that its not a valid 
archive.  Has anyone actually run this, and how did they do it?

I've a real need for something like this, and the remark about awk was not a 
joke.  I really am going to have to rewrite a huge spreadsheet into something 
else, for performance reasons, and awk is the thing that offers itself since 
I don't know Perl.  

Quartam seems a lot more fun, if I can get it to run.

Peter


> Peter, there is no trial version of GLX2 at this time.
>
> Thanks for your interest.
>
> Best,
>
> Jerry Daniels
>
> Daniels & Mara, Inc.
> Makers of GLX2
> http://www.daniels-mara.com/glx2
>
> On Dec 14, 2007, at 12:24 AM, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> > Also, it would be really nice to be able to try Galaxy before getting
> > committed - as a classic Linux user, support is not real high on my
> > list of
> > priorities, if it runs that will be fine, even if there's no official
> > support.  But I'd like to see it running.  Is there a trial version
> > someplace?

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Quartam and Galaxy on Linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

How do you try Quartam under Linux?  Downloaded the exe file, but cannot seem 
to unpack it with Ark.  It looks like it installs under Wine, but that's 
no-one's idea of fun.  So if you want to try it under 2.9 beta for Linux, 
what do you do?  

Also, it would be really nice to be able to try Galaxy before getting 
committed - as a classic Linux user, support is not real high on my list of 
priorities, if it runs that will be fine, even if there's no official 
support.  But I'd like to see it running.  Is there a trial version 
someplace?


Peter
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Linux Revolution Executable

[Peter Alcibiades]

Downloaded it a week or so back, and there is the usual Revolution 2.5mb in 
the 2.9 dp2 folder, click on it and it runs.  So it definitely was there and 
working not long ago.

Peter
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Rev Holiday Bundle - Holy Cow, Batman!

[Peter Alcibiades]

Its a very attractive proposition...Very attracive indeed.  But not quite so 
attractive if you're running Linux.  Because in that case you don't get 
Valentina, and the Galaxy editor doesn't come for Linux, and neither does 
Quartam..  

S...  Maybe the next one.  And back to sqlite for my database, and awk, 
that throwback to prehistory, for my reports  

Awk is pretty good, if you know it already, he said bravely, hoping they would 
not laugh.

Peter
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beta dp2

[Peter Alcibiades]

Very nice to see selection of database via query builder now working.  Fonts 
still an issue on Debian, probably as noted in the release notes.  However, 
the big one, which is not a bug really, though it is in the bug database, but 
more a way of working, is that it still doesn't seem to support multiple 
desktops.

Surely this is going to be a necessity with Spaces?  

What I mean is, you put the dictionary on one desktop, your app and palette on 
another, then open the editor on a third.  The thing you expect is to be able 
to keep them there and work.  Just flip over to the other DT to look at the 
dictionary when you want to.   Drag the windows around from one DT to another 
using the little Gnome or KDE desktop device.  Every other linux application 
behaves this way.  But with Rev, the minute you use either the editor or the 
palette or the toolbar, back they all flick to the one desktop, and there you 
are, half a dozen desktops open and empty, and all your windows scrunched up 
one behind the other getting in each others way.

The little window placement icon on the very top left above the file menu is 
there on all windows.  Its just that it only works temporarily.

I must try it with a tabbed window manager and see if the same problem 
happens.  But whatever, it needs to work properly in the mainstream X Windows 
environments.  Or is there some way of making it work properly that I'm 
missing?

Peter
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font is installed but not listed in Rev

[Peter Alcibiades]

This happens in my two installations of Debian - both on Etch and on Lenny.  
It does not happen on a couple of Mandrivas, where all fonts installed are 
accessible.  It still happens on the 2.9 beta.  Its the only application I'm 
aware of that doesn't see all installed fonts on Debian.

Very glad to find someone has the same problem on a different OS, as it may 
help get to the bottom of it.  What fonts are available to you?  On Debian, 
the 2.9 beta, the ones available (using fontNames in message box) are:

courier 10
bitstream charter
terminal
charter
lucidatypewriter
lucidabright
lucida
times
new century schoolbook
helvetica
courier
clean
fixed

I think this is one or two more than were available in 2.8 - can check if 
anyone is curious.  Is this the same or different for you?

The other thing is that not all fonts are available in all sizes, and if you 
try to invoke the wrong size it reverts to 10pt.  Is this a problem for you 
also? 

For instance, for clean, if you pick 48pt, I get what looks like 10.

Peter
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Klaus' problem with focus

[Peter Alcibiades]

This is another classic example of what Ken expressed so clearly.

I read the entry in the dictionary several times, and even knowing the answer, 
had to work hard at grasping that this what what to use when you wanted to to 
check for if the user wants to save changes before exiting a card.

The entry itself would have been enormously increased in usefulness if there 
were a section below it called 'Main things you can use this for'.

Even more so if in addition to this there had been a link from an entry 
like 'confirm changes' or 'ask whether to save'.

Peter
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Asus eee laptop?

[Peter Alcibiades]

No, but I have run Rev on a 700mhz PIII under Puppy (in case some are not 
familiar, its a 100Mb stripped down Linux using JWM as the desktop).
Amazing.  It ran perfectly and was very fast.  Mean to see how Rev runs under 
the even smaller and faster DSL, which is only 50Mb.

I am also running a Rev app on a 500mhz PIII with 200Mb memory, with the whole 
works installed - Mandriva 2006 under Gnome.  That also runs very snappily, 
though its a bit slow to boot, and its eaten a big chunk of the hard drive.  
If we put in Puppy or DSL or one of the distros below, it would probably 
scream along.

Based on this,  I'd be sure the Asus will run Rev just fine.

If some are not familiar with the interesting and wonderful world of 
minimalist Linux distros and window managers, other minimalist distros worth 
considering if you have clients who are in search of cheap hardware for Rev 
would be Absolute, and Fluxbuntu.  Absolute is Slackware based, and a minimal 
Slack install with Fluxbox as the WM would also work well on minimal 
hardware.  
 
If you want turnkey systems in appliance mode, some of the minimalist tabbed 
window managers (maybe on Debian or Slack) are ways to get there.  They are 
very fast indeed.  Ion3 is one.  wmii is another.  They make Fluxbox seem 
bloated.  They are definitely appliance mode for ordinary users, but not 
necessarily one app only.   Ion3 will let you have multiple apps running with 
tab switching in a way that any user will be able to grasp at once.  I've 
wondered about setting up a simple user with (say) email and web and simple 
WP using one of these window managers on three tabs.

You can get Win98 speed if you configure these right, but with modern security 
and features, at least for a restricted set of apps.

Peter
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"proof-of-concept" Revolution Online Open Dictionary at revcoders.org

[Peter Alcibiades]

Ken puts it exactly, and far far better than I managed to.  Sorry.

A trivial example from my early days with Rev.  I had a scrolling field into 
which a user pastes lines of text by hitting enter.  At a certain point the 
text gets too long for the window, and he/she has to scroll down.  I realize 
this is a chore, and want the window to scroll with the entries so the last 
one is always visible.  But how?

Imagine you're a real novice with Rev.  How do you set about finding out?  You 
just start looking things up.  You look 
up 'scroll',  'autoscroll', 'find', 'select', 'put'and so on.

It is like trying to find the French for 'dog' from a French-English 
dictionary.  If only you knew it was 'chien' you could look it up

Now I don't personally mind this way of learning, or the fact that you learn a 
lot of stuff which is irrelevant to your immediate purpose on the way.  But a 
lot of people just cannot hack it, and these are the ones you'll lose if you 
don't have a more immediate way of getting to purposes.  

Yes, what Ken describes is a good way of doing it.

Peter
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"proof-of-concept" Revolution Online Open Dictionary at revcoders.org

[Peter Alcibiades]

Its great for what it is.  

But it is still a dictionary.  For newer users trying to get proficient, its 
still going to be like trying to improve your Bulgarian from a 
Bulgarian-English dictionary.  You can do it to a limited extent, but its 
going about it the hard way.  And as one poster said earlier, you have to 
know Bulgarian well enough to know what you are looking for before you can 
find it!

What one part of the target market needs is something quite different. They 
need a dictionary of meanings, of tasks.  Then they need an entry which shows 
how to combine various language elements to get the task done.  Without this, 
they'll have a really hard time moving from novice to proficient, and will 
probably give up and go elsewhere.

It is probably not a need which most contributors to this list have, and it 
may be a target market not worth going after.  But Rev does seem to be 
targetting  such users, and this is what it will take to get and keep them.

Peter
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The Documentation

[Peter Alcibiades]

What is missing exactly?

The dictionary is a pretty good version of a man page. Dan's book is ok at the 
level of 'how to think like a computer scientist'  - simple how to get 
started.  Very nice as far as it goes.  Needs a second 
edition. The pdf is ok also as a printable version of the dictionary with a 
few more examples, assuming it ever gets finished.

There are two things missing, or rather, there is one thing missing, but it 
comes in two flavors.   One is the equivalent of Dive Into Python, 
which early on contains the immortal line 

"You know how other books go on and on about programming fundamentals and 
finally work up to building a complete, working program? Let's skip all 
that."  

This is the sort of book that says, you already know about classes, here is 
how they work in Python.

The second is the equivalent of Hetland's Python book.  It is step by step, 
this is how you do certain things, using various bits of the language, with 
an account of pitfalls.  Starts simple and moves you through writing real 
applications.

Both are the reverse of the dictionary:  they both start with something to do, 
and then show how to combine different bits of the language to get it done.
  
The Perl book Minimal Perl is about halfway between these two.  Chapters 
like, why Perl is a better awk.  So start from an assumed knowledge and then 
show how Rev does this particular set of tasks, that the known language was 
designed to do, but does it better.  Again its in reverse, it goes from 
problem to multiple bits of the language.

Not that I'm being hung up on Perl, Python or Ruby - these are just well 
regarded examples of docs.

Getting to be a beginner in Rev is easy.  Getting to be a sophisticated user 
in Rev after that is a Zen like experience.  You go to live with the master 
who attacks you at random intervals, whatever you are doing, for no reason.  
Eventually, you hesitate before entering a doorway.  The master emerges and 
bows deeply.  Son, you are getting there, he says.

The priority ought to be:  One, finish what you started.  So either trash the 
pdf or finish it, don't just leave it there twisting in the wind.  

Two must be, the reverse dictionary - here is how to do specific things, using 
various parts of the language together.  The tutorials are a start but only a 
start.  Its a lot of work - Hetland's book is amazing, and Mark Lutz' book 
even more so.  But I really think that 400-500 systematic pages of this is 
what you need if you're to attract a lot of new people who are not oriented 
to Zen based learning.   If you are doing Dive into Rev for the experienced, 
then it can be shorter.  I don't know which should have priority, Dive, or 
something introductory.  It depends on which market you're going after.

Whether the less experienced new people are worth the trouble, you'd have to 
know more about the numbers for Rev to assess.

I'm not complaining by the way.  Personally I don't mind the odd frustrations 
and find them well compensated by the sudden blinding flash of illumination.  
In fact, I sort of like the mental exercise. But a lot of people are in more 
of a hurry, and if you want to get to them, you have to offer them something 
like that.

Peter
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The Documentation

[Peter Alcibiades]

It is clear to anyone who has read the documentation on other programming 
languages that Rev is very different in its approach.  There is one printed 
book:  Dan Shafer's.  There's an incomplete pdf which, the last time I 
looked, had not been extended for over a year, though the preface promises 
new material in the coming months.  Then there's the dictionary and the 
mailing list.

The question is what the target audience is and what the aims are for the 
language.

The competition is probably Python, Perl, Ruby, maybe Lua.  Were I Rev, I'd be 
looking at what is on offer for these languages, and would consider in the 
light of that and in the light of my ambitions, what sort of printed 
documentation is needed.  

There seems little doubt of two things, if you do this.  One is that if you 
want to stay in the niche, the current approach is fine.  Two is that if you 
want to be an alternative to these languages, the current approach will not 
cut it. 

The things I am thinking of are, on Python, the Lutz O'Reilly book, Hetland's 
book, or Dive into Python.  On Perl something like Minimal Perl or the 24 
hour Pierce book.  On Lua,  Jung and Brown, Beginning Lua Programming.  This 
is the sort of thing varying audiences contemplating Rev will use as their 
standard of comparison.  You need an account of what your response is, in 
terms of your objectives.  

Surely the current approach is only explicable in terms of a strategy which 
says, stay in the present niche?  Not that its a bad thing, of course.  Not 
that it is a mistaken strategy, not at all.  Just how it surely is?

Peter
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