Re: Span Tags in HTML
Ray, What happens if you include body tags? Your HTML probably won't render without them: put htmlbodypThis is an example./p/body/html into myHtmlDoc Greetings again, The RevBrowser external works great in Metacard, even as far back as 2.7.4. Nonetheless, I'm trying to pass in my own html document instead of a real web page and it doesn't respond. So, this works fine: put revBrowserOpen(tWinID,http://www.google.com;) into sBrowserId set the BrowserId of image BrowserImage to sBrowserId But this doesn't: put htmlpThis is an example./p/html into myHtmlDoc put revBrowserOpen(tWinID, myHtmlDoc) into sBrowserId set the BrowserId of image BrowserImage to sBrowserId Any ideas? Thanks, Ray Horsley LinkIt! Software ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Script Editor problems
What happens if you set the defaultStack explicitly in your script? That might convince MetaCard to see your stack as this stack instead of the script editor. i.e. set the defaultStack to myStack put the short name of this stack into s_name = does this return myStack when debugging? Hi friends, does someone also experience this strageness? I cannot debug script that contain this of any kind!? Like in this little example: on mouseUp get 222 put the short name of this stack into s_name ## - Script Editor 1 in Variable Watcher put the name of this cd into c_name ## - card Editor card get fld field in original stack ## Error: can't find object end mouseUp Any hints are very welcome. ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Problems with delete folder someFolder
Alain, The .. and . folders aren't actual folders - they are just symbolic. Thus there is nothing to delete. Problems deleting regular folders is another story, but the . and .. entries shouldn't be the source of your problem. If you are really stuck in Transcript land, you could try using shell() to call through to the command-line where things behave like you are accustomed to? If you use rm on the command line (UNIX / Linux / MacOS X), there are options to recurse and force delete everything: rm -rf /path/to/my/folder Hope that helps. Hello y'all, I'm trying to script MetaCard 2.5 so that it can DELETE a FOLDER. But it just doesn't work, no matter what I try. Given my experience with the command-line in DOS and in UNIX, I know that one cannot delete a folder that has something *in* it. So I tried emptying the files in my to-be-deleted folder. This works fine, for the visible files but one-or-more of the *invisible* files are hard to get-rid- of, namely icon%OD or just icon ... it varies! I think I have managed to empty all of the files from my to-be- deleted folder but it also contains an invisible folder, e.g. ... From my CLI experience I know that this is what one types in order to go UP one-level in the hierarchy of the filesystem, e.g. next- folder-up. But I can't seem to DELETE it ! It's like I'm not-allowed to do it. Do I need to set the access-priviledges to 777 or something? I test-for the existence of this .. folder, BEFORE +AFTER trying to delete it, and confirms the existence of this folder in BOTH cases ; IOW, the folder was NOT deleted!!! I even tried setting the directory one-level-up so that the system is in a location that will still exist once I delete the folder the system used to be in .. again from my CLI experience. So what gives ?? Can we delete folders or not ?? Please HELP me if you can, I'm feeling down_own_own. And I would appreciate you being around_own_own ... won't you PLEASE, please, PLEASE help me, help me HELP-me ou hou ! ;-) on deleteFolder folderPath -- insert your handler here! :-) end deleteFolder Alain ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard --- Brian Yennie QLD Learning (310)-367-7364 ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Help - Cannot delete a folder
Bummer... I guess the . and .. are artifacts of a dual Classic / OS X situation? Or maybe it's just a MetaCard thing. In any case, the only other alternative I can think of would be to use AppleScript. I'm not an expert there, but undoubtedly there is a delete folder function. Thanks for your advice, Brian. :) If you are really stuck in Transcript land, you could try using shell() to call through to the command-line where things behave like you are accustomed to? If you use rm on the command line (UNIX / Linux / MacOS X), there are options to recurse and force delete everything ... But.. unfortunately.. I'm NOT using a UNIX-based OS. In this case, I'm using a Mac Classic 9.x for my MetaCard work. As you probably know old Mac's don't provide SHELL-access! OTOH, since MetaCard 2.5 runs on OLD macs, as well as new ones, and provides the delete folder fPath syntax, I should still be able to do this, without upgrading to a UNIX-based machine (Mac or otherwise). Anyone-else want to chip-in some additional information ? :) Thanks nonetheless, Brian. :-) Alain ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: IsAstack ( )
Only problem I see is that you are going to get false positives if the file actually IS a shell script. You might try nibbling a little more to get something Metacard/Rev specific. Also, I know the file format has changed a couple of times in recent history -- you might need to check if they have finally banished the old Metacard shell script prelude, in which case the function would fail. Lastly, I think your script is still going to load the whole stack into memory before reading off the first line. If you want to read just 1 line, you'll need to use open / read / close file commands. Is there a compelling reason to not just check for the existence of the file, and that it has the appropriate file extension? Then also check for errors when actually opening the stack? return ((there is a file pFilePath) AND (char -4 to -1 of pFilePath is .rev)) HTH, Brian I need a robust alternative to if there is a stack pFilePath that does *not* load the file into memory and potentially cause problems with shared stack name space. Can anyone improve or see anything not foolproof with this? function isAstack pFilePath return line 1 of url(file:pFilePath)=#!/bin/sh end isAstack /H ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: IsAstack ( )
Hugh, I had one last thought while reading this that might be a clever approach. Read a little bit off the front of the currently running stack (since you KNOW that's a valid stack) and compare it to the file in question. The advantages are that you only have to read a tiny bit of the file, and that the script should continue to work even if/when Rev formats change. It's not foolproof - there's always the chance that another type of file would have the same first bytes, but it's probably very unlikely in practice and could always be balanced with some sort of fatal error if the file did indeed end up being bogus when you actually try to load it. Reading from a file should be perfectly safe even if it is in use - writing is the dangerous one. The only caveat I can think of is that the current stack that you are using to compare against must exist on disk and not *only* in memory. function isAStack tFilePath ## the file path to the current stack put value(word 2 of the long name of this stack) into tStackPath ## nibble off the first 8 bytes open file tStackPath for binary read read from file tStackPath for 8 put it into myFirst8Bytes close file tStackPath ## check the first 8 bytes of the file in question open file tFilePath for binary read read from file tFilePath for 8 put it into testFirst8Bytes close file tFilePath ## are they the same? return (myFirst8Bytes = testFirst8Bytes) end isAStack Hi Klaus, Brian, David: Good catches. I don't think I dare use open/read/close in case the file (and it could be any file) is in use, and testing the suffix is not always reliable (I am allowing data stacks to be suffix-less). Since I've never used a shell script, I'm not sure what differentiates them from a 'normal' stack in terms of initial stackfile characters. I don't think there are any differences, so a bit hard to be 100% foolproof it this case. Finally, since this is for ssBk and it is purposefully always saved in 2.4 format (as several people have requested for project compatibility purposes), I think I shall run with my original. BUT your comments have been most instructive, and I thank you all. /H ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: [ANN] automatic metacard IDE creation tool
There is one slightly unconventional option for hosting which we could consider for things Rev-related: Amazon's S3 service. There is no contract, and the cost is $0.15/month per GB storage and $0.18/GB download. I believe upload is $0.10 / GB. You can add a CNAME DNS record to any existing domain name to point to the Amazon service space, so we could ask RunRev to redirect a subdomain, for example: http://metacard.runrev.com Obviously we would have to foot the bill somehow, but it wouldn't take much and there's no contract nor piggy backing on someone else's server space. I can't imagine we would have a GB of files too soon nor more than a few GB of transfer... Incidentally, I've been contemplating writing an S3 library for Rev - but haven't gotten around to it. There are some passable desktop tools already out for managing files on the service. Related to that: Would it be possible to mirror the IDE stack files somewhere, where a program can download them (maybe ask runrev for a bit of space on their server?)? Additionally, is it possible not to use zip files (because that needs the zip.dll)? I recommend plain stack files, maybe gz, because these can be used within rev/mc. ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: More about image timing
If this is truly just a lock screen issue, wouldn't it stand to reason that the Rev IDE is slower because it has a lot more stacks open and affected? Or am I missing a crucial piece here? It would seem that having a bunch of extra stacks open (and in some cases visible, including the toolbar) could easily add 1 millisecond to every 10 loops of a screen altering script...? - Brian J. Landman Gay wrote: This is interesting. I thought I'd do a very quick, rough test. I wrote a fast script: on mouseUp put fld 1 into tPath put the milliseconds into tStart repeat 100 set the filename of img testImg to set the filename of img testImg to tPath end repeat put the milliseconds - tStart end mouseUp I realize there aren't many repetitions in the repeat loop, but I just wanted to get an idea. Just as Wilhelm says, in MC it took between 139 and 142 milliseconds. In Rev, the same script took about 159-161 milliseconds. So that's consistent with what he reports. Then I added a lockscreen: on mouseUp put fld 1 into tPath lock screen put the milliseconds into tStart repeat 100 set the filename of img testImg to set the filename of img testImg to tPath end repeat put the milliseconds - tStart unlock screen end mouseUp The results were identical on both IDEs -- 45 milliseconds consistently with no deviation. I don't know what this means. The refresh rate of the screen appears to vary, but I thought that was set in the engine. Locking the screen made my test give identical results though. I understand this is not conclusive. Just interesting. Very, more so for RunRev than anyone else. Given that only their system is affected, and us MC users appear to be immune to whatever anomaly is at play here, I'm confident they'll take a keen interest in identifying the root cause. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: CGI and DestroyStack property
Tariel, Would not this mean that in this case it's not a CGI solution any more but a regular f MC running Stack that listens to some port and behaves like web server? Something like mchttpd.mc stack that Scott Raney put together and Andre later enhanced? If this is the case, what PHP adds to it other than robustness and reliability ? Yes - it is a lot like mchttpd. Using PHP as an intermediary buys you a few things which may or may not be important to you: 1) You don't have to open another port to the outside world, since the incoming connection is just coming through your web service (port 80) 2) With PHP, you don't have to manage your own incoming HTTP headers - PHP does this automatically with the $_GET and $_POST variables. Other than that, it's mostly personal preference - but I feel better with PHP handling the connection to the outside world to let the existing web server do the heavy lifting. In other words, is PHP absolutely necessary for such a solution or not ? Not at all! I personally prefer it, but it can certainly work without. - Brian ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: ColorizeScript challenge
I've been silently following this thread, and one more out-of-the-box idea comes to mind. What about just colorizing the lines of the script currently visible in the editor, and updating when the user scrolls? If that limited the whole job to say, 50 lines of script, would the original slower, simpler version of the script suffice? It might not give live scrolling in color - but the update could still be snappy enough to not slow down anyone actually reading the script? - Brian On 27 Apr 2006, at 01:49, wouter wrote: On Apr 26, 2006, at 4:34 AM, Dave Cragg wrote: -snip- I see a problem with using htmlText. Say a script contains html entities such as gt;, for example in a script that builds some html strings. Under my script, these would get converted to the actual character in the colorized script. Some more thinking to do. Another one of which could cause colorizing problems in your script, are those #9; and the likes. Everything behind the # will be considered a comment. You're right, Wouter. And I think any # or -- in quotes will get treated as a comment in my latest version. Richard, I don't think you should rush to include this in the IDE just yet. Cheers Dave ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: CGI and DestroyStack property
Tariel, I have. What I did was originally based on some of Pierre's comments that you referenced. Basically, you leave the MC stack running normally, and you communicate with it via PHP and sockets. You'll need to install a PHP script such as this one as the intermediary: http://istream.homeunix.com/insead/page4_en.html Then you need mostly the first two handlers from here: http://istream.homeunix.com/insead/page5_en.html The PHP scripts will pass the POST args to your stack, which then sends back an HTTP reply. This definitely works - if you have specific questions, I may be able to answer them also. Basically, it would be great to know if anybody succeeded in making MC CGI stay-resident on OS X (I don't have linux box) and thus preventing engine quitting after CGI script is executed and launching the new copy of the engine on each call. Any insights ? best regards Tariel ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: CGI and DestroyStack property
It is rather crud to use PHP - socket - MC. The MC socket port listening method is not robust enough, and may went deaf under some loads. I think Pierre would disagree. I would also - it's a whole lot more likely to handle a big load than a CGI that loads the whole engine with every request. There's nothing crud about it, it works quite well. You don't have to use PHP to handle the browser POST queries. We have pure MC CGI written to handle POST running for years without problem. Unless you need to MC running as daemon explicitly, I don't see the need of PHP here. That was the point of this thread... I think you missed the requirements. The original poster already has a working CGI, but wanted a daemon solution to easily solve read/write conflicts for the stack. - Brian ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Answer Dialog at ScreenLoc?
Scott, What about inserting a frontScript which traps the preOpenStack message, checks the target, and reacts if there is an ask/answer dialog forthcoming. Same effect, no IDE modification? - Brian Recently, Wilhelm Sanke wrote: You can of course use the available IDE dialogs: Just add the two script lines I have proposed (at the right place) to them, this is what I normally do when a new version appears. Not when I'm delivering tools to other developers, no. I have no problem messing around with my own development environment but I don't want to modify other developers' IDEs. Regards, Scott Rossi Creative Director Tactile Media, Multimedia Design - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] W: http://www.tactilemedia.com ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: savingStandalone and standaloneSaved messages
Richard, Sounds good to me. It would be great to be able to create StripAndShip plugins which worked automatically rather than as a separate tool to be triggered manually. Just the other day I cooked up a script to minimize script size- nothing ground breaking, but if this API was available I would throw it in a plugin and make it available because people would only have to install it once to get it's benefits. As it is now, it's probably not worth having to manually use it for the meager impact. If I'm understanding it correctly, I definitely like it- and I'd probably immediately write a thing or two for it. There are two Rev IDE message which may be useful to add to the MC IDE: savingStandalone -- sent just before the build standaloneSaved -- sent just after In spite of the departure from convention, the absence of the rev prefix does NOT mean these are engine messages. This means that to support them we need to add them ourselves. It wouldn't be hard to do, and would allow folks to have an automatic trigger for things like StripAndShip handlers. Any objections to my adding these? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Word Wrap, crossed-eyes, and so forth with text-fields
Richmond, I believe the property is actually dontWrap, and is FALSE by default. What text do you see getting broken inside words? I've never seen this behavior, wrapping works fine here... - Brian I suppose I am trying to reinvent the wheel (my problem is that my wheels are square), but . . . If I set wordWrap to true words get chopped in half if I set wordWrap to false one has to scroll laterally and vertically, and the whole thing is unusable. I would like (as, I suspect, would quite a few others) to know how to wordWrap, but only at the word-boundaries . . . OK, OK, OK . . . just waiting for some smart linguist to point out that word-boundaries are arbitrary conventions forced on us by schoolteachers, and so forth. Notwithstanding this, it is bloody hard work trying to read a text field where half the words are chopped in half. Help gratefully recieved, Richmond __ See Mathewson's software at: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html ___ --- The Think Different Store http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/ For All Your Mac Gear --- ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: image compress
Rick, on mouseUp answer file image to compress: if it is empty then exit mouseup put it into timage Looks like you're just saving the file _path_ here. Change this: put it into timage TO put url (binfile:it) into timage put compress(timage) into URL binfile:/CSMLS Moncton/DATA/AREA end mouseUp Keep in mind that a lot of image formats are already compressed, and zip compression is much better suited for text than binary... so you may want to keep an eye on how much you're actually saving. It won't hurt, but worth checking out... HTH, Brian ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Link Grammar
This works! You have to put MC in the LinkParser folder first. You can also set the directory, if needed, instead: set the directory to /Users/MyName/SomeFolder/ get shell(...) Thanks. Steve ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Link Grammar
How about something like this: on mouseUp put shell(echo 'This is a test sentence' | ./parse) end mouseUp HTH, - Brian The Link Grammar is a free download that parses English sentences. http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/index.html If you have the Xcode Tools loaded, it will compile on Mac OSX. After that if you enter ./parse in the terminal you can input sentences and it will attempt to assign a grammatical structure to them. Problem: I wanted to put a MetaCard front end on it by using the shell(.../parse) command. It works halfway. The Link Parser attempts to start but says it can't find some stuff. Any smart people out there who understand this stuff? Steve Tripp ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list metacard@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: easy externals question
I would try setting a relative path to your externals- then there should be no need to reset the paths. Or is there a reason that you would need to change even the relative path? That's silly. How does RunRev get around it? Or do they just assume we don't use an external until the next session? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: 2lz3
Klaus, It looks like it all came through just fine here, hopefully intact in my quote below- perhaps it's your mail client that doesn't like it? - Brian Hi MetaCarders, i just uploaded my new 2lz3 palette, the nice and handy replacement for the MC tools palette... What's new: It is a real plugin now, no installation required, just put it into the plugin folder... You can have new stacks with drag'n'drop functionality... Preferences are now saved outside the stacks :-) The following stacks are integrated now: Analyze it... Favourites... Einstein... Albert can convert all absolute pathnames of images and/or players to relative pathnames! And import all referenced images into your stacks in a batch... So you can work with (possibly changing) referenced images and import (or convert to relative paths) them before building your standalone... And much more... I provide 2 versions, but both have the OS X look, since i faked a palette behaviour, and the overwhelming (?) response to my announcement did not encourage me to make this extra cosmetic work... But there were some issues with the look of standard buttons on win, so i changed this at least (to please my eyes ;-)... Mac-Version: http://www.major-k.de/staxx/MAC2lz3.sit And for WINDOWS/*NIX: http://www.major-k.de/staxx/WIN2lz3.zip I also integrated some of the more handy REV handlers like revGourl etc... into a frontscript (button revfake) and also this handy little sucker of Richard's: on IfX pIt if pIt = empty or pIt = Cancel or the result = cancel then exit to metacard end IfX EXTREMELY handy, once you got used to that ;-) Thanks Richard! Donwload and test it, if you like, it's free! I cannot be without it anymore :-D And of course you can still have verical or horizontal alignement! Hope you like it! Regards Klaus Major [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.major-k.de P.S. Feedback very welcome! ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: IDE and libUrl
Ah, right. Yes that would cause extra difficulty. With that said, should the IDE generally be doing something along the lines of: try start using stack libURL catch tErr answer error Error loading libURL... version conflict? end try And would that relieve some of the problems with any incompatible library, in general? It may not be so straightforward. In the case of a new version of libUrl (= 1.1) with an old engine ( 2.6.1) I think a script error will pop up as soon as the engine tries to run/compile the script. I haven't checked out the details yet, but doesn't the engine start compiling scripts as soon as a stack is loaded? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Don't autoinsert default handler ('on mouseup/end mouseup')?
FWIW, I've had exactly this problem: I wanted buttons to pass mouseUp, but if I accidentally saved them with the auto-inserted empty mouseUp handler, it broke. My vote would be for it to set the script to empty if it's identical to the auto-inserted script. I don't know how many of you have run into this same kind of thing, but it's an annoyance to me so I thought it might be an annoyance to others as well, and if we're getting set to get a new IDE, now would be the time to say something. :-) ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Don't autoinsert default handler ('on mouseup/end mouseup')?
The IDE does remove the empty script if you don't change it. If you close the script editor without entering anything, the fake handler goes away. So it sounds like hitting the enter key is the problem. (I always close the editor with Cmd-Opt-click, which doesn't put anything into the handler. I miss this behavior in Rev.) So, if the problem is that people are hitting the enter key, then the IDE should probably check for that since it already removes the fake handler otherwise. Huh. Never occurred to me that it would make a difference, but I can confirm- I almost always just hit the enter key to dismiss script editors... - Brian ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Resize aspect
Simon, How about something like this: 1) When you create a new stack, set a couple of properties of the stack to remember what size it wants to be: set the actualHeight of this stack to (11*72) ## 11 inches at 72DPI set the actualWidth of this stack to (17*72)## 17 inches at 72DPI set the zoomPercent of this stack to 100 ## start viewing at 100% 2) Ditto for objects- you want to remember what size they _want_ to be as accurately as possible (if you just translate each time, cumulatively, you'll probably notice them start to drift) ex: on newButton set the actualHeight of the target to (the height of the target * 100 / the zoomPercent of this stack) set the actualWidth of the target to (the width of the target * 100 / the zoomPercent of this stack) set the actualLeft of the target to (the left of the target * 100 / the zoomPercent of this stack) set the actualTop of the target to (the top of the target * 100 / the zoomPercent of this stack) end newButton 3) Create a simple handler which resizes the stack itself and you can call when needed: on zoomLayout toPercent set the zoomPercent of this stack to toPercent get the rect of this stack put (item 2 of it + round(the actualHeight of this stack * toPercent / 100)) into item 4 of it put (item 1 of it + round(the actualWidth of this stack * toPercent / 100)) into item 3 of it set the rect of this stack to it end zoomLayout 4) Catch the resizeStack handler to fix your objects: on resizeStack newWidth, newHeight, oldWidth, oldHeight repeat with i=1 to (number of cd parts) put the actualLeft of cd part i * (the zoomPercent of this stack / 100) into newLeft put the actualTop of cd part i * (the zoomPercent of this stack / 100) into newTop put the actualHeight of cd part i * (the zoomPercent of this stack / 100) into newHeight put the actualWidth of cd part i * (the zoomPercent of this stack / 100) into newWidth set the rect of cd part i to (round(newLeft)commaround(newTop)commaround(newLeft + newWidth)commaround(newTop + newHeight)) end repeat end resizeStack All of this (with some work I'm sure, this is off the top of my head) should buy you fairly reasonable resizing, although you probably won't achieve ultra-accurate layout by nature of the beast- Rev isn't vector graphics nor able to store higher zoomable resolutions for you to maintain in the background when someone is zoomed out. When the user is working at 800x600 pixels, newly created objects are going to be limited by the available pixels and when you zoom way back out, you might get nudged slightly by rounding inconsistencies. If you need finer alignment, you might consider other tactics, such as allowing objects to be aligned horizontally / vertically and carefully honoring that when zooming, etc. But the above approach should give reasonable results. You might also investigate the Rev geometry manager for inspiration... HTH Hi all, I want to throw out the following question to see if anyone has a stack already done that can do the following... My stack allows users to create a layout using template objects that fit the printed page. However, some users don't have monitor that can display the full resolution, and 11 x 17 layouts are near impossible for most. So I'm looking to make a stack that can resize all objects on a card *proportionally* to fit the new stack size (for example, a user wants to scale the stack down to 77% because that's all that fits on his viewable screen space). But it will always be an aspect ratio proportionate to the layout they are working on. That way when it comes time to print (or preview a print) I can scale everything to 100%. Or is there another way? Sincerely, Simon ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Scripting the new stack
Shari, FWIW, I would be careful when scripting the transfer of properties to you new stack- as one of those stack properties _is_ the password and possibly how you got into the pickle if it wasn't copied exactly... The script I threw together to copy objects from the old stack to the new stack is in the new stack, which I cannot access the scripts of. So I am back to the drawing board to write a script to recreate the old stack into a new one. If anyone has such a script already written it would be much appreciated. I meant to save the one I wrote yesterday for future reference, but hadn't yet done it. Removed the password from the original stack, and will now try to create a new stack (again) and hopefully no password will be needed. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: colorize script bailout
Did I hear an optimizing challenge Just kidding- many of you probably have noticed I tend to get a little over-zealous when a script gets to being optimized on-list. I'd be happy to take a crack at the colorizing script over the weekend provided nobody is anxious to do it themselves before then. That and commenting could be made faster if the screen was locked first, and faster still if done with htmlText. Anyone want to tackle that for the IDE? - Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC (941)-928-7127 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: erroneous error codes
Could it be that the error is actually rooted in the error dialog, which is reading some sort of property or global too soon, and then *cough* it gets the fresh one the second time? On 4/15/04 10:31 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote: When using MC 2.6 (Rev 2.3 engine) all errors are first reported as Not an integer, and only when I dismiss the error dialog and repeat the action that caused error do I get the proper error string. 1. Are you folks seeing the same thing? 2. Have any of you taken the time to find out why? Using the older engine does not produce this issue, but Tuv tells me the error codes have not changed. Obviously something has, so if any of you have some insight it'll help save some time in getting this addressed. I get the same thing, and it is driving me nuts. I assumed the codes had changed and that we could just dump in the new ones to fix it. If that isn't true, I'm not sure what to do from here. -- Jacqueline Landman Gay | [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: htmltext
FWIW, if anytime you want raw HTML tags to show up in emails for everyone, just encapsulate the whole HTML section inside of pre tags. Then it will render as source even if HTML interpreted. For example: pre The font tag is not very interesting. /pre HTH, Brian A text file that contains my previous post: http://ufp.uqam.ca/mc/htmlTags.txt Enjoy! ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Storing cgi data in stacks
I can't speak for MetaCard's behavior here, although my hope would be that it gives you an error message when you try to perform the second write. However, what you are generally referring to would be acquiring a write lock on the stack, which is something you can manage yourself. It's mostly as simple as it would seem- you just need to be able to communicate some sort of global flag that you scripts can check. For example: ## check if another script has a write lock put isLocked() into someFlag put the seconds into startTime repeat until (someFlag is FALSE) or (timeElapsed 10) ## wait until it's available put isLocked() into someFlag put the seconds - startTime into timeElapsed end repeat if (someFlag is TRUE) then put Error: scripts too busy, couldn't write for 10 seconds! else lockStack writeToStack unlockStack end if You could implement the lock/unlock through an external file, say: function isLocked return (there is a file mc.lock) end isLocked on lockStack put empty into url file:mc.lock end lockStack on unlockStack delete file mc.lock end unlockStack There are more efficient ways to do locking, but this seems appropriate here. HTH, Brian And, more importantly, what steps could be taken in a cgi script to make this approach work, if any? Like, if a stack was currently being written to, would darwin mc know that? Is there some message returned like stack is in use or something that you could trap for? And maybe make your own timeout? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Storing cgi data in stacks
Agreed! I only offer the former since it may be suitable here and Richard mentioned he'd rather not learn a DBMS for this task... - Brian Even if MC/Rev is really able to perform good results in accessing datas in write mode concurrent accesses with flat-files accesses and locking procs on stacks, a best practice is to bind it to an ACID compliant RDBMS (PostgreSQL and Sybase ASE best suitable than Oracle, today) for such kind of jobs. I use this way all the time and it rocks, even in about hundreds of concurrent requests peer second (i never had any server crash over the years). ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Storing cgi data in stacks
I agree with some of your points, but keep in mind that MySQL is perfect for some projects. MySQL 4.0 is much faster than anything you can do inside of MC/Rev (unless perhaps a database is so small it doesn't belong in a RDBMS), and I've had no crashes in more than 6 months... I know it is very easy to have a long discussion of MySQL vs other databases, but surely you overstate things here based on old experiences with MySQL. No argument that PostgreSQL is another good open source option. Please, don't never spend time in binding MC/Rev to MySQL 3.23. MySQL is not a real DB server (don't contain any transactions management engine) and all it can perform (without crashing) will always be better done inside MC/Rev (even, if needed in connecting the stacks to flat-files). Else, you will get very good results too, in conecting MC/Rev to rock-solid real ORDBMS (PostgreSQL, Sybase ASE, Oracle or, even, OpenBase...). ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Using php
FWIW, I've also used a method similar to Pierre's for PHP script - MetaCard daemon work. I have easily supported 50+ users hitting the system hard (with many database queries and a lot of HTML generation) on a modest server. Have yet to see where the maximum is. - Brian And if the speed is as good as you keep telling us, then that's even more proof of MC/RR as an excellent platform for developing distributed business applications. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Using php
Shari, If you control the php script, you can always return simple HTML than will render using a field's htmlText property, and display that. You can also just search for the name in the HTML. HTH, Brian The .php script can dynamically insert a person's name onto a web page, to personally thank them or whatever. But for my Metacard script to go to that web page and check to make sure the name is there, fails. When you get an URL, what you are getting is the raw HTML, not the finished page the surfer sees. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: PHP versus CGI
FWIW, PHP sometimes _is_ run as a CGI script. It's not the norm, but PHP is just the language. The advantage that PHP, Perl and others have it that they have commonly installed web-server modules installed, which is basically a built-in CGI. - Brian * PHP is widely-used and popular ; * PHP deals with many of the intricit details ; * PHP is safer than CGI unless you add a lot to CGI ; * PHP is supported by most service providers/hosts ; * PHP is part of the very dominant dev platform: LAMP ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: PHP versus CGI
I think the mitigating factor here that's being missed somewhat (although many of the point raised are valid), is that all of these setups are mostly dependent on a properly-configured webserver. If you configure things in a secure fashion, someone can write the most malicious of CGIs and it won't be able to do anything. It'll run under a user that doesn't have write access to anywhere secure, and even if it purposefully crashes itself, it'll just go away and end up making the webserver return an error page. MetaCard can't write to disk if the user that launched the application can't. Bad configurations make modules and CGIs both a potential hazard, good configurations make it nearly impossible to do any harm with either. Well, unless you are on a Microsoft platform... - Brian ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Mail
If you just want to email from a CGI on a machine your control, you may want to try using shell() with sendmail. What platform? OS X has a broken sendmail configuration, but there are article on Apple and Oreilly sites for fixing it. HTH, Brian So I tried setting up a form on my web page via CGI, Metacard can take them to that form and they can fill it out. Trouble so far is that either I can get the form to update the info on a web page, but not email me. Or I can get the form to email me, but not update the data of a web page. It needs to be both so that I can verify that they did indeed enter their name as it appears on my list. Any suggestions? (Specific suggestions... with actual usable code for either Metacard, SMTP, or CGI much appreciated.) ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: The Get-Post option...
Shari, I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of post. POST sends a request in POST-format to a url, e.g. a CGI app. I think what you are looking for is an FTP upload? put userList into url ftp://www.someurl.com/list.txt; OR If you had a CGI that adds a name, you could do something like: get url http://www.someurl.com/list.cgi?name=urlEncode(newUserName) post userList to url http://www.someurl/list.txt; ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Flushing events
It sounds like your mouseUp is considered a message, rather than an event- since you are generating it yourself rather than it coming from an event queue. We wouldn't want FlushEvents() to cancel all of the pending messages, no? I think it may just be a coincidence due to the fact you are sending your own mouseUps, perhaps it would be clearer to send yourself a custom message and use cancel? - Brian tried it. in the message, in the stack, in a palette just to be shure... Tried what's written in the reference. Is it a bug? using a conditional whether to send the next mouseup cleaned the queue but it's puzzling that it doesn't work... I'll test RR... -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Scott Rossi Sent: Friday, February 06, 2004 20:32 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Discussions on Metacard Subject: Re: Flushing events Recently, MisterX wrote: Any experience anyone? get flushevent(mouseup) doesn't remove my mouseup events... ;((( Try flushEvents() [plural]. Regards, Scott Rossi Creative Director Tactile Media, Multimedia Design - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] W: http://www.tactilemedia.com ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Anyone care about stack size?
I'm curious, how many of you consider stack size a major concern? I was playing around the other day, and realized there is a pretty simple way to shrink your stacks permanently: 1) Create an invisible, empty stack, Wrapper Do this: set the stackData of stack Wrapper to compress(stack SomeStack) set the visible of stack Wrapper to false Then add a script like this to Wrapper: on openStack go stack (uncompress(the stackData of this stack)) close stack Wrapper end openStack Voila! Save the wrapper to disk and it made my 900k stack shrink to about 300k, and it still opens in virtually the same amount of time. Of course if I want to make changes, I would need to make the changes and re-stuff the stack into the user property. Obviously most files are compressed anyway when they are distributed, but in this case they remain compressed on disk regardless. It seems that one could write a plugin which cloned itself, prompted the user to pick an open stack, and then created a new, wrapped and compressed stack which could then be built into a standalone, etc. Personally, I'm not working on anything where file size matters, but does it to others? - Brian ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Compression and Encryption
Well, I can confirm the problem... the simplest string I could replicate the problem with was a bb a bb. As for mcEncrypt, I believe it is undocumented and possibly used in the licensing scheme, so it's on purpose that there is no function to reverse it. HTH a little, Brian Greetings, I've run into an interesting compression problem. The second character in each line of myData is a tab. on mouseUp put Ate into myData put Bte into line 2 of myData put compress(myData) into myDataCompressed put decompress(myDataCompressed) into myDataUncompressed end mouseUp I get an error trying to decompress this simple bit of data after compressing it. Any ideas anyone? On a related note, if I use the following: put mcEncrypt(anyData) into anyDataEncrypted It works fine. But how do I get it back out? There seems to be no corresponding mcDecrypt() function. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ray Horsley Developer, LinkIt! Software ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Metacard support
I second that thought- for all of those here that have enjoyed the benefits of Scott's obsessive responsiveness in the past and want to weigh database options, Valentina really is in many ways the MetaCard of the database world, complete with their own Mr. Raney disguised as the entirely enjoyable Ruslan. It's a damn nice database emgine for many projects, also. - Brian Well, I know of another person that provides great support in the same spirit: Ruslan Zasukhin of Paradigma Software, the main developer of Valentina Database family. Coincidently MC/Rev and Valentina are a great match. Ruslan participates very actively in his product support list, his replies are often within short time of the question showing there, and even helps to some degree with user issues, like help with designing databases. He is also reknown for acting quickly on the reported bugs and listening to user input in product development. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: URL exists?
I think the only way that will be technically faster than this would be to use sockets, and make a HEAD request, rather than a GET for the url in question. You'd have to look up http protocol, but basically what it does it let you get just the http headers for a page rather than the contents. You'd also have to parse the return code... But it would be faster than fetching the whole page when it exists. If you want to try that, I can probably dig out a URL to read up on it. Depending on the circumstance, it might also help to do some sort of lookup on the domain name first and see if that fails- hostnameToAddress() for example. HTH - Brian What's the fastest way to check if an URL exists? I tried: if URL http://www.whatever.com/something/else.html; is empty then blah blah blah end if Very very slow. Is there a faster way? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Getting MC CGI to work on OS X with Web Sharing turned on
The cgi-bin alias is for the whole domain. If you want separate cgi-bin folders for each user account, you'll need to edit the Apache config file (/etc/httpd/httpd.conf). Don't ask me how. Check out this section to set specific options for user directories: #Directory /home/*/Sites #AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit #Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec #Limit GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND #Order allow,deny #Allow from all #/Limit #LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND #Order deny,allow #Deny from all #/LimitExcept #/Directory Just uncomment and modify, I would try adding ExecCGI to the list of options. You'll have to cruise to apache.org if you want documentation on all of the options... HTH Brian ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Getting MC CGI to work on OS X with Web Sharing turned on
There's also this: #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi Uncomment it and change the file extension to whatever you want: files with that extension will become executable from anywhere. IOW: AddHandler cgi-script .mt The cgi-bin alias is for the whole domain. If you want separate cgi-bin folders for each user account, you'll need to edit the Apache config file (/etc/httpd/httpd.conf). Don't ask me how. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: 10000 fields and crash
FWIW, I don't think you would want to create a huge number of fields to accomodate a spreadsheet implementation: you're better off creating only as many as need to be visible and shuttling the data through them. You do seem to have pointed out a serious inefficiency in MetaCard's save routine, however. Not exactly, but as I'm exploring the possibility to use MC to simulate a spreadsheet, I could use 10,000 flds to display data, and therefore for some direct user interaction, like selecting / moving rows cols... ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Compress/decompress
Could you use combine and split to shuffle it between text and back? Something like: combine myArray using tab and return set the compressed_data of fld 1 to compress(myArray) ... put decompress(the compressed_data of fld 1) into myArray split myArray using tab and return I could not figure out how to compress an array. A multi-dimensional array. The array is stored as a customPropertySet. Is there a way to do it? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Squishing data
I'm not sure what you mean by putting data in an array changing the stack size: arrays are held in memory. Do you mean that you write the arrays to custom properties? You may want to try using compress() on the field data, i.e. set the compressed_data of fld 1 to compress(fld 1) Then just access the fields with: put decompress(the compressed_data of fld 1) into fieldData For performance, you would want to only decompress() once- although keeping the uncompressed data in memory bumps your memory requirements so you'll have to balance memory vs. performance. Compress() should get you a reasonable shrink on text, hopefully 50% or so. Brian The stack with 300 fields is about 15 MB. I tried putting the data into an array, and deleting the fields. But it actually makes the stack bigger to do this. I created an array with 300 elements, myArray[1] held the data from field 1, and so forth. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: MC IDE
Huh? That's exactly the point... it's a BETTER GUI (in some cases, not all) which absolutely can be used with the Revolution engine. So how exactly is anyone doing anything except choosing the best product? If the underlying issue here is with Hypercard stragglers from the past, I hardly think it's fair to somehow apply that in a negative light here. The Metacard IDE is a better IDE for more than a few people for more than a few projects. What else is there to say? Those who agree will maintain it, those that don't need not worry about it. Brian Maybe you missed something but MetaCard is now only an IDE that can be used with the Revolution engine ;-) Sorry but our world has changed no matter how much you try and keep it the same. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: MC IDE
Fair enough. It is frustrating encouraging the adoption of a new tool when undoubtedly some old users stay out of loyalty, habit, religion, whatever you want to call it. What can I say? If Windows really did undoubtedly surpass MacOS in every logical person's eyes, I might still cling to my Mac- and on the same token Windows users would have a right to be frustrated by my fanatacism. To quote Gandhi, All religions are true. Ditto on offending anyone- I don't think of even the biggest disagreements about MetaCard on this list as anything personal or offensive. In any case, I suggest we kill this portion of the thread (says the one adding to it) since there's not really an issue at hand at this point. Brian There seems to be two groups of people still interested in MetaCard. Those that for logical reasons made a planned and well informed decision to stay with the IDE and those that are scared of the move and haven't investigated properly as a result. My comments were aimed squarely at the second group. I certainly wasn't trying to offend anyone ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: MC IDE
Monte, I sympathize with some of your thoughts here, but I think you are missing some of the appeal. As someone who has moved from Hypercard to Supercard to Metacard (and then to Rev) as each has come out, I have always taken the leap to the next tool at whatever point it proved to be worth it. I've been using the Rev IDE for months and am quite comfortable with it; however, for about 40% of my work I would still prefer to work in the MetaCard IDE. I can't quite quantify a rule for when I use each one, but I can tell you that there's no doubt in my mind that when I do use the MetaCard IDE, it's because for that particular project it's faster, easier and bottom line more efficient. Maybe some day the Rev IDE will reach a point where it's utterly pointless to use the MetaCard IDE, but I kind of doubt it. If I had to pick one, it would probably be the Rev version. But that certainly does not make maintaining the MetaCard IDE worthless! Please don't insinuate that this has anything to do with Hypercard lingerers- I haven't used Hypercard since about 1996 (and by then I had a copy of Supercard and was soon to buy Metacard). I've got all sorts of IDEs here, and they are most certainly not stuck back in time- don't throw out my emacs just because SimpleText looks nicer! Brian I still haven't thought of a reason to maintain the MetaCard IDE let alone the documentation. Just because you're comforatable using the MC IDE it's no reason to waste time maintaining it yourselves. It'sll only take you a few weeks to get the same level of comfort with Rev. 2 1/2 years ago people on this list couldn't comprehend why people were still using HyperCard. I guess this is history repeating itself? Maybe the people lingering here are the ones that only just realised that Apple has stopped working on HyperCard? Well let me tell you that in 10 years time when you realise that MetaCard corp is no longer working on MetaCard you will move to Revolution anyway. Why not make the move and get it over with? If there's something you're not happy with in the IDE then ask the team to change it. Even spend your time developing a reference implementation for the runrev team (as I did with the distribution builder) rather than making your life hard and working on MC. ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Launching a local file in the default browser
I tried it without the file:/// in OS X as well as with other variations with less than three slashes. All did nothing. Perhaps it's the fact they are /-delimited paths that they require file:/// ? I would suspect this is true. file:// (with two colons) is really the proper protocol, as it corresponds to http://;, ftp://;, etc. Using file:// is really just forming a proper URL- the oddity is that file paths also start with a slash, so you get the three slashes. But if you think of URLs as a protocol followed by a path, it starts to make sense- especially if you are accustomed to seeing http://; by now. FWIW Brian ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Launching a local file in the default browser
Still works... I did miss the local though and skipped my eyes to the browser. In any case, try this form: tell application Finder open location file:///Users/yennie/Desktop/test.html end tell The trick seems to be adding the browser-style protocol to the front for local files: file:// You should have 3 slashes total- the third is part of the file path. HTH Brian Uh, Brian... he mentioned a local file not a web site. Will this still work? Ken Ray Sons of Thunder Software Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/ -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Yennie Sent: Saturday, August 09, 2003 1:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Launching a local file in the default browser tell application Finder open location http://www.apple.com; end tell ... do as AppleScript of course Yep, the same ol' question: how do I launch a local file in the default browser on Mac OS X? And for future reference: Where is the definitive answer archived? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metac ard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Launching a local file - NEW SOLUTION
To pass file paths to cp, you'll need to escape spaces in the file path or put the path in quotes: replace space with (\space) in filePath or put quotefilePathquote into filePath HTH Brian on mouseup LaunchIt /Volumes/FourthWorld/4W Catalog/webmerge/WebMerge 2.0/WebMerge Help/WebMerge_Help/WebMergeHelp.html end mouseup And got an error: Error:usage: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-f | -i] [-p] src target cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-f | -i] [-p] src1 ... srcN directory ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Unified Revolution
Dear Rev-carders, It's been bugging me for quite some time that the Rev/MetaCard community lacks central resources. As fantastic as the discussion lists are (and they are good ones), there's no one way to find an answer, obtain an external, submit something you wrote, etc, etc. A few list members have taken the time to provide resources online- Ken and Richard for starters have excellent stuff available on their sites. I, for one, do not, simply because I don't have the time to create a site just for that purpose. So here's the question: how can we, as the user base for Rev/Metacard, create a central resource that serves all of us, promotes development of useful resources, and brings glory to RunRev? What I would really love to see is an open source project that incorporates several things at once: 1) The now open-source Metacard IDE and any other alternative IDEs (i.e. FreeCard) 2) Open-source externals (i.e. custom controls, movie editing, etc) 3) Open-source plugins (i.e. RevNet) 4) Open-source stacks, widgets scripts (i.e. libSMTP, libURL, etc) The LAST thing I would want this to be would be a free-for-all. We would need people to take on roles in managing these projects. Projects would have to be approved, and code would have to be submitted. All of the best practices of other open source projects would potentially apply. Would anyone else like to see this kind of organized effort? Who could actually contribute to running the entity (as opposed to submitting code)? Would we elect a board? Would this make a difference? - Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC (904)-997-0212 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Launching a local file in the default browser #3
FWIW, there's also this nugget: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfig.plist You can also dig around in: ~/Library/Preferences/LaunchServices.plist It seems that you can use these to find the actual applications assigned to various file formats. Brian ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Launching a local file in the default browser
Er... I guess I should probably get some sleep: my solution has this problem also for files that don't normally open in a browser. If there's not a better way, you could work around this by creating a dummy HTML file that just redirects the browser to the correct file. That'll get you in the right app, *then* open the file. There must be a better way buried somewhere in AppleScript... Brian Same here: it launches the local file, but in the application that matches the file's creator code and not the default browser. :( ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Launching a local file in the default browser
tell application Finder open location http://www.apple.com; end tell ... do as AppleScript of course Yep, the same ol' question: how do I launch a local file in the default browser on Mac OS X? And for future reference: Where is the definitive answer archived? ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Memory and Type 2 error
OT Question: My computer has 128 MB RAM built in. So I use virtual memory to up the ante in PPC. But OSX seems to have no virtual memory to tinker with. What happens if the computer needs more than 128 MB RAM? I'm outta luck? This is an over-simplification, but basically UNIX operating systems have virtual memory built-in. MacOS X will first swap out memory from other running processes, and then eventually when those resources have been exhausted, start swapping your own app's memory too and from disk. Things will slow down, but theoretically you have about as much extra memory as disk space. In the end, it works much better than virtual memory and application settings do in OS 9. But as a last resort, I tried upping Metacard's memory usage from 1 to 25000, and the stack finally launched. *sigh* Two hours on this. I must have last launched this stack when I had Metacard's memory set to some really high number. I think at one time I had it set to 75000. Since you say it's for internal use, this may be acceptable, but if you're looking for a suggestion, you might try breaking the stack up into a few smaller stacks, or just keeping all of your images on disk in a directory and use fileName properties rather than importing the images. Since Metacard loads the entire stack into memory, you can probably get a ballpark figure for how much memory it needs to launch by taking the file size and adding a few MBs. HTH, - Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC (904)-997-0212 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ___ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
Re: Buggy post url cmd - socket stays open
FWIW, since this is in fact part of libURL, it is possible to edit the scripts in question and change their behavior if either the need is urgent or it doesn't get officially changed. If you truly want the socket immediately closed, is there any reason why you can't check for it and close it yourself after the transfer is complete? i.e. repeat until the openSockets is empty close socket (line 1 of the openSockets) end repeat HTH, Brian I believe you. But the behavior is intentional. By default, the libUrl script doesn't close the socket after completing a request. This allows re-use of the same socket which is useful if you are making a series of requests to the same server, and is in line with the HTTP 1.1 spec. (The socket will eventually get closed by the server.) -- Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: Buggy post url cmd - socket stays open
Alain, Glad it worked. "close socket" is documented under the "close" command, although a bit buried and sparse. You'll find it on the very last line of both the syntax listing and the help text. FWIW, the Rev documentation is more complete on this particular command- I often find it helpful to have both sets of docs on hand. Happy post-ing ------ Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: METACARD ACQUIRED BY RUN REV!!!
In this particular case, I can't argue that either proposition is at all unreasonable, but there is a simple way of looking at this: just imagine that Rev 2.1 (or 2.5, whatever the next major upgrade becomes) is "Metacard 3.0" when it comes out. Seeing as how the Metacard GUI will still be available, and the engine has always been the same, isn't it?? Brian What I was saying was this - If Revolution transferred my MetaCard 2.5 license, right now, to Revolution 2.0.1, for free, I would switch from MetaCard development to Revolution development immediately and not look back. Revolution is the future. ------ Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: Moving image contents
I can confirm that "put image 1 into image 2" doesn't work here on OS X. I've tried JPEG and GIF images, nothing unusual about them (as far as I know). I just get an empty image. ImageData works well in my tests. ------ Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: METACARD ACQUIRED BY RUN REV!!!
I'm glad you're still on board, Scott- and applaud your willingness to combine efforts with RunRev in expanding the Metacard/Rev community. I'm not up for hosting a list, but count me in as a helper for the Metacard GUI: I'd love to see it kept up-to-date with the lastest versions of Rev without losing it's original simplicity. PS: it's at times like this that I miss Grant Schampel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). He always loved a good brouhaha, and always had something insightful to say about the back-room dealings that make them possible... Indeed! Thanks for the fond memory, I haven't heard that name passed around here in some time. -- Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: Process Handle?
Scott, If you are on an OS which supports the "ps" command via shell() (such as MacOS X), you can get a process listing which shows the ppid of each process- that is, the parent process ID that launched it. For example, "ps -l -x" from Terminal on Mac gives me this: UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND ... 502 4051 183 0 62 0 109848 13008 - S ?? 8:17.17 /Users/yennie/Desktop/MC 2.5/MetaCard.app/Cont ... Thus 4051 is the process id of Metacard- anything with 4051 as the PPID would have be launched by Metacard, and in turn you could use that process ID to see what processes the sub-process had launched (again by looking for that process ID as the PPID). Dunno if that helps... ------ Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: Directory to URL?
The best you can do is to try and grab the URL's directory by itself: put url "http://www.myserver.com/test/" into fileList The problem is that different web servers (or FTP servers) may return different formats. Some web servers won't give a directory listing at all (or will send back the contents of "index.html" or some other default page). If you really need to get a list of the files reliably, I believe you would need to send specific FTP commands to a FTP site. There is no reliable way over HTTP unless you have control of the server side, AFAIK. Perhaps there is something you can glean from the FTP libs? HTH I've been trying the following without success: set the directory to url "http://www.myserver.com/test/" set the directory to url "ftp://ftp.myserver.com/test/" set the directory to url "ftp://uname:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/test/" Result = "Can't open directory." Am I missing the obvious? -- Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: Try, try again
Just a poor choice of variable name.
get shell("echo '"pwd"' | sudo"cmd)
This won't actually put "pwd" in the shell command, it's a variable.
You'll still get something like:
echo 'MyPassword' | sudo MyCommand
as the final shell command.
'pwd' puts the working directory ie the directory you are currently
working in for operations like file listing. copying etc...
------
Brian Yennie
Chief Technology Officer
QLD Learning, LLC
www.QLDLearning.com
PH: (904)-997-0212
EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---
Re: Try, try again
If you don't mind the password being briefly sent in the clear (as part of the name of the process), you can use this:
get shell("echo '"pwd"' | sudo"cmd)
Which comes out to something that looks like:
echo 'MyPassword' | sudo MyCommand
Unfortunately, open process appears to be still broken on OS X. If it wasn't, you could use the "-S" option to sudo to write the password to the process. This is really the way it should be done security-wise.
(something like this)
put "sudo -S"myCmd into theProcess
open process theProcess
write MyPasswordcr to process theProcess
read from process theProcess until eof
close process theProcess
You can also, of course, execute AppleScript on Mac which should give you the same results as AppleScript Studio can achieve.
You could also write the password to a temporary file and pass that to sudo.
HTH.
------
Brian Yennie
Chief Technology Officer
QLD Learning, LLC
www.QLDLearning.com
PH: (904)-997-0212
EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---
Re: Help! Has anyone compiled an external for OS X?
Tereza, I haven't built an mach-o external with Codewarrior for quite a while, but what I DO have are several examples in ProjectBuilder. If you're interested, I'll send you a small one off-list. As far as outputting the binary, what you want to do is: 1) Compile your external code as a MacOS "bundle", i.e. "MyExternal.bundle". 2) Set the 'externals' property of your stack to the path to the bundle. This can be a relative path, just as with images / movies etc. 3) Quit and reload the stack HTH ------ Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: Help! Has anyone compiled an external for OS X?
Well that's what I get for not looking first. Seems there is now a ProjectBuilder example in the external package. It looks like an oversight if the Mach-o target is missing from the CW project- there seems to be all the remnants of that target including settings and precompiled header files... unfortunately I don't have a machine with CW loaded at the moment to check it out. You *should* be able to add a target for a mach-o bundle and compile with the mach-o precompiled header in place of the Carbon, PPC, 68k, etc. You'll need to add frameworks (instead of libraries) to the target- i.e. Carbon.framework or others you may need such as Quicktime. Other than that, the example external code should compile into a bundle for you with little modification. Follow the install procedure from my previous email and you *should* be golden... HTH -- Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: handling print cancellation
I believe these will do the trick: answer printer if (the result is "cancel") then ... end if open printing with dialog if (the result is "cancel") then ... end if ------ Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: handling print cancellation
Unless I'm misunderstanding, it seems to work here. open printing with dialog Always seems to show the dialog immediately- *unless* another open printing call hasn't been closed. I don't know if it is worth noting, but Rev seems to behave differently: Rev's printing library actually shows the dialog when you execute the specific print command. Any chance you're using Rev, and this is a Rev problem? It sounds curiosly akin to Rev's implementation. HTH Brian Not on OS X, at least not reliably. In OS X, the print dialog is not actually triggered by the open printing commamd that specifies it; accordingly the result for the open printing command will always be empty. -- Brian Yennie Chief Technology Officer QLD Learning, LLC www.QLDLearning.com PH: (904)-997-0212 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: weblog: detailed files, spaces - +
For the record, they are urlEncoded. A quick urlDecode() will bring them back to normal if desired... In detailed files, be careful to note that spaces in file names become "+" chars. http://radio.weblogs.com/0118367/categories/metacard/2003/02/17.html
Re: The Case Of The Unreadable File
What kind of value do you get for "increment" in your script by the time you get an error in "the result"? Is it larger than the supposed file size returned by the detailed files()? Here's one idea if it is: function isValid theFile, fileSize open file theFile for read read from file theFile for 1 at (fileSize+1) put (the result = "eof") into vBool close file theFile return vBool end isValid I tested a variation here, and it works for valid files. Dunno if it helps any with your invalid ones- that might be hardwired underneath into whatever system file routine is returning the error. HTH Any ideas?
Re: copying packages in OSX
Just a thought without seeing your scripts: are you using "binfile:" URLs to reference the files? If not, you may not be copying them as binary, but rather as text. Brian When I compare the file sizes (original and copy) I see no difference, but going back to OS9, and using ResEdit, I do notice that some of my files have garbage in the 'Creator' (the 'Type' is empty). In the 'good' file, these are supposed to be empty...changing this and saving the file does not work of course.
Re: CGI Frustration
Ken, Can you run the script from the command line? That is, can you connect via Telnet, ssh, etc, and run something like: ./linux test.mc ? If so, then it probably has something to do with the ISP setup / Apache configuration (assuming they use Apache). If not, then it may be your setup. Some tidbits that *could* help (or at least narrow down the problem): 1) Try putting a full path to the mc engine. 2) Try changing the extension to ".cgi". The ISP configuration could possibly only accept cgis with certain extensions. HTH. Brian OK, I'm finally trying to get MC set up as a CGI. I have an ISP that uses Linux, so I DL'ed the linux engine and uploaded it to my cgi-bin folder. I set the permissions to 755, and have a simple script called "test.mt" that sits in the cgi-bin folder as well, and its permissions are 755. The script is this... #!linux on startup put "Hello World!" into tResponse put "Content-Type: text/HTML" crlf put "Content-Length:" (the length of tResponse) crlf crlf put tResponse end startup ... and I keep getting an internal server error 500. I tried exactly the same thing on another ISP using BSD (with the exception of the first line being "#!mc"), and got the same result. I'm convinced I'm just not calling it properly... any ideas? Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Darwin Engine with X11
A while back I tried using the Darwin engine with various XWindow ports for MacOS X... no luck. I had hoped that with Apple's own port of X11 coming out, things would clear up. However, the Darwin engine still bombs all over the place running under X11. It DOES launch, but you can't get far without a sudden "Abort" message in the terminal (and no more GUI). So, my question is... is there any remedy (missing libs?) that would allow me to run the Darwin engine with a GUI as-is on MacOS? Granted, it may not be that useful with a mach-o version already natively available, but I'd be at least curious to see this work. Brian
Re: Metacard CGi's
Does anyone have any other suggestions about how I could get this to work? You may be able to create an ordinary library stack with the image-creation objects and routines... then within your script: start using stack "imageLib" makeImages() In limited tests, I've found this to be the way to do stack-specific work from a CGI script. HTH, Brian
Re: Web-Dedicated Metacard
Well, there is one nugget already in the language which would help: set the secureMode to true Brian Ouch! I didn't think about that. The big problem with a *sanctioned* web-savvy MetaCard or RunRev player is the potential for *very dangerous viruses*!!
Re: Web-Dedicated Metacard
My guess would be per session, but I've never used it.
Anything built from libmc ("embedded Metacard") could presumably always set the property if need be, which would pretty much tackle the browser plugin problem.
As far as helper applications, a standalone player could probably be made that did the same thing and always set the secureMode property. Of course anyone could get around this if they *wanted* to by using the ordinary Metacard engine, but it would be a user-safe engine for those that want it.
I'd love to see someone find the time to create all of the delivery goodies for Metacard: browser plugin, apache module, player application. I know there are various pro/cons and reasons that they don't already exist, but they are all very much technically feasible, and could go a long way towards a growing anti-Java following.
Mozilla is open source, and so is Apache...
Brian
Wow, Brian... cool stuff! I noted that once set to true, it can't be set to
false. Is that per session? Or is it saved with the stack? Just curious...
Re: Web-Dedicated Metacard
One tidbit from playing around: You can easily secure your Metacard distribution from third-party stacks (as far as I can see), by adding the following to your home stack: on startup set the secureMode to true end startup Of course, it's easily hackable on your own machine (just move the home stack), but I can't see any way a third-party stack could do anything running under such a setup- it's effectively on lock-down. FWIW, Brian
Re: Web-Dedicated Metacard
In a message dated 12/22/02 8:56:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Oops, that was a little premature. The home stack won't get this message if you drag the stack directly onto the Metacard application. Perhaps on openStack would be better, or maybe this needs a whole standalone to be built... Brian You can easily secure your Metacard distribution from third-party stacks (as far as I can see), by adding the following to your home stack: on startup set the secureMode to true end startup
Re: xcmd
I think you are either mistaken or were using a stack with the external property already set by someone else. Or recall using a CFM-based version / CODE resource. If the path was not specified, how would MetaCard ever find and load it? But of course you only need to set the property of the stack once. And further, you can use the stack as a library stack, so you don't have to set the property in every stack that wishes to use Valentina- only the library stack. HTH, Brian Brian, but I wonder if this is 100% required ? I have run example stack without this path to external set up.
Re: Answer File Command
Also, you'll notice that when you try to open an unknown file type in OS X and switch the application-chooser popup from "Recommended Applications" to "All Applications", the grayed-out applications remain grayed out... *except* for their icons. Happens every time here on 10.2.1. So the bugginess is clearly an OS thing. However, I have noticed several times that OS X doesn't always "recognize" files right away. There have been times when a file was dimmed in the file dialog that shouldn't be. These are almost always new files, just downloaded or just created. Sometimes moving the file to the desktop and back will fix it, sometimes it takes hours before the Finder "sees" it as the right file type.
Re: launching on Wintel/inter-process communication
Simple. Write the milliseconds into the file. Then, when the app launches, grab the milliseconds as its "launch date". When it goes to look in the folder, it will read in the "leftover" file, but because the milliseconds in the leftover is *earlier* than the launch date, it is ignored. It will only read files written into the "watched" folder *after* the launch date. The time stamp seems logical- but here's my question: how does a second instance of the application know what file to look for? That is, if the file is already there from the first instance which was launched hours ago, how can it tell the difference between that file and a crashed one. Without using inter-application communication of course =). Or am I missing something? Brian
Re: md5digest
HTTP Digest Authentication for a server app. Presumably you could use it for the client side as well. Are any of you using md5digest, and if so what are you doing with it? Brian
Custom Objects?
Hi guys, This one is a question for any external developers. I know there are considerable reasons why you don't see a lot of "plug-in" objects powered by externals for MetaCard- among them cross-platform considerations, and the rarity in which they are even needed. However... is there a preferred method for going about this? For example, say I want to create a simple "graph" object from a C library (note: this is *not* what I'm doing, just an example). How would I trap for update events in the MetaCard window? For mouse clicks, should I use a "dummy" object to trap for the clicks? Has anyone had success with this sort of thing? Best Regards, Brian
Re: the large file challenge
All right... I tweaked a little more outside of email.
For accuracy in the case where "mystic_mouse" occurs multiple times on one line, uncomment the line:
"add offset(return, thisChunk, theOffset) to theOffset"
This just skips to the next line whenever a match is found.
This should run faster than my previous attempts:
on startup
## initialize variables: try adjusting numLines
put "/gig/tmp/log/access_log" into the_file
put ($1*1024*1024) into chunkSize ## this is for MB
put 0 into counter
put FALSE into isEOF
open file the_file
repeat until (isEOF = TRUE)
## read the specified number of lines, check if we are at the end of the file
read from file the_file for chunkSize
put it into thisChunk
put (the result = "eof") into isEOF
## count the number of matches in this chunk
put offset("mystic_mouse", thisChunk) into theOffset
repeat
add 1 to counter
get offset("mystic_mouse", thisChunk, theOffset)
if (it = 0) then exit repeat
put theOffset + it + 12 into theOffset
## add offset(return, thisChunk, theOffset) to theOffset
end repeat
end repeat
close file the_file
put counter
end startup
HTH.
Brian
Re: the large file challenge
I'm pretty sure the problem with speed here is from reading in the entire file.
Unless of course you have enough free RAM- but that's hard to imagine when the files are 300MB+.
How about this, which you can adjust to read any given number of lines at a time.
Try it with 10, 1000, 1, etc and see what gives you the best performance!
Hasn't been tested but hopefully it'll run with a tweak or less.
#!/usr/local/bin/mc
on startup
## initialize variables: try adjusting numLines
put "/gig/tmp/log/xaa" into the_file
put 1000 into numLines
put 0 into counter
open file the_file
repeat until (isEOF = TRUE)
## read the specified number of lines, check if we are at the end of the file
read from file the_file for numLines lines
put it into thisChunk
put (the result = "eof") into isEOF
## count the number of matches in this chunk
put offset("mystic_mouse", thisChunk) into theOffset
repeat until (theOffset = 0)
add 1 to counter
put offset("mystic_mouse", thisChunk, theOffset) into tempOffset
if (tempOffset 0) then add tempOffset to theOffset
else put 0 into theOffset
end repeat
end repeat
close file the_file
put counter
end startup
HTH,
Brian
Re: the large file challenge
One last note: Be careful of using read from file xxx for yyy If you do not read for "lines", you run the risk of cutting a line in half on the spot where your magic string occurs. So always use read from file xxx for yyy LINES HTH. Brian
Re: Read and Analyze Giant Files
Problem here most likely is that you are trying to read the entire 300MB file into memory at once. Unless you have an extra 300MB block of RAM floating around, this will start beating on virtual memory pretty hard (and increasingly slow). You'll notice that your non-MetaCard script reads one line at a time- I would suggest doing the same. If you are just looking for occurences of a single string, you could also try using the grep command-line tool. Type "man grep" into the Terminal for syntax. HTH, Brian
Re: Aliases in cgis
In a message dated 10/26/02 7:50:23 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Oop, just caught this one after hurredly replying to the last! I never knew that Terminal tip, however =). While we're at it, for anyone not familiar, if you are ever trying to *type* a path into the terminal as a command-line argument, you can always hit tab to auto-complete the path. Brian Wait -- it works. I found a stupid mistake in the file path. Funny how using the right path makes a difference. :) So here is today's tip for anyone like me who has fat fingers: drag the file whose path you need directly into the Terminal window. It figures out the file path for you, and all you have to do is copy/paste it into your script. I wish I'd done that to begin with...
Re: XCMD Limitations
Obviously Scott knows which callbacks he implemented. Is there a published list anywhere? If you really want to be safe, I would suggest recompiling as a Metacard-native external. Or else eliminate all the callbacks- are there any that really need to be made and not done internally? You can find the MetaCard external package at ftp.metacard.com- you should only need to change the code in your main() routine to use the appropriate MetaCard callbacks. HTH, Brian
Re: XCMD Limitations
I think there are pretty much two options here. One is to recode as a native MetaCard external- this is not hard to do, the only things that change are a) callbacks and b) parameter parsing and return values. If the XCMD is written clearly (i.e. one parameter parsing block of code and a generic routine for building the return value), this is usually trivial. I've managed to write code in the past that compiles as XCMD or Metacard-native based on a couple of #ifdef's. The only other options I see would be to carefully recode the callbacks. What callbacks exactly does it use? I find there is almost never a compelling reason to use any callbacks that you couldn't code yourself instead. The exception with Hypercard of course was their external windowing code. That you won't be able to replicate without wholesale changes to your approach. One suggestion if you decide to stay with the XCMD: try taking your copy of HyperXCmd.h and commenting out the prototypes for all of the callbacks. Now recompile and you should get an error for each one. From this you should be able to compile a list of the callbacks used. The simple ones are trivial to replace: StrToRect, StrToNum, etc. In fact, they'll run faster if you just call the appropriate C function instead. If you are really stuck, you'll probably need to post some actual code to get much better suggestions. If you'd like and you can, send me something off-list and I'll look it over. HTH, Brian Thus far I've managed to avoid writing a single external since I started working with MC in '97 (I hired out the only one I couldn't make in native MetaTalk), so my knowledge of how MC works with externals is very limited. Hopefully somone with experience with this can take a moment to fill in the details...
Re: MC after OS X Upgrade...
What version of MetaCard are you using? And what version were you running under OS9? Do other stacks run correctly for you? And finally... any externals? Brian Just a small problem. My stack created using system 9.2 no longers seems to open after I finally made the leap to OS X.2. (even in the Classic environment). Do I need the OSX version or is it a MC memory allocation problem. The stack is quite large ( ~200 MB - mostly sound samples).
Re: Looking For Suggestions
There may be something more elegant, but how about a time-stamped file? Could your app just stamp the current time into the file once per minute? A second app could then check if the file is "alive" by checking the time contained within. One other trick that might work: what if the main app opens up a socket or other means of IAC? Then the secondary app could attempt to "ping" it locally. Brian
UNIX C/C++ programmer wanted
Hello list, I'm gathering resumés to consider for a programming spot in a startup company. The ideal candidate would have: * UNIX experience, esp. in C/C++ , networking * MetaCard experience The rest is gravy- your responsibilities would most likely include programming in C/C++ with embedded MetaCard, and possibly taking on scripting work. If things work out well, you may have your choice of work in several areas. Please contact me off-list to follow up. Regards, Brian Yennie Chief Techonology Officer QLD Learning
Re: MC concurrency performance?
1. How well does MC handle multiple connections at once ('concurrency')?
There are a few issues here. First off, Metacard basically handles one connection at a time; however, there are several ways to work with this. First, when reading/writing to sockets, you can use asynchronous calls which will allow other connections to come in. The pitfall here is that while a handler is executing, no others will. So its possible to have more than one connection get in, but they are basically processed one at a time if they are calculation-intensive. If most of the work *is* the data transer, you'll be able to handle a few connections at a time, maybe even many.
If you truly want "multiple connections", you can run multiple processes. This is really only sane if you are using one of the UNIX engines (or Darwin under MacOS). With such an engine, you can spawn many processes running on separate ports which will behave nicely in serving many requests. This is a memory hog with non-UNIX builds (i.e. GUI apps). If you search the archives, I posted some code using "open process" under the Darwin engine for this in the last month.
2. Better of using shared or multiple ports?
Myself, I haven't found a way to have multiple processes share the same port. It is most likely possible if you can work at a lower level (i.e. embedded MetaCard); but scripted socket support won't let you listen on the same port twice. So, if you want one port you are probably stuck with one process. Unless you are using multiple processes, I don't see much advantage to multiple ports- although it could have marginal benefits. I think the possible confusion added would be more than its worth.
HTH,
Brian
Re: More CGI Stuff
You can easily use a long-running Metacard stack in the background- just launch it normally and communicate from your CGI using sockets (or any other IAC). Problem is- you can only handle one connection at a time with the long-running stack. That is why I've been investigating using multiple processes with the Darwin engine. Not sure on this one - seem to remember some comments on the list b4 - but not tries it yet... something to do with having MC already running in background on the server (ie not started by a cgi)? Is it then possible for the CGI to start using / send messages to the MC stacks already up and running? This has to be possible via some type of IAC but is the process started via the same as the mc engine running in the background...
Re: More CGI Stuff
It exists, it just hasn't made it on the site yet. Ruslan? Ruslan Does this mean there is a Mach-o version available now? I don't see it on your site. Cheers Dave
Re: More CGI Stuff
Which is very cool stuff! I just want to point out one difference that I'm trying to obtain, however: *multiple* long running processes with shared memory, and everything done with Metacard! =). Since I want most of the work to happen in Metacard, its not as valuable if I can only maintain one Metacard process- then the server can only handle one connection at a time. And simply launching multiple copies of say, MetacardCarbon, works- but its a major memory hog. Thus I'm trying to work with scripts, rather than GUI processes. I can spawn 20 long running scripts and it barely requires more memory than 1! Of course- PHP is still an option with multiple Metcard processes doing the work, its just one more language to throw into the mix. Brian FWIW, I believe Pierre Sahores explained a way to use PHP to manage sockets and enable backend use of MC as a long-running process. I think it's related to this thread. (Wherever that explanation is in the archives, maybe Ken Ray would consider adding it to his already excellent Developer Resources section at http://www.sonsothunder.com !)
