World: r4wp

Congratulations on the release of Red Alpha.

Another OS for running Windows console binaries (and possibly more): 
http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/

I also thought about "WinCon" at the beginning (and "WinGUI" instead 
of "Windows"), but quickly dropped it because it would not be easy 
to remember, and inconsistent with the way other targets are named. 
See the targets list at the bottom of this page: 

https://github.com/dockimbel/Red

Calling it DOS would annoy me, as I had that on Atari 8-bit :-)

well, let's not loose much time upon what just annoys us re naming 
convention of not so important language parameter ... :-)

I don't want *that* target called DOS, I want it called something 
without "DOS" in the name, since it's not for DOS (MS or not).

http://bikeshed.org

Brian: you don't have to like it, on Windows, it's the default target, 
so you'll never have to type it as long as you're not cross-compiling 
from another OS. ;-)

Thanks Peter! Your early unit tests helped it get out without too 
many bugs. ;-)

That does help :)

Well I did find one bug :-)

Red Alpha release! Where's the party?

Kaj: thanks, I'm bookmarking this one, I will certainly need it in 
future. :-)

It's a cyber-party and it's happening here. ;-)

OK ;-) *PLOP* as we say here in the Netherlands

We're just lacking some ASCII-art beer to make it more fun!

Pekr: I think the Twitter widget I'm using on my Blogger's site is 
dead, not a single other Twitter plugin for Blogger is working...

well, I have twitter code on my 2zone site, ad it works ....

They changed their API a few weeks back

RED-system/GTK-bindings on Ubuntu 12.10 : all the samples compile 
but GTK-Widget give an error at run time :

red-system/builds$ ./GTK-widgets 


(GTK-widgets:2867): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_container_add: assertion 
`GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

*** Runtime Error 9: float invalid operation
*** at: B64F5C20h

Run-All    v0.8.2
Quick-Test v0.9.1
REBOL       2.7.8.4.2
Red/System Test Suite

ok - logic.............................81 / 81
ok - byte..............................40 / 40
ok - c-string..........................20 / 20
ok - struct...........................116 / 116
ok - pointer...........................69 / 69
ok - cast..............................88 / 88
ok - alias.............................23 / 23
ok - length............................11 / 11
ok - null..............................11 / 11
ok - enum..............................19 / 19
ok - float.............................60 / 60
ok - float32...........................55 / 55
ok - lib...............................13 / 13
ok - get-pointer........................5 / 5
ok - float-pointer.....................61 / 61
ok - namespace........................109 / 109
ok - not...............................44 / 44
ok - size..............................37 / 37
ok - function...........................6 / 6
ok - case..............................64 / 64
ok - switch............................85 / 85
ok - exit...............................9 / 9
ok - return............................25 / 25
ok - modulo............................29 / 29
ok - math-mixed.......................114 / 114
ok - infix..............................2 / 2
ok - conditional.......................13 / 13
ok - common............................16 / 16
ok - byte-auto.......................3636 / 3636
ok - integer-auto....................2778 / 2778
ok - maths-auto......................1661 / 1661
ok - float-auto......................1617 / 1617
ok - float32-auto....................1023 / 1023
ok - alias-compile......................3 / 3
ok - cast-compile......................16 / 16
ok - comp-err...........................2 / 2
ok - exit-err...........................3 / 3
ok - int-literals-err...................1 / 1
ok - output.............................3 / 3
ok - return-err.........................5 / 5
ok - conditions-required-err...........23 / 23
ok - inference-err......................1 / 1
ok - callback-err.......................2 / 2
ok - infix-compile......................3 / 3
ok - not-compile........................1 / 1
ok - print..............................3 / 3
ok - enumerations compile..............12 / 12
ok - pointer-compile....................2 / 2
ok - namespace compiler tests...........5 / 5

ok - Red/System Test Suite..........12031 / 12031
       in 0:00:42.94891

Congratulations on the new release! It's hard to believe how fast 
things are moving these recently.

SDL Samples Ubuntu 12.10 SDL version: 1.2.15... all OK

Doc, are you thinking of doing anything in particular to make the 
lexer be easily accessed from a hosting environment? It would be 
nice to see Red supported in a deeper way by something like Sublime 
Text.

DanielN: thanks for testing, I will have a look at the GTK issue 
later today.

AdrianS: we can make the lexer part of the upcoming public API accessible 
when compiling Red script as shared library. If you have suggestions 
about how the lexer should be exposed in order to facilitate integration 
with code editors, let me know.

Kaj: I got a reply from AVIRA telling me that the binary I've submitted 
was clean:

https://analysis.avira.com/en/status?uniqueid=KwPWqW429CmT1fNpbHWQgDxQ8ryDHO4T&incidentid=1301128

WebKit ( I don't ckow if this can help... ) : GTK3 sample work fine 
for me after "/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 libwebkit-1.0.so.2"... 
and sometimes  : ./LazySundayAfternoon-Browser 
java version ("1.6.0_24"

OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11.5) (6b24-1.11.5-0ubuntu1~12.10.1)
OpenJDK Server VM (b1uild 20.0-b12, mixed mode)

*** Runtime Error 32: segmentation fault
*** at: A66DB327h

Daniel, thanks for testing. The GTK error is recent; I reported it 
last week or so. But I didn't get the float error with it, which 
makes me think I need to add back FPU initialisation to it

WebKit has been changing their API a lot, so the binding is only 
for the older version. Segfaults and such would be expected when 
fooling it. Also, the GTK binding is developed for GTK 2 at the moment. 
I'll update them when I start running newer versions myself

Anti-virus: should I suspect that we have to submit every build of 
every version of every program to all anti-virus vendors to get them 
recognised?

Only if Red does stuff that will trip the heuristics, or be run on 
a system with AVG (since they require you to pay them money to revert 
a false positive diagnosis). Which we can't know ahead of time because 
those heruistics are unpublished and thus untrustable.

Ah, another modern extortion scheme

Yeah. The way it goes with AVG is that any false positive dispute 
is automatically rejected, and escalation to dispute that requires 
paid support. I have refused to use AVG ever since they refused to 
retract their false positive diagnosis of R3 alpha 94.

Or rather an earlier alpha, the last private alpha build before we 
switched to public alphas.

It was a while ago, so pardon any mixups with the version.

Good tip. I'll use the same policy when advising Windows users

MS has a really great false positive dispute process. I've never 
had a problem with them. Even in cases where the diagnosis isn't 
false as much as it is iffy, such as diagnostic tools that admins 
need to use but which you don't want non-admins to use, it just labels 
tham as "Medium Risk" and lets you choose to allow them to run if 
you like on a case-by-case basis.

The new Windows Defenfer in Win8 is pretty much a relabeled Microsoft 
Security Essentials with a few more features. Haven't had a problem 
with MSE yet that wasn't resolvable.

I've just got an answer from F-Prot, they just whitelisted the sample 
binary I've sent to them but didn't send me any info about their 
heuristics... So I think that in order to avoid loosing my time trying 
to get any info from those AV vendors, I'll just add a specific signature 
to Red generated binaries, so that they can be whitelisted by all 
AV vendors (when possible). I can't see what else I could do, except 
warn users about some crappy AV software.

So, I could just add a static c-string!, what good unique signature 
sequence could we use, and how long should it be?

Be sure to not include such a signature in Red's output of user binaries. 
We want to keep Red itself whitelisted even if Red's users decide 
to make malware with it.

Good point.

OTOH, that could be a good selling point for Red. ;-)

Not for long, since they'll stop whitelisting Red. It's similar to 
leaking your authenticode signature to malware writers.

What point is virus scanning if you need generic signatures that 
it will let through?

Afaik, authenticode is supposed to handle that process, at least 
to a certain extent. You cryptographically sign your binaries so 
when they do bad things there's someone to blame. If your binaries 
aren't signed, they're assumed to be bad by some people.

That's signing the complete binary, that's much stronger than adding 
a signature

Right, it's definitely better than a whitelist constant.