I've noticed that there are a certain number of users who login on a regular
basis, or stay logged in, or maintain a session in some way. I realize that
what I'm seeing in the output of who doesn't necessarily represent people who
are available at any given moment. I'd be curious to know how many of us are
"around" during the day at some point.

That said, I've also noticed that "party" gets a fair amount of new user
traffic. People pop in to check it out, and often simply "pop out" once they
notice that no one is around. I've been trying (broken pipes aside) to stay
in party to be there to greet new members whenever possible, when I've had
time during the day (I'm in mountain time). 

Would anyone else be willing to commit to spending a little more time in party
when they have availability, to help get the conversation going?

One final party-related item: do we have a grex source tree we're working off,
or are we using a stock version of party? I'd love to talk to someone in
charge here about working up another binary that has a little more support
for color and formatting, to make party easier to use. I've browsed through
the stock source for party, and I don't think it would require a lot of heavy
lifting or anything, and we could certainly have a color binary that accessed
the same data as the current binary. 

40 responses total.

I should also point out, user gascony has also been trying, and falcon, to
be there in party.

Thanks for your efforts and investigations, tfurrows. I never was much
for party and with my current job I have even less time.  BTW there
are a lot of party "noises" that people used to use that are rather
interesting and useful.

The party source we use should be the same as we note in the FAQ (can I
have a copy of Grex's party program?).

A while back I downloaded the party source pointed to by the FAQ and was
able to build it on my Linux Mint box with only minor modifications. It
works fine there. Funny that "noises" are mentioned cuz I made a derivative
build with the MUD-like "noises" removed and in which the '/' command
behaves like the IRC '/me' command. I just located the modified source and
can post a link to a tarball if anyone is interested.

See /cyberspace/bin/party-faq about noises.
<you sigh gustily>

Yeah, I have a copy of the source in my /src folder on grex. I feel we should
have a grex-specific version, or a few. I'd love to see the version with a
better /me style command like you're describing Robert, and I'd love to see
one with color as well and a few formatting changes. I think it would be easy
to do, and the binaries could access the same data and be used simultaneously
with the normal/stock binary. What do we need to do to get that moving?? (or,
who do we need to pester?)

There is a more-or-less Grex specific version of all of this software that's
stored in a Subversion repository here on Grex. We should probably move all
of that to git and Github. There's nothing in there that's particularly
secret (secret keys or passwords or whatever) so I see no reason to not let
other folks look at it.

I'll see about putting together a Grex community and we'll go from there.

What time in GMT/UTC are most people logged into party?
I am London UK time, GMT.
Also: Would it be easy to use party as a stand alone talker for a BBS?

I was just logged in but can be on at a certain time..let me know

:) 
Well i will be back at 12:30 GMT which is my lunchtime. Fingers crossed!
:) 

We may all end up in there at different times; it's about 19:00GMT now, about
12:00MST for me. Once you're in party, don't be afraid to use the - command
to view the last n lines, and chat away even if people aren't currently in
there. We will respond when we get there!

alright then..
hmmm...

It's happening! Right 'now' - 'Party', it's Lunchtime!! :P (GMT)

We're getting more traffic in party, let's keep it going! I am still
interested in getting access to the grex source tree for party, so we can spin
a color version at the very least (which would use the same data, no changes
on that side, both could run). 

Here's another oddity... I wrote a small perl script so that if a person puts
their GMT offset in their .plan file (e.g. "GMT-7:00") the script can parse
the output from finger, add/subtract the offset, and tell you what time it
is locally for that user. Example:

./plantime tfurrows
Current time for tfurrows: 22:33
date
Tue Jan 10 00:34:00 EST 2017

So, it gets the gmtime, and subtracts the offset. In my .plan I have:

cat ~/.plan
....[lots of lines]....
Timezone: GMT-7:00 (MST, Arizona)

It just parses out the GMT bit, and is flexible enough to accept "GMT-7" or
the 7:00 format. Anyway, it's simple, but it's nice to know what time it is
for different users you might be looking for or interacting with. Now, to get
people to populate their .plan files with their offsets... I guess you could
ask them at signup?

One last question: is there a place on grex to share things like this? It's
in /z/t/f/tfurrows/bin/plantime right now, and is readable by all, but it
seems like there should be a place where we can share these kinds of things.

A note: the plantime idea was because we had people in party today in the UK,
USA, and Spain. I googled their current time, but it would be nice to just
run a '!plantime <username>' right from party and have the info without having
to ask or search.

We live in the different parts of the world, so that information regarding time
zone is  necessary. I suggest compiling a custom 'finger' program that displays
a local time  related configuration, so that 'finger ${USERNAME}' command will
suffice to know about  user's time zone information.

I don't know that we need to compile a custom finger command. Take a look at
~tfurrows/share/bin/plantime and tell me what you think. Users can voluntarily
place a GMT offset in their .plan file, and then other users can run plantime
<username> to find out that person's local time. They can run it from party
easily as well, using "!". 

That said, I think it would be cool if at signup we could requier a GMT
offset, which would be placed in the .plan file for new users automatically.

We also need a way to inspire old members to add their time zone to their
.plan file.

We don't need to compile a new 'finger' program, since user information 
is recorded in the .plan file.

The signup question need to be modified to also gather information about 
user timezone.

For existing users, just send a notification email to add timezone entry 
in the ~/.plan file.

All, with a little poking around, we found that party has a setting called
"filter". This was intended to allow users to ignore other users if they found
them annoying (per the documentation.) But, it can also be used to
process/parse the output of party in any way one wishes. The setting is
temporary if set within party, or can be set in the partytab system-wide, or
in the env variable PARTYOPTS on a per-user basis.

I've wanted to improve the output of party since I started using it. I say
"improve" but what I really mean is make it more usable for me personally :)
I wanted minor formatting changes, and of course, color. 

The "filter" option makes this easily possible. I've created a simple example
filter script in perl, which anyone can check out in
~tfurrows/share/bin/wildparty

To test the script, just open party and type:


 :set filter="~tfurrows/share/bin/wildparty"

Please let me know if it works for you from there, or feel free to just copy
the script to anywhere in your own path and use it from there. I think it
would be interesting to have people create their own party filters, in their
own language of choice, to see what we can all come up with... make it a
really wild party!

Also, if you want to use it every time, you simply set your env as described
in the wildparty script.

re #20
Is it going to steal my gribblies?

Most probably.

I use:  filter="./wildparty"
when i log in to party now, for a nice colourized and better formatted output;
but have had trouble seting my environment variables so to keep this filter
persistant. How do i set this?/Help!! :) 

Depends on your shell.

mijk: what shell are you using? The instructions in the wildparty script
itself are for bash. I believe you can use export in the same way with ksh...
have you tried the command in the comments in wildparty?

tfurrows: i was using the menu shell, but now reset (via the menu :) ) to
bash. I edited my .profile file and exported the PARTYOPTS env variable there.
(i also made a typo of the variable: PARTYOPS > PARTYOPTS ;) )
It all works perfectly now. Excellent! 

How do I set the termcaps on my HP 2628A thermal printer terminal?

Ok...vt52 seems to work when I dial in

stty iuclc

re #30
I had to do that with my Tandy CoCo2

"Made in Mexico" is the future.
https://tinyurl.com/y5p8wha4

"Universal Income" is an elitist idea, born from the assumption that 
virtual slaves in foreign countries will supply all of the nation's 
goods and services while the populace lays around in air-conditioned 
government housing being served meals-on-wheels by robots carted around 
by autonomous vehicles.

Come at me grex!

re #32
"...The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and
effeminate age; but if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the
same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser
motives, the standard of the republic" -Edward Gibbons

We cling to the past because we can not handle the present, which is
riddled adult problems like aging, empty nests and financial concerns.

Let's talk about Nintendo Switch and soy products.

Who is "we" and what is "cling"?

And what is "soy face"? Who gets to define "woke"?
What are your pronouns?

re #7
RuPaul gets to decide

I just can't.
I'm triggered.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss