44 new of 46 responses total.
Hmm. yes. Even non-telnetting types should keep their bio info in a .plan file, so it can be seen by conventional users. Hmm.
[5] the vanilla/conflist is not giving me the form to maintain it. I belive that this is because it checks first to see if .cflist is writable, and finds that it is *not*. We need something like partutil to make the .cflist writable so we can maintain it over the web. I can fix it as root, but not as srw, as I cannot grant cfadmg group status to my own .cflist file. This is the way unix works.
Hmmm...I think I fixed it so it will be turned readable if you try reading it, but I think the "readable" function may be reporting its state before it gets reassigned to group cfadmg. Or something. Need to study this. In any case, I thought I already had done something about making partutil work on .cflists.
I don't know if it counts as a bug, really, but all "help backtalk" returns is three boxes and a percent sign.
Here are you entering "help backtalk"?
I believe I've fixed the name-setting bug. People who join conferences via backtalk should no longer have their addresses appended to their name. If you joined before I fixed the bug, the bug fix is too late to help you. You are stuck with the junk in your name until you use the "change your name in this conference" command in pistachio to fix it. I may have fixed the .cflist bug that Steve mentioned above. I'm posting from lynx, which is so weird that I can't really tell if it is working or not. My ISP has flaked out again. :-(
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Yeah, the Pistachio buttons are on izzy, and izzy is in cloud-cuckoo land. It's nice to have the pictures someplace other than Grex, because things run faster that way, but it'd be neat if we had a way to fall back to another site if izzy is down.
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A little bit of flakiness occurred in the text entry field in vanilla, but I can't seem to replicate it. I was entering text, and scrolled up to look at previous responses while my cursor was in the text entry field. When I scrolled back down, there were two cursors in the field--one solid, and one flashing. I clicked in the field, and it seemed to get things back to normal--there was only one cursor, happily blinking away--but the backspace key, rather than deleting the previous letter, would remove that leter and replace it with a letter from the word before. I'm using netscape 2.0 with vanilla from a Mac IIsi, if any of this is relevant.
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Re #14: Whatever caused that, it wasn't Backtalk and there is nothing Backtalk can do about it. It's a browser problem. Re #15: Izzy was up yesterday, but they've set up the file system to be shared between two computers via NFS, and they are having big problems. Accessing some files seems to take forever. So it wouldn't astonish me if it was really, really slow about sending the button images yesterday. It seems to be better today. (cross fingers). But I don't think there are any images on the welcome page. I don't know why that would be hanging. I've installed a new version of Backtalk that should fix the problem with updating sum files incorrectly when you link items.
Yup, looks like the linking bug is fixed all right.
OK, user bios work a bit better now, though I think they still need a bit of work. If you click on the login id's of any other user, it does the moral equivalent of a "finger" on him, displaying that user's .plan file. If you do so on your own login, you get a chance to edit your .plan file. You also get fields to edit your full name, change your password, and nuke your account. None of these will work, nor are any of them likely to start working in the near future. Instead, we will probably modify the scripts to stop offering the options. The bios do still leave the office and phone fields in the user's full name. This still needs to be fixed up.
Re 14. Jan is right (in 16) that is a Netscape 2.0 bug, valerie. It seems to be mac-only as far as I can tell. I run into it from time to time. It's annoying, but not deadly.
The list of users commands in both vanilla and pistachio should more or less work now. They are still slow, but they do seem functional. They allow you to list all users (showing just a few per screen) or search the user database for a any users with a particular string in their names Probably there should be an option to search for an exact match with a particular login name. That, at least, would be fast.
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Don't apologize. We do need bug reports. The timeout is mainly there for insurance against infinite loops while debugging. It's clear that on Grex it has to be lengthened quite a lot. I agree we should give image sizes. On #23, when it didn't give options to continue reading new responses, were you in vanilla or pistachio?
I put sizes on the grex logo. Most of the buttons on the pistachio read page (both the ones in the control panel like "NEXT ITEM" and the ones in the text window like "UNSEEN") already had sizes, but it had been left out on a few (though not on ones Valerie would have seen...just fairwitness controls). There are probably some sizeless buttons here and there on other pages, but I'll have to look for them.
I've increased the timeout on Grex. There isn't a really good way to read just selected responses of an item in either of the interfaces right now. (Though it wouldn't be hard to put into an interface). The best you can do now is in Pistachio: - On the "list of items" page, Check the item, Check "read new responses", and hit the "Read" button. This will read the new responses in the item, which, since you say it was all marked seen read it, there aren't any of. - You'll get the read page, with just the response box, and a little "view responses" button at the top. Type the response range you want to see into the box, and hit the button. Obviously this won't work with a new item. The "read new" will show the whole thing. There needs to be an option for that on the Read button on the items page.
I wonder if Valerie isn't using Vanilla. I wasn't able to reproduce the problem of losing the "NEXT ITEM" button under pistachio. And Vanilla is more inclined to collect up all the output in a buffer and then send it in a single blast when it is done composing the item that Pistachio is. Pistachio tends to send chunks of text along as they are completed.
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You still got a timeout reading "The Flood"? Wow. Timeout is set at eight minutes. I've read it several times and even the previous 3 minute timeout never got me. I'm not so worried about the timeouts, per se. I would plan to turn them off in a production system. We put those in on HVCN because if one of our scripts went into an infinite loop, it was difficult or impossible to kill it. I am rather amazed that you were willing to wait 8 minutes. The Pistachio "UNSEEN" button marks that response, and all subsequent responses unseen, and skips on to the next item, so if you do another "read new" you can pick up where you left off. Alt tags on the buttons is a good idea. I tend to think of those as support for non-graphical browsers, which would be hopelessly lost in Pistachio anyway. But I guess there are other uses. I put the "HELP" button into Pistachio, but never thought of anything for it to do. Someday I'll have to do something about that. Wow. You can fit a lot in a name. I wonder what Picospan thinks about that? On my browser, the Post button is kind of highlit. I suppose I could do something nicer with it.
Looks like mile-long names are A-OK with Picospan.
NEW BUG: I tried to use the thing to edit my conference hot list but when i tried to "change" the file, it said it could not write to the .cfonce file. now isn't it supposed to edit .cflist?
Yup. I think I've fixed that bug, but not quite 100%. It now edits your .cflist, but leaves it permitted wrong so Picospan can't read it anymore. I've implemented a fix to the second bug, but haven't installed it on Grex yet, so for the moment, I'd advise not editting your .cflist with backtalk. If you tried doing so before the first bug fix, I suspect you have an empty file named ".cfdir/..cfdir" if you had a .cfdir, or one name ".cfdir" if you didn't. (I know, I was really off my head when I wrote that bit of code.) You should remove it, especially in the latter case. If you've tried it since the first fix I did, I recommend doing "chmod o+r .cflist" or, if you have a .cfdir, "chmod o+r .cfdir/.cflist". Sorry. There also seems to be a bug with Backtalk remembering some forgotten items. I haven't chased this down yet.
Yipes - I haven't been here in way too long. Valerie, there are problems in Vanilla which can cause it to lose the option to continue reading. Your resp:23 experience is a known defect. Thanks for reporting it, though, I keep forgetting about it. I was responding to daniel, sorry. I agree that embedding the pixel sizes would be a good idea. I am still having trouble with Backtalk paying no attention to my cflist and participation files. It seems odd that it would choose me to discriminate against. Alas it is almost 3AM and I can't figure it out right now. I'm using picospan, because every item is all new to me when viewed in Backtalk.
I also think vanilla needs a cutoff on repnses. When the number is too large, one could be told that there are more responses, and ask if you want to go on. this would ease the problem with timeouts. How many respnses should we issue before asking this? 50? 100? I have been assuming that the problem which I am seeing with my participation files came from a gltch which was causing partutil to fail to be able to change the perms. In fact, the perms were not getting changed. So I changed them manually to see what would happen. Now all my participation files and my .cflist should be rw accessible to backtalk, but the symptoms are unchaged. It refuses to read any of them. I seem to have no conferences in my cflist and nothing seems to have been read. This was working OK in the backtalk conference a few weeks ago, but is broken there, now too. I am going to have to set aside some time to reproduce this with "repeatfile" and the -r option, so I can see what's happening under the debugger, unless I get a brainstorm first. Maybe I can do it this weekend.
Also, when I "check mark" all the items I want to read, and then click on "Read Selected Items" it shows the ENTIRE list of responses to that item which takes quite a while to download. Is it supposed to do that? Or am I supposed to use the option to "Read New Responses" and I will not have that problem? Anyway, I am waiting to use the "read new responses" feature until the "forget" bug is fixed :) Uhm, if you didn't understand that, I don't blame you. I barely understood what I just typed.
Steve's problem should be fixed. An early version of partutil had the really evil bug of creating a file named ".cfdir" in the home directories of users with no .cfdir directory. When backtalk saw Steve's .cfdir file, it thought he had a .cfdir, and went looking for participation files under it, which it couldn't find....yuck. Webcaucus shows 25 responses at a time. You have to hit a MORE button to get more. There is are buttons for PREVIOUS PAGE, NEXT PAGE and LAST PAGE. The "List of Items" page is one I still want to redesign. To do what Ryan wants with the current page, select the items you want, and hit do a "Read New". It will read only new responses in those items, and it won't skip items with no new responses (it'll just show no responses). The whole thing is not very intuitive. I still need to figure out the forget bug.
OK, here's something that would make using BT a bit easier. I think it would be very helpful if you displayed the users' .cflist file on the startup page that tells you to put a bookmark to. (http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/pw/bt/pistachio/begin) It would be neat for that page to show the CF's listed (in the same order as .cflist) and you be able to click on the conference you want to see. Just a suggestion.
A good one too.
Hi. I am a lynx user. Coming here via MSIE is a major trip. Can I not use tabs? Pistachio . . Pistach-IO . . is so slow as to be unusable but it really, really, really is incredibly spiffy. I mean, it really is. Would vanilla run faster? Would it run and melt and drip? What now . . am I to click on "Post" Here goes nothin' . .
Pistachio is faster if you get it out of frames mode. If the control panel at the top of the page doesn't scroll when you scroll the window, you are in frames mode. I think I made this default off on Grex, but if you have it on, you can turn it off. Click the "Edit Personal Settings" button on the entrace page, then the "Set Options" button on the bottom of the Personal Info page, and there is a check box for using frames. If you aren't in frames mode, vanilla and pistachio are about the same speed. I'm not sure I really understand why backtalk is so slow on Grex.
You have several choices: