Grex System Announcements - Fall 2015/Winter 2016

Dec 31 16:40 UTC 2015

This item is for system announcements (new computer equipment on Grex,
system upgrades, Grex meetings, etc.).  Personal announcements should go
back in item 2; Grex system *problems* belong in the next item (#4).

response 2 of 54:

Jan 15 13:33 UTC 2016

The votes have now been counted.  cross, kentn and tod each received one vote
from members.  cross received two non-member votes, while kentn and tod each
received one non-member vote.
 
So cross, tod, and kentn have each been elected to a two-year term as a
Director of Cyberspace Communications, Inc. There is one Directorship
vacant.

response 4 of 54:

Jan 16 15:09 UTC 2016

I've installed the "par" paragraph formatter on Grex.  If you've used the
"fmt" text formatter, "par" can do the same thing and a lot more.  For
example, you can set it up to understand comments so that reformatting
comments works like you'd expect.
 
For example, if you had comments in code like these and wanted to reformat
them to a wider width:

      # Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
      # consectetur adipiscing
      # elit. Nulla consequat, ipsum
      # sit amet placerat blandit, nisi
      # eros interdum nunc, sit amet
      # facilisis enim est nec neque. In
      # venenatis, odio sit amet eleifend

Using fmt, you might get:

      # Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, # consectetur adipiscing # elit.
      Nulla consequat, ipsum # sit amet placerat blandit, nisi #
      eros interdum nunc, sit amet # facilisis enim est nec neque.
      In # venenatis, odio sit amet eleifend

with the comment characters embededded in the resulting formatted
paragraph.

Using par, you'd get:

      # Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla
      # consequat, ipsum sit amet placerat blandit, nisi eros interdum
      # nunc, sit amet facilisis enim est nec neque. In venenatis, odio
      # sit amet eleifend

Because par can handle comments appropriately, it brings the comment
characters to the beginning of each line. This is real handy for
programmers doing comments.  Par also handles hanging indents correctly
(if you have text with 2 or more indented lines).  There are lots of
options to par.  See the man page, which includes a number of "before
and after" examples of what par can do.

I'm using the vim text editor to filter these paragraphs through the
formatter program (with !}fmt or !}par).  You can run other amounts
of text through these formatters, using the appropriate text objects.
Mostly, I use par to format paragraphs of comments. par is not specific
to vi or vim, so can work from the command line or in other editors
or applications.

response 6 of 54:

Jan 19 04:47 UTC 2016

I've used it for bbs responses and it seems to work okay (lines
aren't too long). The default seems to be more like 70 or 75.
You can try 'par 80' and see.  It probably still won't format to
exactly 80 characters by default.

It tries, generally, to format the lines into something that
looks reasonable, so a lot depends on how much text there is
to format, in addition to whatever default or specified width
there is.  Since it won't go over the line length specified, and
it has to break on word boundaries, the lines end up no longer
than the width specified and are sometimes quite a bit shorter,
depending on the length of the words you use and where they land
in relation to end of each line.

response 8 of 54:

Sep 25 15:42 UTC 2016

I'd like to announce that I'm still successfully able to use the
MindTerm java terminal to connect to Grex.  It takes a several extra
clicks to let your browser and Java know you are aware the connection
may not be secure, etc.  But after that, it worked for me, using Firefox
v48.  This may be an alternative for those who cannot install a terminal
such as PuTTY to connect, or for connecting via a tablet for cellphone
(if you don't have a terminal app installed there).  A lot depends on
how picky your browser is about running Java applications. YMMV.


    https://grex.org/mindterm/applet.html