• WX

    From Android8675@VERT/SHODAN to All on Wed Mar 2 06:58:00 2016
    Having an issue with the current SyncWX build.

    JavaScript C:\SBBS\xtrn\syncWXremix\wxlanguage.js line 68: TypeError: opts.language is undefined

    Any thoughts? Started happening after pulling the latest from github.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Shodan's Core @ ShodansCore.com (Port 2323 for Nethack)
  • From echicken@VERT/ECBBS to Android8675 on Wed Mar 2 10:55:00 2016
    Re: WX
    By: Android8675 to All on Wed Mar 02 2016 11:58:35

    JavaScript C:\SBBS\xtrn\syncWXremix\wxlanguage.js line 68: TypeError: opts.language is undefined

    Looks like there are a few problems with that script. I would suggest trying the following:

    Change line 9 to:

    if (typeof opts.language === 'undefined') {
    opts.language = 'EN';

    If that helps, perhaps Ken can incorporate it.

    ---
    echicken
    electronic chicken bbs - bbs.electronicchicken.com - 416-273-7230
    þ Synchronet þ electronic chicken bbs - bbs.electronicchicken.com
  • From KenDB3@VERT/KD3NET to echicken on Fri Mar 4 02:14:00 2016
    Re: WX
    By: Android8675 to All on Wed Mar 02 2016 11:58:35

    JavaScript C:\SBBS\xtrn\syncWXremix\wxlanguage.js line 68: TypeError: opts.language is undefined

    Looks like there are a few problems with that script. I would suggest trying the following:

    Change line 9 to:

    if (typeof opts.language === 'undefined') {
    opts.language = 'EN';

    If that helps, perhaps Ken can incorporate it.

    Thanks EC! Slowly making some changes.

    FYI folks, the latest on GitHub (not ready for release yet, however) adds the ability to have English (EN), Spanish (SP), or Italian (IT). Anyone feel like doing some translations for French?

    Also, I have a request to add the ability to add a Header and Footer file to the display. I've been tweaking this, but none of that has hit the GitHub version yet. The lines for "Low / High", "Lo / Hi", "L / H", etc... will go away in languages other than English when I am done with the Header/Footer due to me not wanting to support that crazy bit of code in every possible language.

    ~KenDB3

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ KD3net-Rhode Island's only BBS about nothing. http://bbs.kd3.us
  • From KenDB3@VERT/KD3NET to Android8675 on Fri Mar 4 19:51:00 2016
    Re: WX
    By: Android8675 to All on Wed Mar 02 2016 11:58:35

    JavaScript C:\SBBS\xtrn\syncWXremix\wxlanguage.js line 68: TypeError: opts.language is undefined

    Looks like there are a few problems with that script. I would suggest trying the following:

    Change line 9 to:

    if (typeof opts.language === 'undefined') {
    opts.language = 'EN';

    If that helps, perhaps Ken can incorporate it.

    I rewrote that section, and tweaked some stuff in the main weather.js as well. Grab a copy from GitHub and let me know how it goes. Just FYI, anything on GitHub right now is all very ~beta~, lol. If you want something stable, grab this:
    ftp://bbs.kd3.us/main/KD3DOORS/sWXr104.zip

    The only thing the GitHub code has over Ver 1.04 is the beginnings of language support (aka internationalization) for Spanish and Italian (other translations are welcome if someone wants to submit some). However, for languages other than English I've made the characters UTF-8/Unicode as opposed to CP437, since the accents on non-English characters will not show up correctly in CP437. (Ex. Monday in Italian is Lunedì, ending in an "i" with the grave accent which looks awkward in CP437).

    ~KenDB3

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ KD3net-Rhode Island's only BBS about nothing. http://bbs.kd3.us
  • From Digital Man@VERT to KenDB3 on Sat Mar 5 14:37:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: KenDB3 to Android8675 on Sat Mar 05 2016 12:51 am

    The only thing the GitHub code has over Ver 1.04 is the beginnings of language support (aka internationalization) for Spanish and Italian (other translations are welcome if someone wants to submit some). However, for languages other than English I've made the characters UTF-8/Unicode as opposed to CP437, since the accents on non-English characters will not show up correctly in CP437. (Ex. Monday in Italian is Lunedì, ending in an "i" with the grave accent which looks awkward in CP437).

    Are you using a terminal program that supports UTF-8?

    Most BBS terminal programs that I'm aware of (e.g. SyncTERM) do not support UTF-8, so that's not going to work well with the majority of clients. Or is this for a web UI (where UTF-8 is widely supported)?

    digital man

    Synchronet "Real Fact" #48:
    Synchronet program was named 'sbbs' instead of 'sync' to avoid conflict w/Unix. Norco, CA WX: 59.6øF, 84.0% humidity, 3 mph ESE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net
  • From KenDB3@VERT/KD3NET to Digital Man on Sun Mar 6 17:41:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: Digital Man to KenDB3 on Sat Mar 05 2016 07:37 pm

    The only thing the GitHub code has over Ver 1.04 is the beginnings of
    language support (aka internationalization) for Spanish and Italian
    (other translations are welcome if someone wants to submit some).
    However, for languages other than English I've made the characters
    UTF-8/Unicode as opposed to CP437, since the accents on non-English
    characters will not show up correctly in CP437. (Ex. Monday in Italian
    is Lunedì, ending in an "i" with the grave accent which looks awkward
    in CP437).

    Are you using a terminal program that supports UTF-8?

    Most BBS terminal programs that I'm aware of (e.g. SyncTERM) do not support UTF-8, so that's not going to work well with the majority of clients. Or is this for a web UI (where UTF-8 is widely supported)?

    So, it is for the Terminal, and not a Web UI.

    Honestly, this was my attempt to support a request I got (on GitHub) for i18n support. First, I had to look up "i18n" to find out it meant internationalization. But, then I saw that Weather Underground's API actually supports this, but it's a bit of a catch-22.

    The data that comes back has UTF-8 characters, like the days of the week example I threw into my last post. I am pretty sure the W.U. API wasn't expecting much stuff other than Web UI. I really have no idea what character set would support the accented characters besides UTF-8, but I tested with few different fonts in SyncTERM, including ISO-8859-15 West European and ISO-8859-2 Central European, but no luck.

    I'm able to see everything in UTF-8 just fine using PuTTY release 0.66, using UTF-8 as the Remote Character Set on the Translations tab, and with a font of Courier (14-pt, Clear Type) on the Appearance tab.

    I even made some changes to the Degrees symbol where if you chose something other than English it will change to the UTF-8 character.

    However, your question has me concerned that maybe I am trying to support a feature that will never get used (or I'll never really get quite right). Especially since I feel like I have no idea what character set someone would use when dialing into a BBS in a non-English country, or even how many various character sets would be out there and what kind of trouble I would make for myself trying to figure it all out.

    Thoughts? Suggestions? Comments? Quizzical looks? lol

    API info for anyone interested: http://api.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs?d=language-support

    ~KenDB3

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ KD3net-Rhode Island's only BBS about nothing. http://bbs.kd3.us
  • From Digital Man@VERT to KenDB3 on Sun Mar 6 15:35:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: KenDB3 to Digital Man on Sun Mar 06 2016 10:41 pm

    Re: Re: WX
    By: Digital Man to KenDB3 on Sat Mar 05 2016 07:37 pm

    The only thing the GitHub code has over Ver 1.04 is the beginnings of
    language support (aka internationalization) for Spanish and Italian
    (other translations are welcome if someone wants to submit some).
    However, for languages other than English I've made the characters
    UTF-8/Unicode as opposed to CP437, since the accents on non-English
    characters will not show up correctly in CP437. (Ex. Monday in Italian
    is Lunedì, ending in an "i" with the grave accent which looks awkward
    in CP437).

    Are you using a terminal program that supports UTF-8?

    Most BBS terminal programs that I'm aware of (e.g. SyncTERM) do not support UTF-8, so that's not going to work well with the majority of clients. Or is this for a web UI (where UTF-8 is widely supported)?

    So, it is for the Terminal, and not a Web UI.

    Honestly, this was my attempt to support a request I got (on GitHub) for i18n support. First, I had to look up "i18n" to find out it meant internationalization. But, then I saw that Weather Underground's API actually supports this, but it's a bit of a catch-22.

    The data that comes back has UTF-8 characters, like the days of the week example I threw into my last post. I am pretty sure the W.U. API wasn't expecting much stuff other than Web UI. I really have no idea what character set would support the accented characters besides UTF-8, but I tested with few different fonts in SyncTERM, including ISO-8859-15 West European and ISO-8859-2 Central European, but no luck.

    I'm able to see everything in UTF-8 just fine using PuTTY release 0.66, using UTF-8 as the Remote Character Set on the Translations tab, and with a font of Courier (14-pt, Clear Type) on the Appearance tab.

    Right, but how does the rest of the BBS look with PuTTY set that way? Probably not very good. Right now, Synchronet doesn't support any way of detecting or tracking the user's character set or encoding and pretty much assumes CP437. You can send UTF-8 from your script, but most clients aren't going to display it correctly and there's really no way for you to know which clients will or will not display it correctly.

    digital man

    Synchronet "Real Fact" #1:
    Synchronet version 2 for DOS and OS/2 was released to the public domain in 1997.
    Norco, CA WX: 54.3øF, 74.0% humidity, 0 mph ESE wind, 0.20 inches rain/24hrs

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net
  • From Android8675@VERT/SHODAN to echicken on Wed Mar 9 07:18:00 2016
    Re: WX
    By: echicken to Android8675 on Wed Mar 02 2016 03:55 pm

    JavaScript C:\SBBS\xtrn\syncWXremix\wxlanguage.js line 68:
    TypeError: opts.language is undefined

    Looks like there are a few problems with that script. I would suggest trying the following:

    Change line 9 to:

    if (typeof opts.language === 'undefined') {
    opts.language = 'EN';

    Yep, thanks I see Ken put the fix in github, so all good now.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Shodan's Core @ ShodansCore.com (Port 2323 for Nethack)
  • From KenDB3@VERT/KD3NET to Digital Man on Tue Mar 29 07:12:00 2016
    Right, but how does the rest of the BBS look with PuTTY set that way? Probably not very good. Right now, Synchronet doesn't support any way of detecting or tracking the user's character set or encoding and pretty much assumes CP437. You can send UTF-8 from your script, but most clients aren't going to display it correctly and there's really no way for you to know which clients will or will not display it correctly.

    digital man

    So, I haven't forgotten about this, I've just been rather tied up. I see what your aiming at, and I think I'm at a bit of a disadvantage not knowing some history. It sounds like you are trying to politely tell me that UTF-8/Unicode is really not used in the BBS community, even outside the US. But, how do other countries utilize special characters? Or, would it be a case where those characters are ignored and replaced with the Non-Accented characters that are more CP437 friendly?

    I think my problem is that data is coming back from Weather Underground in UTF-8, which is not a problem when it is in (US) English, but starts to present a problem with the couple of Latin based languages I tried to implement. Is there any way to clean/convert the text before displaying it?

    Someone asked for this feature, and I thought it would be an easier ask than some of the other requests I got, but it proved more challenging thanks to the UTF-8 characters.

    Any advice is welcome :-)

    ~KenDB3

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ KD3net-Rhode Island's only BBS about nothing. http://bbs.kd3.us
  • From Doctor Who@VERT/THE5THD to KenDB3 on Tue Mar 29 12:23:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: KenDB3 to Digital Man on Tue Mar 29 2016 11:12 am

    I think my problem is that data is coming back from Weather Underground in UTF-8, which is not a problem when it is in (US) English, but starts to present a problem with the couple of Latin based languages I tried to implement. Is there any way to clean/convert the text before displaying it?

    Someone asked for this feature, and I thought it would be an easier ask than some of the other requests I got, but it proved more challenging thanks to the UTF-8 characters.

    Any advice is welcome :-)

    ~KenDB3

    If you're running on Linux, you could pass the text through iconv. Something like "cat utf8encodedfile.txt | iconv -f utf8 -t cp437 > cp437encodedfile.txt"

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ The 5th Dimension: the5thd.synchro.net
  • From Digital Man@VERT to KenDB3 on Tue Mar 29 13:37:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: KenDB3 to Digital Man on Tue Mar 29 2016 11:12 am

    Right, but how does the rest of the BBS look with PuTTY set that way? Probably not very good. Right now, Synchronet doesn't support any way of detecting or tracking the user's character set or encoding and pretty much assumes CP437. You can send UTF-8 from your script, but most clients aren't going to display it correctly and there's really no way for you to know which clients will or will not display it correctly.

    digital man

    So, I haven't forgotten about this, I've just been rather tied up. I see what your aiming at, and I think I'm at a bit of a disadvantage not knowing some history. It sounds like you are trying to politely tell me that UTF-8/Unicode is really not used in the BBS community, even outside the US.

    I think in China it's used, but those BBSes (e.g. ptt.cc) are not really ANSI-BBS.

    But, how do other countries utilize special characters?

    Depends on the country/locale. For many western countries, CP437 supplies enough specialized characters. For others, they just require that the client is preconfigured for the proper character set (e.g. CP855 in soviet block countries).

    Or, would it be a
    case where those characters are ignored and replaced with the Non-Accented characters that are more CP437 friendly?

    I don't follow.

    I think my problem is that data is coming back from Weather Underground in UTF-8, which is not a problem when it is in (US) English, but starts to present a problem with the couple of Latin based languages I tried to implement. Is there any way to clean/convert the text before displaying it?

    Yes, UTF-8 could be translated, but the results may not be very good/useful, depending on stuff (e.g. the source and target locale).

    Someone asked for this feature, and I thought it would be an easier ask than some of the other requests I got, but it proved more challenging thanks to the UTF-8 characters.

    Any advice is welcome :-)

    Stick to US-English? :-) Seriously though, I don't really have any advice on this topic as I haven't been big on translating software to other locales or worrying about non-CP437-capable terminals. Maybe Deuce has some advice. <shrug>

    digital man

    Synchronet "Real Fact" #7:
    Synchronet was originally intended as a replacement for WWIV BBS software. Norco, CA WX: 56.7øF, 53.0% humidity, 5 mph ENE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net
  • From Deuce@VERT/BBSDEV to Digital Man on Tue Apr 12 21:32:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: Digital Man to KenDB3 on Tue Mar 29 2016 05:37 pm

    I think my problem is that data is coming back from Weather Underground in UTF-8, which is not a problem when it is in (US) English, but starts to present a problem with the couple of Latin based languages I tried to implement. Is there any way to clean/convert the text before displaying it?

    Yes, UTF-8 could be translated, but the results may not be very good/useful, depending on stuff (e.g. the source and target locale).

    Someone asked for this feature, and I thought it would be an easier ask than some of the other requests I got, but it proved more challenging thanks to the UTF-8 characters.

    Any advice is welcome :-)

    Stick to US-English? :-) Seriously though, I don't really have any advice on this topic as I haven't been big on translating software to other locales or worrying about non-CP437-capable terminals. Maybe Deuce has some advice.

    In the latest CVS, there's a utf8_cp437.js file you can load()... after you do, you can call utf8_cp437(utf8_string) and it returns a cp437 version of the same string. It handles most common codepoints, but unknown ones are replaced with a question mark. If you find ones that need to be added, please let us know.

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ The future of BBSing
  • From KenDB3@VERT/KD3NET to Deuce on Wed Apr 13 10:15:00 2016
    Re: Re: WX
    By: Deuce to Digital Man on Wed Apr 13 2016 01:32 am

    I think my problem is that data is coming back from Weather
    Underground in UTF-8, which is not a problem when it is in (US)
    English, but starts to present a problem with the couple of Latin
    based languages I tried to implement. Is there any way to
    clean/convert the text before displaying it?

    Yes, UTF-8 could be translated, but the results may not be very
    good/useful, depending on stuff (e.g. the source and target locale).

    Someone asked for this feature, and I thought it would be an easier
    ask than some of the other requests I got, but it proved more
    challenging thanks to the UTF-8 characters.

    Any advice is welcome :-)

    Stick to US-English? :-) Seriously though, I don't really have any
    advice on this topic as I haven't been big on translating software to
    other locales or worrying about non-CP437-capable terminals. Maybe
    Deuce has some advice.

    In the latest CVS, there's a utf8_cp437.js file you can load()... after you do, you can call utf8_cp437(utf8_string) and it returns a cp437 version of the same string. It handles most common codepoints, but unknown ones are replaced with a question mark. If you find ones that need to be added, please let us know.

    Thanks Deuce. You and DM rock. I'll see if I can utilize it and how it plays along with the Weather Underground data coming back. If it's more trouble than it is worth, I may take DM's rather realistic advise and stick to English, lol.

    Much appreciated, gentlemen.

    ~KenDB3

    ---
    þ Synchronet þ KD3net-Rhode Island's only BBS about nothing. http://bbs.kd3.us