VoteOften Read Me

As mentioned in my newsletter article, VoteOften is an application that
sends HTTP requests to a single specified server with multiple threads.
It is intended solely as an instructional application detailing how to
manage a multithreaded BeOS networking application.

You will probably want to know how to get the application working.
You can start the application from either the command-line or by
double-clicking.  By default, there are no voting threads created.
There is also no GUI interface for creating additional threads.  This is
left as an exercise to the user.

So, how do you manage the number of voters?  Thorough the command-line and
BApplication's ArgvReceived() function.  Here is the syntax:

=NUMBER - sets the number of voters to NUMBER
+NUMBER - adds NUMBER of voters
-NUMBER - removes NUMBER of voters

There is a hard-coded maximum number of voters (set at 10 right now). You will not
be able to add more than that number of voters.  Also, as the application in single
launch, you can use other Terminals to change the number of voters.

To change whether the voters are voting or not, you can either use the
button in the interface (labelled either 'Stuff the Ballot!' or 'Cease And Desist!',
or you can use command-line argunents:

CEASE - will stop the voting if it is going
STUFF - will start the voting if it is stopped

Finally, one last note.  The interface leaves a lot to be desired.  As noted earlier,
there is no way to change the number of voters, or to set the targets.  There is also
one thing that you may not notice immediately: the current vote count is simply
the number of votes that the current set of voters have cast (in fact it is implemented
by simply asking the voters what they have done.)  This means that when a voter gets
arrested, the vote count will be decremented by the number of votes that voter has
cast.  If you want a running tally of total votes, you will have to implement it
yourself.

stephen beaulieu <hippo@be.com>