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It ain't workin' for me.

At 7/20/07 01:58 AM, ShortMonkey wrote: It ain't workin' for me.

that sucks.

At 7/19/07 07:13 PM, NickScott wrote: It looks really good, but I keep getting this error message:

"Either the program has been discontinued, or there are problems with NG Log. Please try again later, or right now, because this system sucks."

My internet works fine, and everyone else's seems to work.

I get that message too, how do i get it to work?

If you KEEP getting the Runtime 9 error, I'm going to ask you to check out the source code of the portal at the moment of the problem, and PM me the part with the last few submitted movies (to find that part, just search the last movie's title). I had another Runtime 9 error all the time while testing, which was due to the fact that icon-less submissions have another code...

If you KEEP getting the "discontinued" error, that sucks because there's nothing you can do but to try again and again...

Thanks everyone for appreciating my work :)

thanks for the redesigned portal guard Casualties!

hopefully this version will run better than the old one at home :3 i'll be sure to test it out and letcha know, but keep up the good work as always, cutie pie ;)

Fantastic! I've been waiting a whole 7 and a quarter hours for this!! (yes, I downloaded it, realised that it wouldn't work, then found it again XD)
Great work, Casualty, as always!!

At 7/20/07 09:57 AM, BlueHippo wrote: hopefully this version will run better than the old one at home :3 i'll be sure to test it out and letcha know, but keep up the good work as always, cutie pie ;)

Make sure you do :3

Minor issue: the program sometimes shows the wrong number of new entries (see e.g. this screenshot).

At 7/19/07 02:47 PM, backflipair wrote: That's fantastic, cheers.

I might give it a try.

Possibly related to the above: in this case, Portal Guard actually misses a new entry ("Wade RPG").

I checked, though, and it turns out that that entry's number is actually higher than that of the one above it ("Wade RPG" has 389160, whereas "TimeScape2" has 389159), so you probably can't rely on entries being strictly in order at all times anymore.

The order was actually fixed about five minutes later, and Portal Guard found "Wade RPG" then as well, but it'd probably still be a good idea to keep an actual list of "under judgement" flashes and, after pulling, check all the ones that are currently UJ in the portal to see if they are already on the list instead of relying on the ID numbers only (which I suppose is what PG does, currently).

Sorry for double-posting, but I grabbed a copy of the portal after PG stopped working, as you asked for in the LUL. You can get it here; it contains both a complete copy of the portal saved in Mozilla as well as a bare, unmodified wgotten (so to speak) one. :) Hope it'll help you isolate the problem!

Thanks much Caz.

At 7/21/07 07:58 AM, schneelocke wrote: Sorry for double-posting, but I grabbed a copy of the portal after PG stopped working, as you asked for in the LUL. You can get it here; it contains both a complete copy of the portal saved in Mozilla as well as a bare, unmodified wgotten (so to speak) one. :) Hope it'll help you isolate the problem!

I'm terribly sorry, but after investigating the file(s) more than 4 times on several aspects, I have found absolutely nothing that should disrupt Portal Guard...

I think the only possible reason left is a local one, like the shut down of your connection for a split second, even though this is very unlikely to happen. To be honest, I have no idea of what's causing PG to shut down though I appreciate the hard work you put in these screen shots and sources...

At 7/22/07 01:26 PM, Casualty wrote: I'm terribly sorry, but after investigating the file(s) more than 4 times on several aspects, I have found absolutely nothing that should disrupt Portal Guard...

That matches my experiences... I've had a case yesterday where PG stopped working, and I noticed it pretty quickly; I manually restarted it, and after that, it kept on updating on its own again (for a while, anyway), even though the portal hadn't actually changed compared to what it looked like when PG stopped working. So the portal's content can't have been the reason why it stopped working in that case at least.

I think the only possible reason left is a local one, like the shut down of your connection for a split second, even though this is very unlikely to happen. To be honest, I have no idea of what's causing PG to shut down though I appreciate the hard work you put in these screen shots and sources...

My connection isn't shutting down (right now, it's been up for about 4 hours, and PG stopped working several times in that time), but something I'm wondering about is the following: I know that my ISP's DNS servers are a bit slow sometimes, so occasionally, I get timeouts when name resolutions are made.

Could it be that PG runs into one of those? If this results in an error that's not caught by the program, I could see why it might stop working; so it might be worth either creating a version where the NG IP address is hardcoded in instead of the hostname (for testing purposes, if nothing else) or changing the program to do an explicit name resolution *once* and then cache the IP address and continue using that.

I can try to fire up Ethereal (or Wireshark or whatever it's called these days) to see if I can catch the problem and see what's actually happening then, but given that it sometimes works for hours without problems, I can't promise anything.

Wow I never knew this kind of program existed.

WTF why didn't anyone ever tell me?!?!?! I've been B/Ping the old fashioned way all along

Here's something else that's pretty strange... just on a whim, I decided to write down the times when the program stops working, and here's what I got so far (each of these is the time of the last reported successful pull):

21:23:30
21:43:35
22:03:23
22:23:27
22:43:24
-
23:23:32

Notice something? They're all more or less 20 minutes apart. (The dash indicates that there was no malfunction around 23:03, BTW.

What's even stranger, BTW, is that at around 22:30, I actually restarted PG for unrelated reasons (I was wondering if it was leaking memory), yet the program *still* stopped working 20 minutes after the last time, at 22:43. This seems to suggest that it's something external that's causing this, as opposed to PG's internal state somehow getting messed up.

Strange, isn't it? I have no idea what to make of this.

It's possible that time outs would be the cause of all this... I have no function implanted that detects them, and if you receive a blank or unrelated page (as trough a time out) PG just doesn't react anymore.

This also fits with the "press the button and it'll work again". PG is stuck, and when you order it to start all over by pressing the button, it just retrieves the page as usual, no problem.

I don't know if I could fix this, and I won't be trying for now. I'm really sorry, but it's late today and I feel like chillaxing on the BBS a bit. (Yes, this is an awesome word indeed). Monday, all my efforts will be put into NG Log, and I have no idea how long it might take to adjust it.

At 7/22/07 05:48 PM, Casualty wrote: It's possible that time outs would be the cause of all this... I have no function implanted that detects them, and if you receive a blank or unrelated page (as trough a time out) PG just doesn't react anymore.

This also fits with the "press the button and it'll work again". PG is stuck, and when you order it to start all over by pressing the button, it just retrieves the page as usual, no problem.

I don't know if I could fix this, and I won't be trying for now. I'm really sorry, but it's late today and I feel like chillaxing on the BBS a bit. (Yes, this is an awesome word indeed). Monday, all my efforts will be put into NG Log, and I have no idea how long it might take to adjust it.

That's OK - take your time. :)

I can confirm that it's indeed DNS issues, BTW. I did a packet capture; the dump file is here, and it's quite telling. There's several working pulls, in intervals of about 15 to 17 seconds; the last one is at around 83 seconds into the capture. At ~99 seconds, PG attempts another pull, but the DNS requests receive no answer, and after 4 tries, around 107 seconds, it apparently gives up on the name resolution. I manually restart it at ~157 seconds, then, and it starts working again just fine.

Given all this, I would suggest

a) making sure that all possible errors are, indeed, handled gracefully;
b) doing a resolution of the NG hostname once, when the program is started, and using the obtained IP address from then on. (Also, if this initial resolution fails, fall back down to 38.119.130.61; chances are this will still be correct.)

b) is probably the more important one for getting this fixed, as well as the one that should be easier to implement, but a) should also be part of any kind of software development, so if you get around to it eventually, it's probably a good idea to make sure errors, exceptions etc. are handled properly, too. :)

BTW, I still keep getting those "runtime error 9" messages all the time, too, although I can't say why they sometimes appear and sometimes don't. On some occasions, the program runs fine for an entire day without problems; on other occasions, it crashes every 30 seconds, which - needless to say - makes it totally unusable. :/

And because the error appears as a pop-under (in relation to other windows, notably one's browser etc.), you won't even notice until you remember to manually check PG to see if it died again. :/

the previous portal guard didn't work for me, but this version seems to be working fine so far, im glad i downloaded it.

At 7/27/07 04:38 AM, schneelocke wrote: BTW, I still keep getting those "runtime error 9" messages all the time, too, although I can't say why they sometimes appear and sometimes don't. On some occasions, the program runs fine for an entire day without problems; on other occasions, it crashes every 30 seconds, which - needless to say - makes it totally unusable. :/

And because the error appears as a pop-under (in relation to other windows, notably one's browser etc.), you won't even notice until you remember to manually check PG to see if it died again. :/

I kept getting those every 2 minutes or so, making Portal Guard completely useless, but I installed it again and t seems to work fine, I do some times get those runtime errors but that's all to do with all my BandWidth being used up.

Yet there seems to be some minor kinks, but it may all be down to my slow connection.

Great job! This is very useful now since I don't remember the last flash I viewed, and there is no indication that I viewed it to begin with.

Thanks!

Holy cow this is useful! One suggestion, I would change the sound to the old vote noise. :)

About the Runtime 9 error: I'm pretty sure it isn't an error caused by the program, but that it's happening because PG gets a wrong input. And finding out what causes that is hell. Therefor, you're going to have to check your task bar every now and then to make sure PG is still running...

At 7/28/07 05:47 AM, TomatoGlock wrote: Holy cow this is useful! One suggestion, I would change the sound to the old vote noise. :)

That's a good idea, but I don't have the sound here...

flash portal live is cool downloas it here
http://deadlock32.newgrounds.com/news/po st/7869

its good because mac users and pc users can use it

A new version of Portal Guard is availabe!. Now the pop ups show the last submission's title and the list doesn't show the same movie info anymore when there are several new movies...

At 7/28/07 06:54 AM, fuzz wrote: flash portal live is cool downloas it here
http://deadlock32.newgrounds.com/news/po st/7869

its good because mac users and pc users can use it

Meh, it's almost just as easy to check the Portal, IMO...

At 7/28/07 06:08 AM, Casualty wrote: About the Runtime 9 error: I'm pretty sure it isn't an error caused by the program, but that it's happening because PG gets a wrong input. And finding out what causes that is hell. Therefor, you're going to have to check your task bar every now and then to make sure PG is still running...

That may well be the case, but PG - like any program! - should handle bad input gracefully. If you get junk trying to pull in the portal, for example, you should detect that and try again (and the same goes for other situations, too). Always code defensively.

At 7/28/07 08:34 AM, Casualty wrote: A new version of Portal Guard is availabe!. Now the pop ups show the last submission's title and the list doesn't show the same movie info anymore when there are several new movies...

Cool! *downloads*

OK, here's a very minor issue (just something that could get for the next version): if there's more than one new flash after any given check, the new flashes are listed in the wrong order. For example, right now, my "New UJ entries" list looks like this:

390475: "!metalgearawsom e!" by sefa2009
390474: "Random sketches 1" by Twist-Chao06
390469: "Click Master" by xSTACHUx
390470: "-Sickness-" by james (devilsparks)
390471: "mouse over" by jagondudo
390472: "Blades of Doom" by Sidorio
390473: "That's My Bush S1 EP1" by Darkside7000 / Darkside5000

Note that 390469 to 390473 are listed in ascending order, even though they should be in descending order.

Oh yeah, and the "PG stops working after pulling the portal fails due to DNS problems" issue is still present, too (but at least I haven't gotten any "Runtime Error 9" so far...)

At 7/20/07 12:32 AM, Bazi wrote: I keep getting this error after Portal Gaurd is running more than about 10-15 mins:

Run-time error "9":

Subscript out of range

Help pweeese? :)

I get the runtime error pretty often too...
Sometimes, it can work for more than an hour, sometimes, I get the Run-time error after only a couple of minutes...