New OS X Widget

[strayduck]

Sounds good. In thinking through the pitfalls of the drop down menu for stats update frequency: would probably also have to keep the mechanism if the update failed.

For example: if someone chooses to update every 24 hours but the time they made the selection is the time that stanford updates their stats, they may never get a successful update (because it would fail every day at the time that the stats are not available). So to the user the update choices would be the same, but on the backend there would have to still be a built-in "retry every N minutes until success".

[pgwalsh]

Right... and the retry could be set too.

Currently the timer doesn't go on the retry or regularly until you view the widget. So if time expires it doesn't get triggered until you view it.

[strayduck]

Quick updates on the folding@home widget:

It's been three days and three WUs on the Mac Pro and still no missing stats have filled in. This is after a reboot for a software update.

Additionally, there is a message that is showing that is cut off: "...will go to sleep for 1 day as there have been ...". A day has passed and I have also disabled/re-enabled folding@home in the System Prefs.




On my MacBook Pro I installed folding@home and the widget and made it (probably) half way through a WU and it doesn't seem to know it's own progress.



Ideas?

[pgwalsh]

Do you have any old folding@home directories? Was folding@home active when you installed it? It seems that it know's the process is active by the green light. I haven't seen anything like that before and we've tested a lot of clients. Do you have a new folding@home client on your machine?

I'd remove the widget and reinstall it. Look's like there's a lot of missing data.

[strayduck]

Hey pgwalsh,

Lo and behold I did seem to have InCrease still installed on the MacBook Pro. Ripped it out and it now knows what it's doing and reports that it's on it's third WU already.

So two problems remain (probably only one that you can address fully):

(1) Has been 2-3 days and my Mac Pro has not started folding again (even after restarts of the computer and folding@home in Sys Prefs). I ask you about it as the message the widget is reporting is truncated and knowing what it says in full will help me to find this problem elsewhere in the forums. What is visible is in the image in my last post

"...will go to sleep for 1 day as there have been ..."

I have searched in spotlight for the phrase "will go to sleep" and nothing comes up. Manual perusing of console leads to the same. Ideas?

(2) You told me to let you know if my stats never update. Might be a bit early yet but we're looking at 5 days and some of those missing fields (mostly from stanford) still haven't filled in yet. Stats outage still in effect for you? Anyone we should bug about this?

[pgwalsh]

There's several fields still missing from Stanford, so not much I can do about that.

For the first one you'll need to go into your Library > Folding@Home > work directory and delete the contents. Then restart folding@home.

[strayduck]

Hooray. Numbers.



Once we've got the refresh time gentle enough to not get us frequent dashboard users banned I would go ahead and recommend this be included as an add-on to the main stanford Mac client. It is *that* useful in making the software feel polished and complete. A program that installs the way I'm imagining is pCalc; when you install the main app and run it, it asks if you want to add the widget as well. Most sensible people say "yes".

[strayduck]

Just a quick update to say that the "adjacent teammates" section does *not* seem to be hanging on to previous numbers -- I just refreshed my widget and it went from showing my rank to a blank box. Ideas?

[pgwalsh]

What do you mean you refreshed your widget?

[strayduck]

I mean I hit the dashboard button on my keyboard, the bottom block swirled as if it were updating, and I watched my "adjacent teammates" block go from populated to blank.

[pgwalsh]

Well that's odd, but it could happen if there was an error on the web page. Any other fields having issues?

[strayduck]

yeah, appears, in my case, to be some of the team OS X-related fields. So further up in the "Team OS X" block I CAN see:
- team score
- team rank
- User WU
- User score
- User WU

...but user rank in team is {blank} of 1000

Summary: "user rank" in "Team OS X" section and the entire "Adjacent Teammates" sections are pooched but all the rest of the fields look good.

So the question is of keeping "bad" data or bad response from server from overwriting locally cached good data.

Cheers.

[pgwalsh]

Trying closing out the widget and trashing the preference file and spawn a new one afterwards.

[strayduck]

Whoops. I think you might have replied while I was editing my last post. This glitch is something I've seen before and it always corrects itself at some point which makes me think your idea of a bad server response is a likely scenario. If that is true the question would be if the widget can determine a good response from a bad one and only overwrite the local data if the newer data is "good"

[pgwalsh]

The widget can tell the difference in response, but when you flip the widget over it discards the current info.