ROOL News: Latest news comments

"USB sticks available from ROOL site" by Graham Judd (1393)

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:40:53 +0000

Will this run as fast as a native strongarm riscPC machine? And will I have use of the USB ports, and printer drivers on the PC?

"Bug tracker temporarily offline" by Martin Bazley (331)

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:47:06 +0000

It isn’t the syntax colouring again, is it?

"New offers and new prices for the latest Developer Tools" by Steve Revill (20)

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:31:52 +0100

Note to existing ROOL DDE CD owners: if you fall outside of the six month window for the offers above, you can still get a half-price ISO image download for the latest CD. See this page for more information.

"Planned web site down time" by Andrew Hodgkinson (6)

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:31:47 +0100

There were even more infinite loop bugs in the YAML syntax library so I just got rid of it in the end.

Obviously there will be unscheduled down time occasionally; there’s no such thing as bug free software or perfectly reliable hardware.

"Planned web site down time" by Martin Bazley (331)

Sun, 01 May 2011 01:06:57 +0100

What about that down time, then? “Failed to connect to post 80: Connection refused”. Was that planned?

"Planned web site down time" by Andrew Hodgkinson (6)

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:06:20 +0100

Hopefully this is now fixed so source browsing has been turned back on again for the Subversion tree.

"Planned web site down time" by Andrew Hodgkinson (6)

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:28:06 +0100

It was all too good to be true… :-)

I’ve identified a serious problem in the bug tracker that causes Ruby processes to get stuck spinning in a tight loop under certain conditions and this interferes badly with the wider hosting environment, especially as more and more such processes begin to accumulate. If you’ve had problems with the ROOL site running very slowly or generating errors instead of serving pages recently, that’s a symptom of this problem.

The fault is triggered by attempts to view particular files in the Subversion repository. Something goes wrong inside a piece of code that handles syntax colouring. This code has not been changed in the recent web site upgrade so the failure is currently a mystery and probably points to bugs or incompatibilities in supporting pieces of software, such as shared bits of library code, or possibly even the Ruby interpreter itself – we are using a faster, lighter weight Ruby interpreter for the updated ROOL site compared with the one that we ran before.

As a temporary measure I have disabled Subversion browsing. RISC OS code is in CVS and that’s unaffected – only the web site sources in Subversion cannot be viewed through the web interface. You can still download tarballs and look at Changeset information.

If you try to browse Subversion, you’ll be asked to log into Hub if you haven’t already, then additionally asked to log into the bug tracker itself. This is something a public user would never normally have to do. No public login credentials are available. The whole point is that access to this mechanism is temporarily shut off in order to basically save the bug tracker from itself!

I don’t know when this will be fixed but hopefully not many people will care too much anyway, since the overwhelming majority of interest is in the RISC OS sources in CVS.

"Planned web site down time" by Andrew Hodgkinson (6)

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:00:22 +0000

[…] the main PRM index page takes ages to load in Internet Explorer

I just tried it in MSIE 6 under DarWINE. It looked ugly as MSIE 6 isn’t supported and can’t handle the transparent PNGs, apart from anything else, but it rendered almost instantly.

I then tried in MSIE 8 under Win 7 on VMWare. I see what you mean! It just sits there soaking CPU for almost a minute before rendering the page. Way to go Microsoft! I think it just can’t handle a large number of links, or perhaps flowing text; either way, there’s nothing I could do short of removing the page references altogether. Besides, MSIE isn’t supported :-) – we recommend you use NetSurf or a WebKit derivative like Safari or Chrome.

For giggles I tried upgrading to the shiny new MSIE 9 (not being pushed out over Windows Update for some reason, strange; had to install it manually). The big tagline on the download page is “Fast is now beautiful”. Different issues. It shows the page quickly, but as you scroll there a big delays for rendering. Worse, it seems horribly buggy; when I hover my pointer over links, there’s a huge delay, then the whole page reformats to something very wide for no reason at all until I move the pointer away from the link.

Just don’t use MSIE. It’s never worked and it never will.

Microsoft: The More We Change, The More We Stay The Same.

"Planned web site down time" by Jeffrey Lee (213)

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:37:49 +0000

A wiki with images and proper page history?

And a list of which pages link to the current page! However you might want to rethink the decision of having the links listed at the bottom of the page – the main PRM index page takes ages to load in Internet Explorer (but Netsurf seems OK, so I’m just going to blame IE’s page layout algorithm).

"Planned web site down time" by Jeffrey Lee (213)

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:22:47 +0000

A wiki with images and proper page history? It’s like you knew exactly what I wanted! ;)

Nice work!