Saturday, February 09, 2002 - No Simpler than this' Archive

last night 10ish i finally decided to look into what a "tools menu" might be. i thought i'd seen one once, weeks ago, but then it disappeared and i kind-of left it with feeling stupid.

a quick google search on userland showed me that i might want to start by scanning my .roots for 'item#1's... i found some, and quite a bit of code defending against them.. i zapped the 'item#1's and as that didnt do anything on a restart, i exited and moved all tools to a temp directory.

radio started and kept running at 97% cpu utilization. that was not good. putting tools back didnt help-- thus i actually had to hack in the startup process.

i commented out the line initializing tools in the system startupscript. that got me somewhere. it got radio back, still no tools menu, but at least no infinite loops.

anyway, somewhere in this simple process, some bit of code decided to erase all my sites. the cloud was gone, my isp was gone, my local pages.. all gone. going back and forth i republished the whole website and _thank _murphy got everything back all shiny.

back to debugging the tools menu thing. i wound up running the frontier tools menu initialization, 'following' the code to see where it went. learned that you have to stop and follow a few times to actually follow things.. but eventually i got to system.verbs.builtins.frontier.tools.installsubmenu()

something was very wrong here:

while (linetext != "-") { //search for the sub-menu -- it may already exist in the Tools menu
if string.lower (linetext) == string.lower (menuName) {
  flNewMenu = false};
op.go (dir, 1);
if dir == right {
  dir = down};
linetext = op.getLineText ();
if linetext > menuName { //12/20/00 JES: make tools submenus alphabetical
  break}}

this code would loop forever with linetext == blankstring.

that was bad. i didnt want to muck about with @'s and tests and break conditions so i went and deleted everything under user.tools.databases and reran the thing. an 'item#1' was added and i had more problems UNTIL i put a tool back. that worked.

after this i put all the tools back to where they were supposed to be and while mypictures isnt happy, at least i have that fabled menu item available now.

if someone that's handier with usertalk would argue with userland to have this thought about and fixed i'd appreciate. for now, i'm glad to have 'everything back'. with fiddling around and other tracks going, this affair set me back 6 hrs last night. I didnt want to go to sleep without a homepage in place. I'm sure that other radioheads can relate to that. you dont just 404 yourself.

anyhow, i'm off to play.