Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

Hi Folks,

How's everyone's experience of the P2P file sharing going?
I'd have to say that mine has been very patchy, if not just down right frustrating!
Sure I've aquired a dozen or so very nice decks, and a big thank you to all those who have made their decks available, but most of the time I just get the Operation abandoned etc message. In fact, about 9 times out of 10 that I bring up a preview, see a great looking Fool card, click on Request Deck, the file transmission begins and I wait, and I wait, but eventually the afore mentioned failed message pops up.
Why does this happen after I've been able to see the preview? Is the sharer disconnecting before the download is complete?

I have only shared a couple of decks so far, notably the R.G. Tarot, supposedly by Richard Gardner, although it's probably a rip off from a much older deck issued by the Insight Institute. I've not seen it in its entirety anywhere else on the net, so I thought some of you may be interested. It comes complete with both deck and card info, (which is more than I can say for many of the decks I have been lucky enough to download). I had hoped to post a few more images and an essay on my member's page (Sumada), but I can't update/load anything in My Settings. it just says there is an error, so I'm stummped on that one.
For some reason the deck name on the file exchange only shows as R.G even though I have unshared it, renamed it and re-shared it again, but anyway that's where you'll find it. And if your having as much trouble as I am but would really like this deck, reply with your email address and I'll just send you the zipped file as an attachement.

Also, I was wondering if there was any way of telling if a deck you have shared is actively being downloaded? or if shared decks had any sort of hit counter?

Regards to all,

Sumada

Hi Sumada,

The Operation Abandoned message is a bit of a catch-all. It probably means that something has timed-out. It is often impossible to work out exactly where the transfer has broken down, which was one of the hardest things about programming the P2P thing. I do seem to remember that you said you were using a dial-up connection, which suggests to me that this is a time-out problem related to that. Certainly for me that figure is about the other way round, i.e. 9 times out of 10 I download the deck successfully, and perhaps once out of ten I get the same message that you do.

The first question to ask, which might shed some light on this, is after how long are you seeing this message. Crucially, is it after more than ten minutes? I will explain the significance of this. One of the more important timeouts that I have configured in the program is a response received timeout which is a property on a software component the program uses. I set this at ten minutes, for the following reason. When someone requests and starts to download a deck they are making somebody elses machine do some work, in serving up that deck. OK, that work is minimized, and it is on a low priority thread etc, but it is still work. I wanted to avoid a scenario where a novice user could go requesting scores of decks, willy nilly, get bored after a couple of minutes with each one and go cancelling them and requesting more. This sort of behaviour would be anti-social. So I built in that mechanism which stops someone cancelling a transfer once they have started it, i.e. the message which appears when you try to close the form, which tells you that you have to wait for the transfer to complete. I did this in order to try to educate users about the seriousness of opening a transaction because by doing so they are eating into someone else's processor time. But this begs the question when should the user be allowed to close the form. Obviously sometimes the transaction will fail, because the other user has switched off or whatever. So the timeout is a necessary property to set, to indicate when the program should stop trying and thus allow the user to close the form. Ten minutes seemed like a reasonable limit to me, based on the information I could collect about average download times. At one point I had it set at twenty minutes, but I could not get any user feedback on whether this was useful in reducing the Operation Abandonded errors, so I reverted to ten.

So then, when do you normally get these messages? If it is after about ten minutes it is probably to do with this. If so we can try raising it again when I compile the next beta and you can tell me if it makes any difference. If it is less than ten minutes it is probably because of the quality of your dial-up line. Sometimes there are blips on a dial-up connection which might be enough to stop the transfer, even if your modem can recover from them and not lose its internet connection.

You can tell if I deck has been requested by looking in the system event log. The Windows service that handles deck requests logs each request and deck served, the time it occured, and any associated error messages.

Re the error in My Settings, do you mean that you go to the page and see an error message straight away, instead of the page, or do you mean an error occurs when you try to do some specific operation, like saving your changes? If so, could you do a tiny bit of testing and try to find out which change is causing the problem? If I can get the same error I will be able to fix it.

Cheers,
Richard

BTW, I am going to be away for a few days, so if you reply quickly to this don't be surprised if my response is a bit slow.

Oh yeah, re the name of the deck...If the deck contains a PackInfo.xml file the program will pick the name up from that, otherwise it will use the name of the folder. You should change the name in the PackInfo.xml file too.