Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

I just got around to uploading version 8.11, which is the first version of the program that is designed to work with the Orphalese Deck Service as a separate add on. The Orphalese Deck Service is the Windows Service which runs in the background and lets users share their decks on the P2P Deck Exchange.

The main reason for separating this out as a distinct download, as opposed to bundling it with the rest of the program, is that a certain proportion of users kept getting errors from the Windows Installer when trying to install or uninstall the program, and I think these were related to the Deck Service. I have written a custom installer for the new Orphalese Deck Service and hopefully it will not have the same problems.

I would be really grateful if anyone else can try out the new Deck Service and program and check there are no obvious problems that I have overlooked. I am going to be switching off the old deck exchange shortly, at which point everyone will have to download the new version. I am sorry for the inconvenience this will cause, but unfortunately it has to be this way because the new system uses a different underlying technology.

Thanks for this new update it works very well and have solved my problems, here http://www.orphalese.willowsheart.co.uk ... b3c31f47c2

The program works well and I've tried the "P2P Deck Exchange"(manage to search and download), tried emailing the spread and that too is working well. Thumbs Up

Hi Richard,

My OS is Vista Home Premium and I use the Firefox browser.

I upgraded to the new version 8.11.1.2 and installed the new deck service. I notice that the file share icon is still gray in my P2P window, though I don’t know if that’s significant.

Several times since the upgrade, I’ve tried to download decks, and somewhere between 40 seconds and 1 minute the “file transmission in progress” message changes to “Unable to find other user – they might have logged off.”

Thereafter I keep getting the same “Unable to find other user – they might have logged off” message for every selection, so I close and reopen the program and the same thing keeps happening. I get part way through the download of a deck and it clicks off before it’s complete, losing whatever was downloaded.

I’ve tried with different decks from different “Shared By” names, and it’s all the same frustration. Out of about 15 attempts, I've been able to download one deck, which took less than 1 minute to download.

Hope you can sort this out. Thanx!

Gisela

I am now using Version 8.11 and don't know if I've done something wrong or not, but, when I installed the Deck Service program, I got an error message sayin the service hadn't been installed and my Deck Service in Orphalese is still gray.

I have my program installed on my D:\ drive instead of C:\ and my deck service is on C:\ could this be the problem, however, there's no option to install to a separate drive. I managed to download a file from P2P, but cannot share any. When I start the Deck Service application a Microsoft Visual Studio program starts, and I don't know how to use this, is this supposed to happen? Can someone enlighten me as to any problems that have been found since the new update, thankyou.

Carol

Hi Richard,

In addition to experiencing aborted deck downloads any time a deck takes longer than one minute to come down, version 8.11.1.2 also can't remember what deck to use upon program start.

I had it checked to open with whatever deck I was using last time, but next time I opened the program I found the yellow and black striped box of amnesia. This happened repeatedly until I changed the setting to always use the same default deck, and so far that works, but I'd rather just pick up with whatever I'd used last.

Hope you're doing okay,
Hugs
Gisela

Gisela,

Are you still getting the issue with the Shared Decks icon not being enabled? After installing the Deck Service you would have to stop and start the Tarot program, but I am guessing you have done that, obviously. The test would be to look in Control Panel >> Tools >> Admin Tools >> Services and see if the Orphalese Deck Service is marked as running. To do this you select it in the list. If the Services window gives you the options to Stop or Restart the service then it is running. If it gives you the option to Start the service then it is stopped. That is the same test that the program is doing when it decides to enable that button or not. If it is stopped you can start it manually by clicking on the Start option right there in the Services window.

Re the "user has logged off" message, are you still getting that? I did get that one time, very much as you described (for all the decks the user was sharing). I think it was because the user had logged off, or the connect to them was broken, and the decks still showed as available for a few minutes after. The server does an internal audit every ten minutes to see who is really logged on, so that is when they would have disappeared. Have you had more success since? What sort of overall success rate would you say you are getting?

Cheers,
Richard

Carol,

It sounds like the installer did not manage to install the Deck Service, obviously. I am not sure the different drive letter would have been the reason, it should just try to install to the Program Files folder, wherever that is. When you tried to start the installed Deck Service application manually Windows could not start it. This is to be expected because it is a background Windows Service rather than a normal application (even though they all have the .exe extension). If I try to do that on my machine I get a message saying something like "This is a service, not an application. You can't start it like that". I am a bit surprised that you had Visual Studio start up. I would imagine that is because you share your computer with someone who writes Windows programs (it is not a standard program that you find on most machines, only programmers would bother to install it) and it started up to try to debug what had gone wrong. Maybe you saw a message just before it started asking if you wanted to use the default "debugger"? The people at Microsoft have no idea how funny that sounds to British ears.

...All of which leaves us no further on about why the service could not be installed in the first place. You could try looking in the same folder where you found the executable above, i.e. Program Files/Orphalese Deck Service and look for a file called "DeckService.InstallLog". That might contain a clue about what went wrong. If it is not too long maybe you could paste it back in here.

Cheers,
Richard

Hi Richard,

Glad to see you're back from wherever, and hope you're feeling refreshed.

Yes, the share icon remains obstinately gray. I've never seen it otherwise.

I went into Control Panel as you suggested.

Orphalese Deck Service is listed, with blanks in the Description and Status columns, Startup Type is Automatic, Log On As says .\Gisela

When I clicked the Start link, I got a box with an Exclamation point inside a yellow triangle stating:
Windows could not start the Orphalese Deck service on Local Computer.
Error 1069: The service did not start due to a logon failure.
[OK]

And yes, I still get "user has logged off" at the 1 minute mark of any download, regardless of who the sharer might be. If I shut down and reopen the p2p service, I can dl decks from the same person, as long as they take less than 1 minute to complete the dl, so i do not believe it's that they have logged off, at least not most of the time. I have been able to successfully download decks that take less than a minute, but none that take more.

And the program still can't remember what deck I used last.

I wish I had been away, I've just been too busy to log on!

It sounds like there is some default timeout which needs to be overridden somewhere. I tried to test it for myself but I couldn't find any deck which took that long to download, I guess because I have pretty good broadband, which is why I hadn't noticed the problem. I have some time over Easter so I will look at it then.

Re the yellow and black striped deck of forgetfulness, do you have anything set up as a default start-up deck in options? If the program was always looking for some deck which had been moved or deleted that might explain it.

Hi Richard,

If it helps, my one minute timeouts generally occur when a deck is over about 5 megs in size, though that's not a hard cutoff.

And miraculously, the deck amnesia problem has spontaneously corrected itself! No clue what changed, but glad it's no longer a problem.

Thanx,
Gisela