[Coco] CoCo chat

[Roger Taylor]

At 10:58 PM 8/8/2004, you wrote:
>I keep checking in and hardly seeing anyone in Roger's chat rooms on 
>CoCo3.com.
>Probably just my bad timing, but I know Roger is needing a lot of us to hit it
>(preferably at once) and do some beta chatting and bug reporting so he can get
>it working smoothly. Do we need to set up a schedule or something?
>I was always an isolated CoConut until I found the online community in the 
>late
>90's. Now I feel like a starving man who finally arrived at a restraunt 
>just as
>they are closing.

Consider the restaurant a Waffle House.  :)

As for the chat rooms, it's becoming very hard to pursuade anybody, even 
close friends, to waste their time clicking on the link and helping test 
the code.  It's more difficult to find two or more people to do this at the 
same time.  So yes, it's hard to find errors that are not happening when I 
go into the chat rooms but are happening with some other users.  However, I 
know that when it's up and running, a few people out of the hundreds and 
hundreds of CoCo users out there will enjoy chatting live with other CoCo 
users.

Two bizarre errors are holding me up now... when I attempt to read a simple 
cookie from the visitors web browser (that he chooses to set in a previous 
session - his nickname) the program crashes at the very instruction that 
reads the cookie environment variable.  This only happens with some 
visitors.  The author of HLA is swamped right now and has yet to 
investigate the env.get instruction that he just added over a month 
ago.  It works for every other environment variable read from Linux.  So I 
am trapping the error for now which lets the program keep running but no 
nickname can be retrieved back.  The other error is that when I attempt to 
open an HTML file (that is not being used by anybody else, and that does 
exist), some web browsers are causing the script to generate a Linux 
exception $1A.  I'm working on cornering this bug as well.  If it's in the 
fileio.open() function of HLA, my only guess right now is that the web 
server can only have so many files open at a time and that I need to put in 
try.x.times loops when attempting to open files from my script.  Still... 
the errors never happen with me, so you can see why all of this is a little 
baffling.

Why not use Perl?  I'm a die-hard HLA user.  It's capable of almost 
anything.  I am also the first HLA user to have written a cgi-bin 
program.  I did this immediately after Randall added the env.get 
instruction which reads environment variables from Windows or Linux using 
the same instruction.  A link redirector and flat-file database program are 
being used on coco3.com now and have yet to fail as far as I know.  So with 
the other programs not failing when they open files, update them, and close 
them, you can see why it's a mystery why this is happening with the chat code.


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Roger Taylor