Myster Open Source / News: Recent posts

Hi there! So many projects around that look dead. This is now one of them. Sorry about that but between my job and my new found hobbies I havn't had much time or inclination to work on Myster. The last update was really just a big set of bug fixes and other tweaks. I'm finally somewhat satisfied with how Myster is working. The code base still has alot of potential. If anyone has any patches they want to add then send them here and I'll add them. Or email me questions about the code base. Other than that, enjoy the current release and tell me if something doesn't work on the newest OS release / JVM. I'll see what I can do.

Hi there... This is just a quick note to say that I'm not dead! Horray!

Recently I have developed symptoms of RSI (repetitive stress injury) so I've had to take a 6 week (!!) break and a bunch of psysio in order to get over it. I'm just getting to the stage where I can type without fear of causing a massive pain explosion the next day.. Sigh.. The recovery time for RSI is stupidly long and if you ignore the symptoms you can end up permanently crippling yourself. If you do have pains in your arms or hands take the problem seriously. It feels like a normal muscle pain but it's not. It's a potentially career ending injury.... read more

The last little while has been an all out assault on bugs, speed bottlenecks and things that have been annoying me for a long time. You want to know the changes? Changes commin' at ya ->

The progress bar border now appears all the time in MacOS 9.
The progress bar now pulsates when I tell it it (sometimes I would set the progress bar to pulsate and it would show a blank progress bar instead..)
Fixed a bug where clicking cancel on a dialog for multisource download would cause regular download to start.
Made as much of Myster as possible run on the event thread. This has solved all crashing problem for dual processor computers on MacOS X.
Re-wrote the "windows" menu code. It used to cause a slowdown everytime a window was opened or closed. Now it's really fast.
Made it so that search and p2p windows are renamed to something more appropriate on the fly. (thanx to re-writting the window menu code).
Wrote a system so that TCP connections can be done asynchronously using callbacks!
Made it so menu bars appear on progress windows so thatMacOS uses won't see the menu bar disapear when a progress bar is frontmost.
Made it so all windows have a nice looking Myster icon (not visible on most systems :-( )
Made multi source download automatically adapt to faster servers so multi source downloads are now as faster.
Windows will now un-minimize automatically if you ctrl-1 to them. (finally!)
Fixed some issues with Multisource FileProgressWindows giving wrong information.
Made FileProgressWindows use far less CPU power. Myster and your system will be more responsive during downloads.
Made it so you can navigate MCLists using the keyboard up/down arrows, page up/down and enter to doubleClick
Fixed a big memory leak when the memory used by windows wasen't being freed.

Don't try the latest CVS build (or "REV" if you want to call it that) with the MacOSX, MacOS9 plugin from PR 8. If you do then Myster will freeze badly on startup. I have changed how the "windows" menu is kept up to date. The new way is at least 10 times faster, probably more, but it breaks compatibility wiht the old PR 8 plugins. I've also taken the oppertunity to fix something that has been bugging The Rev for some time - window titles for the search and direct connect windows! They now change depending on what you search for or who you are connected to. yay! This has been annoying me for a long time too. ... read more

By the great gods of CVS I command thee to release a new Myster! .. and it was done.

Well, ok, so the actual development process was a bit less melodramatic but whatever, at least there a release out. yay!

Someone instant messaged me (I think it was dialtone. Thanx!) saying there was a bug in multisource download's resume functionality if the file name had some none-merged punctituation in it. Basically it wouldn't resume. Well it does now.... read more

So what's been happening with me? Well, I've been busy doing none-Myster
related things. Since PR 8 is, in my opinion, quite a good release, I don't
really feel any urgency to update Myster so I've used to opportunity to get
my life in order.

In other news, I have had time to play with the Eclipse IDE. It's quite
pleasant. It makes a bunch of code maintenance chores very painless.. Because
of this I've taken the oppertunity to clean up the Myster code a bit; add some
javadoc comments, fix some stupid legacy code issues, fix really minor bugs..
etc... I've just uploaded all the changes. It touches alot of files but the
changes are really small and most of them don't affect Myster's behavior at all.... read more

The old Myster DEV 21 was in a corrupt archive. This one should work fine.

Working UDP on the server (and some places in the client interface too!)

Also, the p2p panel has been revamped finally. Expect the p2p window to continue to be updated through PR 9 too...

What are the changes? Here are the changes:

- Improved the MCList sort algorithm (thanx gmarceau)
- Changed the tabs in the server stats so they actually look like tabs (thanx rev)
- Made it so that 1 person cannot hog all the download spots.
- Fixed a problem where the disconnect button wouldn't disconnect a user who was downloading from you.
- Improved the code that gets the file information after a file search. (no longer spawns a new thread)
- Improve search performance by > 25%.
- Fixed a bug where the PORN type would list no files.

See website for details

http://www.mysternetworks.com/

Basically this is PR 7.6.

New features over DEV 19.6 are ->

The quit command acutally works on MacOS X and MacOS 9.
If you have a rom file in a .zip archive Myster will now share it. (Myster now looks INSIDE the .zip archive for files like .mp3s and .nes or .snes etc...)
The RING type is new too.

DEV 19.6 is out. It's mostly a bug fix and speed boost release. Check out the release notes for a full list of changes. Here are some highlights:

- Fixed a bug where the search list was cleared TWICE. Starting a search is now twice as fast on MacOS X.
- Added more statistics to the server statistic panel including number of concurrent connections and number of connections in total (which is comparable to web site "hits") . I also added uptime to server stats so that those of your who are competing for the world championship in server uptime can see how you're doing :-).
- Server stats will now tell you how far a user is through the file download even when they are using MultiSourceDownload.
- Added ".m4a" extension to allowed music types.... read more

Ok, time for a status update.

The CVS currently has a version of Myster that resumes downloads if your Myster program crashes or you quit or if your computer crashes. I am tempted to do a DEV release only it doesn't work too well.. There are still known problems.. Besides I want to clean up the code a bit..

Other things I want to do is fix up the server stats window so that people can tell how far through the file the person downloading form them is.. Also, the server stats sometimes say that the user in question has disconnected from them when in fact they have simply finished their download. I know what is causing this. I should fix this too.

Recently the author of "Speak Freely" stopped development of his app. He posted his reasons why. In those reasons is a good discussion about NATs.

This article give a good explanation on why NATs are bad for p2p apps.. The reasons explain why Myster has the "6669 error". NATs and p2p are not compatible ideas.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/eol/

myster.org now points to the sf.net/projects/myster/ site.

The CVS build now contains a few minor bug fixes to PR 7.5 and more Server Stats in the Server stats window.

Myster PR 7.5 is mostly a re-write and refactoring of PR 7. PR 7 was an ambitious project and because it was taking so long to do we released it a bit too soon. Myster PR 7.5 is closer to what PR 7 would have been had we had the time to finish things off a little more. We were going to call it PR 7.1 since it's mostly about bug fixes but due to the sheer number of fixes and the added tweaks we've done under the hood we've decided to call it 7.5... because it's really is at least 0.5 more :-)...... read more

Myster DEV 19.5 has all those great fixes I said I would do to make multi-source download better. (less bugs more speed and it won't get stuck when one of your connections is queued).

The downloads now cancel properly and the banners now display correctly.. In addition, one banner is displayed per 30 seconds not whenever they are downloaded.. So that means that multiple banners won't change every time your download one.

TODO:

Make it so that queued sources don't hold up the entire download.

Make it so that more sources are searched for continuously instead of only once at the begining of the first download.... read more

Needless to say PR 7 didn't really go as planned.

Multisource download in PR 7 is buggy and slow. I've been buisy re-factoring parts of it to make it a less crap codebase to work with. I've also been buisy at my day job so progress has been slower than usual. Things have been so buisy I've actually decided to take 2 weeks vacation which I'm having now. Yay! Time off!

Yesterday I got most of the re-factoring done and today I got a whole lot more done as well as spent 4 freaking hours getting MacCVSX to talk to source forge. *sigh*.. 4 hours is a week's worth of free time.. ... read more

Completely re-wrote download queue manager. It now doesn't use any threads (it used to use at least 2 + 1 for every download spot) it's much easier to debug (7 hours to write instead of 20 hours). Also DOES NOT REQUIRE MYSTER TO BE RESTARTED! Hurray!

Oh and queueing now works with multi source download.

It also no longer freezes when multisource downloads are cancelled.

Have fun.

Ok, so here's what's happening behind the scenes. Most of the work in PR 4,5,6,7 has been doing the frameworks for adding on new features. The next release will be fleshing things out so you can expect the pace to pick up a bit. This is also the season where demands on my time mount so in order to keep things moving along we are going to be releasing on a schedule.

week 1 nothing
week 2 DEV release
week 3 nothing
week 4 DEV release
week 5 PR release ... read more

DEV 19.2 is out. It's basically done. We're planning on releasing PR 7 ASAP. If you find any bugs please tell us.

DEV 19.1 is released and it's far less buggy. Try is out.

Wow.. I am a moron. The DEV 19 package has all the DEV 19 stuff in it except for, well, DEV 19. It comes with DEV 18. Ugh.. I am fixing that now. Everyone who downloaded DEV 19 will have to do it again. Sorry the the stupid mistake.

Those of you who follow such things know that yet another security hole has been found in the Unix sub-system of macOS X which means I will have to reboot my dual G4 macOS X machine for the first time in 90 days. grrr I was so close to 100 days of continuous uptime. Here's the uptime output ->

10:48PM up 93 days, 1:56, 1 user, load averages: 0.83, 0.31, 0.20

(Myster has been running for 12 weeks without a crash. Yes I know it tends to crash on downloading file on dual processor machine. No, I can't fix it. It's Apple's problem and they've fixed it in their latest release. Unfortunately their latest release broke the MCList.. *sigh*.. Someday they'll fix the java on MacOS X and the Myster will rock :-) )... read more