ferrousland.com - diary archives
Thursday, August 31, 2000
java applet working again - 09:00 PM
has anyone noticed that the java controlled refresh is back? yay!! 
.. & do we know who it was that figured out what was wrong with it? it was my wonderful shroomie-boy. he is so, so clever!! it was so simple in the end (isn't it always?) but it takes someone with the brains to figure it out.
the image not working seemed to happen out of the blue. i'd done nothing out of the ordinary the previous day .. uploaded some minor changes to the meta tags on most of the pages, nothing earth-shattering you know? all of a sudden, the java applet couldn't find its class file. i tried uploading everything again, re-doing it from the start & uploading it again, completely trashing it & trying a completely different applet. i thought that for some reason, my computer just wouldn't support java anymore & was corrupting the files as it uploaded them.
turns out that i wasn't far from the truth. shroom figured out that i should have been uploading the files in binary mode. i'd been uploading them in ascii mode instead! what had me beat though, was that i hadn't changed anything from before & after the problems occurred, i was uploading everything the same as i always had.
.. then it dawned on me ..
when i started using the applet, i'd been evaluating a different ftp (file transfer protocol) client: cuteftp. when the evaluation period came to an end, i switched back to the one i'd been using previously: ws_ftp. now here's the clincher (& what had me completely fooled), cuteftp selects the mode automatically, i hadn't had to select binary or ascii, so when i went back to ws_ftp i assumed that the java applet files were to be uploaded in ascii. so i selected ascii .. that's why the applet refused to work! i was unintentionally corrupting the files as i was uploading them!
so last night i stayed up quite late re-installing the java applet. i'm rather tired this morning. i did a bit or re-arranging of files too & because i have frames within frames within frames it stretched my poor, tired brain to the limit getting it all to function again.
i'm so glad it's working now. the mystery is solved & i've even learned something new .. ain't life grand?!
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