HELP! Magellan DiscoverAus Question

dak's Emu Mob · Post by **dak's Emu Mob** » 01 February 05 7:58 pm

G'day Magellan Users (or anyone who can help),

Intermittently, when I start DiscoverAus v 1.0, it fails to remember where I was when I last ran it, and it shows the map of the whole world, with the displayed region being where the Equator intersects the Prime Merridian, that is, N 0Ã‚Â° 00.000, W 0Ã‚Â° 00.000.

I then can't move the focus area or change the magnification, which remains stubbornly at 1:10,000,000!

I can't understand why this happens; it's not as though I exited inelegantly last time, and I haven't done anything differently when the behaviour occurs. It happens very infrequently. To top it off, I can't remember how I have solved this in the pastprobably by restarting DiscoverAus or rebooting Windows. However, no matter what I try this time, I can't get the application to behave. It remains unusable.

I have restarted, rebooted, and even renamed the MAPSEND.INI file. All to no avail. (In fact, renaming the INI file merely caused the application to fail to load at all. I was hoping it would merely create a default INI file.) I even tried editing the INI file to change the saved coordinates to S 37Ã‚Â°, E 145Ã‚Â°, but DiscoverAus happily ignored that and opened at N 0Ã‚Â°, W Ã‚Â°0. When I exited, it again wrote the zero coordinates to the INI file.

So, I have two questions:

<ol>
<li>Does anybody know why this happens?</li>
<li>Can anybody tell me how to fix it?</li>
</ol>

Any help will be appreciated. By the way, I initially thought that the problem might have been caused by a faulty OS on my laptop, but I have now experienced it on a new laptop with a fresh install of Windows XP, so I think the problem must be application-specific. Google searches have not provided any enlightenment.

Cheers,

dak

ian-and-penny · Post by **ian-and-penny** » 01 February 05 8:34 pm

Hi Dak,

as a sporadic user, I have never had this problem.

Are you using some sort of anti-spybot software that is killing off the appropriate registry entry?

The mapsend.ini file contains a startup location, are you perhaps corrupting this file somehow?

Sorry no answers only questions.

Ian

dak's Emu Mob · Post by **dak's Emu Mob** » 01 February 05 8:38 pm

Thanks for the reply Ian. No to both questions.

Cheers,

dak

maccamob · Post by **maccamob** » 01 February 05 8:52 pm

I've never seen that behaviour either. Perhaps there is another less-obvious part of the INI file that has been corrupted, or there is another DiscoverAus file involved? Is there another app running at the same time that might be interfering?
In the absence of other ideas, I'll separately send you a copy of my INI file for comparison.

Lt. Sniper · Post by **Lt. Sniper** » 01 February 05 9:14 pm

I have never seen that problem.

dak's Emu Mob · Post by **dak's Emu Mob** » 01 February 05 9:17 pm

Thanks very much David.

Your INI file did the trick. I replaced my INI file with yours and DiscoverAus came up without a problem. Here is some information for anyone who might have a similar problem in the future.

I ran the diff utility on the two files and apart from a couple of configuration differences, the standout difference was the serial port settings. My file had the following entries:
<blockquote>
[DEVICE_DEFAULTS] 
Com_Port=1 
Baud_rate=1
</blockquote>
Note the erroneous "1" entries! Once I made the COM port 1 and the baud rate 57600, all was well with the world.

I'll never know how this happened, but that's the way it is with computers sometimes.

Cheers,

dak

maccamob · Post by **maccamob** » 01 February 05 10:02 pm

Glad it worked. Just out of curiosity, does your laptop have a serial port or do you use a USB-to-serial adapter? If you use the USB, it might somehow be the culprit, as serial devices aren't designed to be hot swappable.

dak's Emu Mob · Post by **dak's Emu Mob** » 01 February 05 10:23 pm

No, the laptop I'm using at the moment doesn't have a serial port, and yes, I do use a USB-to-serial converter. However, my normal laptop (whose screen karked it in Septic Land) does have a proper serial port, and I've had the same problem with it.

Still, I've always been able to recover the situation on the laptop with the proper serial port.

I think you are correct though. The USB-to-serial converter is most probably the culprtit.

Thanks again for the help. It's much appreciated.

Cheers,

dak

dak's Emu Mob · Post by **dak's Emu Mob** » 02 February 05 10:32 pm

G'day All,

I had further trouble today with DiscoverAus. This time, even maccamob's INI file didn't help. I'm only mentioning this in case someone else has the problem. It's not a given that their COM port settings are the problem. By the way, I don't have a solution as I write this. I suspect that I'll have to do a lot more testing before I can discover a pattern, or reliably reproduce it.

Briefly, last night it all worked perfectly after I fixed the COM port settings. However, this morning I tried running it again and experienced the same resultfixed location of N 0Ã‚Â°, W 0Ã‚Â°. I checked the COM port settings, and they were COM 1/57600the same as had worked last night. I then replaced the INI file with maccamob's one, but it made no difference.

The only difference between last night's hardware configuration and this morning's one is that I had an XGA projector plugged into the video port, and a USB pointing device plugged in to one of the USB ports. I did not have a USB-to-Serial converter plugged in (I didn't have it plugged in last night either, incidentally). I unplugged all devices and rebooted. I used maccamob's INI file. Everything worked as expected. Unfortunately, as anyone who has done any software/hardware testing would know, my process was not conducive to isolating the problem (don't change more than one thing at a time).

Stay tuned. If I can figure out a pattern, or find a way to reliably reproduce the behaviour, I'll post it here.

It would definitely seem to be a peripheral connectivity problem of some sort, but given that I have had the same problem with a different laptop (that does have a proper serial port), I don't think the problem relates specifically to the USB-to-Serial converter.

As a last note: I reconnected the projector and pointing device, rebooted the PC, and tried DiscoverAus again. This time it failed miserably. At least I have learned that much. I unplugged the pointing device and tried again, but it still failed to work. I didn't have time to do any further testing, but I will tomorrow. My guess is that it is the pointing device. (By the way, the 'pointing device' is a USB connection that goes into the projector, and has an infrared/radio connection to a mouse/laser pointer/controller for the projector: an HP Digital Projector xb31). If it is the pointing device/projector, then I'm not surprised that nobody else has experienced the problem. As to why a reboot didn't work last night: my guess is that last night's problem was caused by the additional complication of the COM port settings.

Cheers,

dak