FahMon News

I'm writing this news post mainly to let members of the community know what's going on with FahMon development-wise, since there have been no new announcements since April.

Developments

For those of you who are not aware, FahMon is coded entirely in my spare time, which recently I have had virtually none of (writing theses was the main culprit). However, I'm about to start a major drive to get various bits of core code in FahMon up to scratch and more stable.
There are already a number of GUI enhancements in svn including re-organised menus (for those who were confused about the lack of a "client" menu), configurable columns in the main view and the ability to hide the "WU Information" panel. There may be a few more tweaks to the GUI being made of the next few days to try and make the whole thing a little slicker than in the current release.
After finishing the GUI updates I'll be taking a look at the innards of the monitoring code, and possibly re-writing major portions of it to increase stability, and compatibility (mainly with SMP clients inside Virtual Machines).

I also hope to be able to put together some build-bots to automatically compile the latest svn code to ease the testing process.

Contributing

There are a number of ways that you can help contribute to the development of FahMon, and only 1 of them requires you to have any programming knowledge:

• Bug reporting. This is very important to help improve FahMon, because unless I know a bug exists, I can't fix it.
• Ideas for features. You guys might come up with something I had'nt thought of.
• Code contributions. I welcome any patches to code, from typos to new functions.
• Monetary donations. There's a paypal link on the homepage. There's no obligation, but if you want to donate, the facility is there.

FahMon 2.3.2b is now available for download. See the download page for details on how to get it.

For a comprehensive list of changes please view the changelog which is linked to from the home page and the download page.

What's new in this release:

• Several behavioural fixes to dialogs and a number of visual fixes including displaying fractional deadlines correctly.
• Windows now maximises from the System tray correctly. Finally.
• A number of performance and behaviour tweaks to the OS X build.
• GPU2 core support.

Special thanks go to Mark Gerby (Gerby19) for helping me debug and test some of the Windows bugs

To activate GPU2 support you may need to update the project list from the "FahMon" menu.

As always if you find any bugs in FahMon please report them using trac.

It has come to my attention that the system tray icon restore behaviour is still broken in this release, and may in fact actually be worse than previous versions.
I believe this is actually due to a broken compile, as the code added did work during testing. Unfortunately I cannot release a recompiled build until early next week as I have to create a fresh Virtual Machine of XP and the FahMon build environment owing to my current VM now being broken beyond all usefulness.

If you do experience significant problems with the current build of 2.3.2a, switch back to 2.3.2 until I can recompile 2.3.2a correctly again.

Download: 2.3.2 Zip file | 2.3.2 Installer

Please note: This issue does not affect Linux or OS X users.

FahMon 2.3.2a is now available for download. See the download page for details on how to get it.

For a comprehensive list of changes please view the changelog which is linked to from the home page and the download page.

What's new in this release:

• The endian-swap bug has been squashed so you can now monitor PPC Macs from Windows again.
• Several annoying Windows bugs have been squashed, so FahMon now restores it's frame state from the system tray and taskbar correctly.
• FahMon now runs on Mac OS X!

My thanks to several members of Team Mac OS X who helped test and debug the OS X verison.

Several translation updates were missed for this version, so if you notice missing translations whilst using FahMon and feel like updating them, send them along to me and I'll incorporate them into the builds on the website.

As always if you find any bugs in FahMon please report them using trac.

Now some eye-candy:

 

I'm trying out a comment system for the news section of the site, so feel free to use it if you will.
The captcha can sometimes appear completely unreadable, so I recommend you refresh the page until it is readable and then start writing your comments.
Hopefully I can get that fixed.

The software powering the comments is a nifty set of php scripts called blogkomm which I've integrated into nanoblogger.

The download page has been updated with links to the v2.3.2 translations for Portuguese (pt_PT) and German (de_DE). Thanks to Mark Gerber for the German translation.

Installation for Windows is simple, but for Linux it can be a bit more tricky. Read the wiki page linked on the download page for precise instructions.

At long last FahMon 2.3.2 is now available!
To download this version visit the download page.

For a comprehensive list of changes please view the changelog which is linked to from the home page and the download page.

Here's a brief overview of what's new in this release:

• Lots of bug fixes in this release to make FahMon more stable, there should be far fewer instances of FahMon crashing for no apparent reason, and CPU usage whilst reloading clients has been decreased.
• Several bits of data are now retreived using core code from qd (Queue Dumper) http://linuxminded.xs4all.nl/?target=software-qd-tools.plc.
• Web output is now completely configurable thanks to a new templating system which allows you to create custom output pages.
• Documentation should now be much more understandable.

Several translation updates were missed for this version, so if you notice missing translations whilst using FahMon and feel like updating them, send them along to me and I'll incorporate them into the builds on the website.

As always if you find any bugs in FahMon please report them using trac.

This is the third and hopefully final unsupported beta for FahMon 2.3.2 to clear up some additional reported bugs.

This release fixes an issue with the download time and effective rate calculations which were being translated by incorrect amounts from UTC by the timezone logic. An issue which caused FahMon to crash at the end of perculiar WUs have also been dealt with.

Assuming this beta is stable, and I can get all the outstanding translations back in a timely fashion, 2.3.2 should be released publicly sometime next week. There are a number of documentation files that need to be altered in the meantime.

As always, report bugs in this release using trac: http://trac.fahmon.net.

Download: Windows Linux/Source

This is the second unsupported beta for FahMon 2.3.2 to test a number of new bug fixes.

The main bug fixed in this beta is the crash bug when project data is missing. A number of bugs related to the web output translations have also been fixed, but the WebApp output is still incompatible with IE7 at this time.

There have been two reports of a bug relating to the manual timezone setting but I cannot replicate the bug so it needs to be tested more thoroughly.
The bug reports state that the manual timezone setting is not restored across restarts of FahMon, and that while the setting does not affect the effective PPD or ETA calculations resulting in incorrect information being displayed.

To reliably test this version please make sure that you trash prefs.dat beforehand (or install the beta to a separate location), and as always report bugs using trac: http://trac.fahmon.net.

Download: Windows Linux/Source

There have been a couple of reports of undocumented bugs in the 2.3.2beta release which have now been fixed in SVN. It is likely that a beta2 will be released in the near future to check that these bugs are no longer present.

• FahMon will crash if the project database doesn't contain project info for a WU it is monitoring.
• The simple web output erroneously adds an extra "points" string to the credit field.
• Several text items on all web output files cannot be translated.