Troubleshooting Tips and Known Problems

HipScript's installer is your first line of defense when you have trouble. It's always safe to re-run the installer; all your configuration will be preserved. If you've recently re-installed your OS, moved files around, accidentally deleted something HipScript needs -- the installer will fix it.

 

HipScript has a generic-document icon, what's the deal?

This is normal (for some defintiion of "normal"). I finally reached the point where I just couldn't live within the 32K text size limit of the standard Applescript editor; I was unable to add new features because of the limit. So I switched to using the Smile editor for Applescript, and it has a different creator code. If you don't have the Smile editor installed on your system, Finder doesn't know what kind of icon to associate with script documents created by it, and a generic icon appears instead. The scripts will still load and run just fine in Ircle. You can still use the standard Applescript editor to view or edit the source of all the plugins, but not the main HipScript because it's too big now.

 

Problems with HipScript and OS 9.1

 Some users have reported that HipScript fails to load and run after they upgrade to OS 9.1, and the installer fails to run properly. One of Apple's best test engineers helped me track the problem down to a new dependency between the Standard Additions scripting addition and the Security Library extension. To use HipScript on OS 9.1 you MUST have the Security Library extension enabled. HipScript itself doesn't use this directly, but the Standard Additions module it relies on for getting the date and time and other mundane AppleScript tasks requires it.

 

Problems with HipScript, Ircle, and OS X 10.1.2

Onno has discovered what appears to be a fairly serious bug in OS X 10.1.2 (and in the Dec 2001 Developer Tools release). The bug causes Ircle to crash when it tries to load scripts (sometimes the crash is immediate, sometimes it happens a few minutes after the script is loaded and you connect to an IRC server). Apple is aware of the bug, and they are looking into it. In the meantime, Onno has found a workaround he can use in the Ircle code until the bug gets fixed. To use HipScript (or any other loaded script) under OS X 10.1.2 you must download Ircle 3.1b13 Carbon dated Dec 24, 2001 or later.

For the technical-minded, the OS X bug is in the carbon timer event routines. Before calling a script event handler, Ircle disables its carbon timers in the proper way, but it appears that those timers still fire while disabled. This results in Ircle calling into the idle handler of a loaded script while some other script handler is already running. Since AppleScript is documented as being non-reentrant, having two concurrent threads of execution in the same script in the same OSA context leads to crashes.

Problems with HipScript, Ircle, and OS X 10.2

With the 10.2 (Jaguar) release of OS X, Apple changed the format used internally by AppleScript for representing complex data such as lists of information. HipScript and Ircle store script preferences by just dumping the internal-format data into a database file. The implication of all this is that once you upgrade to 10.2, Ircle and HipScript are no longer able to read script preferences stored by earlier versions of AppleScript.

To help get around this problem, the latest release of HipScript (020825) includes a pair of new scripts named HipConfigExport and HipConfigImport. These scripts will export your HipScript config data to a text file or import it from a file. Here's what you need to do to preserve your existing HipScript config data across the upgrade to 10.2: 

  • Before you upgrade to 10.2, install the latest HipScript, and the latest Ircle. Start ircle, ensure that HipScript is loaded.
  • In any Ircle window, type /hipconfigexport
  • Choose a file to export the config to. Remember where it's located, you'll need to find it again later.
  • Upgrade to 10.2
  • After the upgrade, locate your Ircle script preferences files, there are two them, named "ircle script data" and "ircle script data.idx". They should be in your ~username/library/preferences folder. Throw them away, they contain the old-format 10.1 data that scripts can't read on 10.2
  • After discarding the ircle script data files, start Ircle. HipScript should load, but will be completely unconfigured.
  • In any Ircle window, type /hipconfigimport, and choose the file you exported to earlier. This restores your config to its pre-upgrade state. You only need to do this once, then everything will behave as it always has in the past, with your HipScript config being auto-saved.

You can use this export/import procedure whenever you want. It's not a bad way to make an occasional backup of your HipScript prefs. And it's probably a good idea to export before any OS upgrade, just in case Apple breaks the data formats again in the future.