The Case of the Vanishing Cursor

[John Kiltinen]

Has anyone experienced a problem of the cursor disappearing while MetaCard
is running?

I have a MetaCard stack that does some ridculously long computations.  It
takes a field of text with tens of thousands of lines, each consisting of
about 30 characters, and generates from each line several new lines.  It
then stores these new lines in another field, after first checking to see
if the new line is unique.

This is a job for which MetaCard is not the optimal tool, but MetaCard is
what I've got available right now, so it is what I am using.  Since this is
a one-time job, I don't have to worry about efficiency as much.

Running a pass of this program takes a couple of days sometimes.  I have
had numerous occasions during these long runs in which the cursor, which I
set to "busy" at regular intervals in the script, just disappears on me.

This is under the Mac OS X version.  While the cursor is invisible, I can
move it over the dock and do the usual things with it.  I can also move it
up to the menu bar, and, after much trial and error, display pulldown menus
and execute menu items.

Quitting MetaCard does not restore the cursor.  To get it visible again, I
need to restart the computer.  Doing a relaunch doesn't do it.

I've run this stack only on my Mac G4 dual processor computer which is
running running under version 10.2.1 of OS X, so I do not know if the
problem would be there on other platforms.

Has anyone else encountered such a problem?  Is it a MetaCard problem, or
an OS X problem?

By the way, my subject line is inspired in part by the recent "The Case Of
The Reluctant Field."  If we keep this up, we'll soon have a collection of
titles for a new series of high tech Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mystery
novels for kids.

John Kiltinen

PS.  In part I wrote this program in MetaCard to test its stability under
ridiculously long computations.  My program presents some major, open-ended
memory management issues.  Other than this disappearing cursor problem,
MetaCard is performing flawlessly.  My prior experience as a mathematician
with such multi-day tasks has been with Maple, which typically causes a
system crash after a day or so.


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 John Kiltinen (kiltinen at nmu.edu)        Home              Office
 Professor, Dept. of Math. & CS   Tel.(906) 228-8035 or (906) 227-1600
 Northern Michigan University     Fax (906) 228-4667 or (906) 2272010
 Marquette, MI 49855 USA
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