The Case of the Vanishing Cursor

[Richard Gaskin]

John Kiltinen wrote:

> 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.

Still, I'll bet there are ways to speed that up.  I have a tool for
analyzing my Web access logs which does a fair amount of processing on some
80,000 lines at a time in just a few minutes.

> 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 haven't experienced this myself, but maybe MC is just getting too far
ahead of the OS curos routines.  Can you redice the number of times the busy
cursor call is made, maybe to every 100th iteration like this:

   if tCounter mod 100 = 0 then set the cursor to busy

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
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