Monday, December 17, 2007

Parsing Errors

More often than not, Net Usage will sit there doing it's thing and you will not experience any problems with it. However, at some time the ISP will change their page and your meter may stop working.

You will know the meter is not working because it will display a white cross in a red circle.

When you hover your mouse over the meter it may indicate a "parsing error" has occurred. If the error is a parsing error a debug file should have been created in the Mozilla Profile directory. The full path to the profile directory on my computer is:
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\8ndbqffi.default\
The easiest way to find the profiles directory on your computer is to click on the Windows Start button and click on Run... (alternatively press the Widows-Logo [] key and the R key at the same time). In the Run dialog enter the following command:
%AppData%\Mozilla\firefox\Profiles\
Then hit Enter. A window should be displayed with a folder named something like 8ndbqffi.default. Your folder name will be different, but it should be the right place. Double-click on the folder to open it and find the netusage_debug.txt file.

If the debug file is not there, go back to firefox and left click on the meter to get Netusage to fetch your data again. You will get another parsing error, then go back to the profiles directory and the netusage_debug.txt file should be there.

This is a normal text file but if you open it in notepad the line-breaks will not be displayed correctly. If you want to see what's in the file, right click on the file and select "Open With" from the menu and then click on WordPad. I prefer a program called notepad++ but WordPad will do for just looking at the contents. Don't edit anything in this file, Critter need this file the way it is to work out why Net Usage is not working correctly.

Once you have finished looking at the contents of the debug file close WordPad and don't save any changes. To fix the problem you will need to email this file to Critter (his email address is at the bottom of the Net Usage homepage).



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about on Vista x64?

Unknown said...

Dan, On Vista you can find the log file in
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*

Is that what you meant?

Ramon said...

This is great!