Topic: JBidwatcher Help / current auctions moved to "complete"

this has been happening for a while.. currently open auctions are moved to “complete” with a couple days still left on them.. this means they don’t snipe, obviously…

anyone else getting this or have a suggestion?

this is with 2.1pre8-0-g1a6aac8

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre8 (and earlier) showing Buy It Now instead of Bid

Same problem going on here. same as in 2.1pre7

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Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Feature Request: Disable Sleep when Open

I’d second this request, if for nothing else that when my wife uses it she often forgets to turn off the sleep mode.
Thanks k.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Selected auction unreadable (black letters vs dark blue background colour)

Greetings,

Check out http://www.jbidwatcher.com/help/faq#ans14 and let me know if that helps.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: That's SO beta! / pre8 exe doesn't seem to be signed

Greetings,
A code signing certificate costs around $199/year or more, unfortunately. Nothing has changed in JBidwatcher’s method of making an executable, though, so something may have changed in your Windows setup.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: That's SO beta! / pre8 exe doesn't seem to be signed

I load JBidwatcher on startup in the startup folder; indeed, this is the technique recommended in the FAQ.

Upon upgrading to pre8 I have found that Windows now complains that the exe isn’t signed and I have to manually confirm startup. I’m sure I didn’t have to do this in past versions…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Selected auction unreadable (black letters vs dark blue background colour)

Can anyone help? It’s a major problem for me!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1 pre8 Not Loading My ebay Properly

My ebay items not loading properly. Some items not being imported, and no consistency with what items display on tabs. Current auctions might appear on current, completed, or my eBay. As a result, I cannot go to the current tab and see open auctions. Additionally, colors are not consistent. With previous versions, the program seemed to be able to download my ebay auctions and display them on correct tabs.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Mark

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / Sniping based on current bid amount

Rather than enter a maximum amount that I would be willing to bid, can I instruct the program to bid a little above the current bid (subject to a maximum).

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Selected auction unreadable (black letters vs dark blue background colour)

This says it all:

http://stor.voskat.net/jbid_unreadable.jpg

Topic: That's SO beta! / 2 issues in JBidwatcher (2.1pre7-8-g61363f2)

We have a winner! I tried disabling MyJbidwatcher by editing the configuration file and now 2.1pre8 runs normally. Thank you, Budney! I kind of suspected that this was due to some obscure difference in my configuration or in how I use JBidwatcher since evidently not everyone is having this problem.

I played around with MyJbidwatcher a little about 6 months ago but never got it working properly. So maybe my particular non-functional setup is partly to blame.

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Can JBidWatcher do more than 1 snipe at once?

I was going to ask the same question. I have two different auctions that end 20 seconds apart. Is there a way JBidWatcher can do this?

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre7 not retrieving watched items.

I’ll read the rest more carefully later, but re. the clock sync, I disagree – I’m not interested in a ‘perfect’ solution as it has never materialised, but rather one that works.

As a compromise, why not simply offer the option to sync 5 mins before auction end? You can disable it by default, and let people like me try it out. I guarantee you all my sync problems will disappear as I have a 100% success rate with doing it manually. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a purist myself, but after years of having to manually sync, I just don’t want the hassle anymore.

I also genuinely think the real problem is that other apps might by syncing the time (eg. the OS time sync), so you simply cannot control this or rely on your own sync to stay correct (and that applies equally to Ebay’s servers). The only sane solution is to sync (again) near the auction end.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / User profile under "Documents and Settings"

raised a ticket for this issue

https://jbidwatcher.lighthouseapp.com/projects/…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre7 not retrieving watched items.

Greetings,
Yes, sorry, I skimmed them, and didn’t notice the request to remove your email.

I’ll do that. I’ve been heavily occupied with trying to find a new job, so I haven’t been doing much JBidwatcher development lately. Let’s see if I can roughly respond to your questions…

1. I’ll poke at the completed auction handling for My eBay searches; it’s possible that it’s marking them as sticky (i.e. on completion they don’t move from the current tab), but it shouldn’t be.
2. One interesting report I got recently pointed out that I’m checking time drift between before I start the network request, and the time that eBay shows when the request comes back. They made the point that this could be skewed by abnormally long startup times for the network request, and that it might be more accurate to check time drift by grabbing a time snapshot after the request for the time page has returned. I’ll poke at that. I’ve always resisted the ‘synch 5 minutes before snipe’, because if your clock is drifting 1-2 minutes every 40 minutes, JBidwatcher isn’t going to be able to adjust for that sanely. It means that in the 5 minutes left from the sync, your clock will drift by (on average) about 11 seconds. That’s a broken computer, in my opinion, and so I don’t believe that’s the problem for most folks, and thus the ‘sync’ solution may seem right, but it’s not actually addressing the underlying problem.

I thought I’d fixed the delete problem in 2.1pre8, actually.

JBidwatcher is actually a heavily multi-threaded program, and the number of threading issues (left) in it are surprisingly few. I’m actually kinda proud of that. :) The older version was a nightmare to manage, mainly. It didn’t support large auction sets, it was terribly factored, it was really, really frustrating to code on. I added the database, and several other features, to bring it up to a level that I was comfortable developing at, but the interface between the old all-in-memory code and the new as-much-as-possible-in-database code is still admittedly shaky. The deletion issue is resolved, though, I’m pretty sure of that.

I’d need to see your logs for the steps you took, to see exactly what’s caused JBidwatcher to believe the login failed, but that message is VERY specific. If you’re seeing: “eBay (or the link to eBay) appears to be down for the moment.”, it means that eBay responded to an item-view attempt with the very specific message: “Our Site is Temporarily Unavailable”.

The login status display in the upper right has three distinct components. The time, the username, and the icon which indicates login status.

If the login status is green, it’s logged you in. You don’t need to worry about it at that point. If the username and time are struck out, it means it’s having trouble talking to eBay. (God I suck at user-facing UI paradigms; JBidwatcher’s UI needs a serious overhaul.) The strikeout there meant that it tried to read an auction, and got the ‘temporarily unavailable’ message. It doesn’t mean you’re not logged in, just that it thinks eBay might be down. (Not being logged in is usually is shown by a red login status icon, and ‘Not logged in…’ in the username space.)

Updating your login cookie changes the hover text, because it’s a successful network operation, but only a successful listing retrieval can clear the strikeout.

I hope this makes some sense. It all made sense to me as I built it, but when it’s all together it’s…obviously not sufficient.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre7 not retrieving watched items.

Did you ever read my last two messages (above) Morgan?

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Multiple auctions showing same wrong seller

Morgan, is there any way to show the number of watchers and/or the number of item/page views as a seller? I’ve been reading this thread and am assuming the # of watchers can’t be done. I did download your fix above and am currently running 2.1pre7-
Thanks

Topic: That's SO beta! / 2 issues in JBidwatcher (2.1pre7-8-g61363f2)

Update: now I’m fairly convinced that it was caused by “My JBidwatcher.” I tried turning it off many times in the preferences and it would be right back on after restarting… but after editing the config file directly and deleting my username and password, performance has been solid for the last 18 hours.

Topic: That's SO beta! / 2 issues in JBidwatcher (2.1pre7-8-g61363f2)

I’m seeing this slowness, and it’s driving me nuts because I’m using JBidwatcher to buy diabetic care supplies, and it keeps missing auctions because it’s so dog slow.

Here’s how I observed the problem. First, I created a new tab and called it “Test Strips.” Then I created a search, updated hourly, for “aviva strips,” that put the results on that tab. I enabled the setting to remember deleted auctions. So every hour, more auctions appear on the tab for test strips for my Accu-Check Aviva. I look them over, delete the ones I don’t want, and set a snipe amount for the rest. It didn’t take long before this incredibly awful performance started showing itself. Killing and restarting helps, but you have to do that once an hour, which defeats the entire purpose of running JBidwatcher.

I’m using 2.1-pre8 on a Macbook.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / My active eBay 'bidding' auctions not added

It used to be that when I was bidding on something, no matter where the bid was initiated, JBidwatcher would pick it up and add it to the current list. Somewhere along the line that feature disappeared. How do I restore this function? I’m using the latest Mac version.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBigwatcher phones home... why?

The reason I assume it still connects to my.jbidwatcher.com is because of this

“The only place in JBidwatcher to choose to send me any kind of personal information (still not username/password) is going to be My JBidwatcher-related functionality, which is a general bucket for features I’m adding to JBidwatcher to integrate with a web service”

As for it not being self contained, that is actually quite true but I found the following in the FAQ

Q. What files does JBidwatcher create, and where? A. There will be a directory in your home directory named .jbidwatcher. On MacOSX, it’s at:
/Users/{Username}/.jbidwatcher
on Windows it’s usually at:
C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\.jbidwatcher
on Linux (and other unices), it’s at:
~/.jbidwatcher
In that directory would be a set of files:
auctions.xml – the XML version of your auctions you are monitoring.
searches.xml – all the searches you’ve defined for it.
JBidWatch.cfg – the configuration file for the program.
display.cfg – Display-related configurations (windowsize, column widths, etc.)
errors.##.log – Error logs of what happened during a given run of the program.
There is also a ‘auctionsave’ directory, which contains a compressed copy of the HTML from the last successful update of all the auctions you are monitoring. This lets you view an auction (through JBidwatcher’s internal web server) long after it’s been removed from eBay’s own site. This directory is only used for cached-views, and the files can be deleted regularly if you don’t use that feature.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Instruction on how to use JBid please

Hi
Please excuse me if I am making a fool of myself , but is there somewhere I can go to see exactly how to use this program?

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBigwatcher phones home... why?

I’m not saying that you’re a bad person Morgan, but I think that the situation is a bit more involved than you have described it.

I have cleared the “Regularly check for new version” and the “Allow live configuration updates” checkboxes in the General tab. I am running 2.1pre8-0-g1a6aac8 on Mac OS X 10.5.8

I am observing that any change to settings causes the program to attempt to connect back to my.jbidwatcher.com. When I disallow the connection(s), the settings dialog box will not close when I press the “save” button. The naive conclusion would be that it is uploading my settings to the jbidwatcher.com web server. I trust that it is not, but it is also clear that the attempt to connect to the jbidwatcher.com server is not just about updates…

I also note that the program leaves stuff on the machine (it is not fully self contained). I load the .dmg and run it from the mounted disk. If I eject the disk, delete the .dmg and replace it with a fresh one, when I start the program it remembers all of my old settings and auctions.

I would kindly request that you provide a complete “uninstaller” for your program. I can probably clean up after it myself, but that will be a miserable job. A quick script included with the application would be plenty. Failing that, a readme.txt file that tells me what I need to delete manually would work.

Overall, it’s a cool little program and I appreciate that you’ve created it.

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / "Snipe failed as you are disallowed from bidding" error

Greetings,
That’s a very specific error message; it got: “You are not permitted to bid on their listings” (Sometimes it’s “You’re”.)

That’s generally because the seller in question has marked you as banned from their listings.

I have no idea why that would have been; if you haven’t had any interaction with the seller before, it’s entirely possible that they have a ‘whitelist’ for bidding on that item, where they only let specific users bid. (It’s one of eBay’s features.)

Hopefully that helps you dig around to find out what was going on.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!