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: 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: 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!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre8 saying bid too low, but wasn't

Greetings,
@Torque – Brad’s bug report is specifically a problem that he hasn’t upgraded to 2.1pre8. Hal didn’t give any log files, so there’s no way for me to know what his issue is.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre8 saying bid too low, but wasn't

Greetings,
@Torque – Your snipe timing seems to be set to about 6 seconds? It looks like your system clock is more than 4 seconds off from eBay’s clock, so when it took 3 seconds to fire the actual snipe, it was too long.

Specifically, from 03:28:44 to 03:28:57, it was logging in and pulling up the necessary pages. It took 13 seconds to do all that. Then, it loaded the bid request (essentially getting to the ‘confirmation’ page on eBay), which took another 3 seconds. Then, at 6 seconds before the auction end (or so it believed), it started the process of sending the confirmation form. It finished in 3 seconds, and loaded the post-bid response, which indicated that the auction was ended. Since its end time was, it believed, 3 seconds before the auction was supposed to end, that means that your computer’s clock is at least 4 seconds off from eBay’s. Worse, it’s apparently not being adjusted for by JBidwatcher, either because it’s disabled or the last time JBidwatcher synchronized the time, it wasn’t as badly off. I’d need to see your log file (attached as a file, to a ticket or in email, rather than just dumped up here!) to know more.

This is why I don’t recommend sniping with 6 seconds. Your computer’s clock, extra latency on your connection, a program slowing your system down, anything can kick in to make a snipe fail at that short a timeframe.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre8 bid rejected

Greetings,
That they’re willing to sell it to you, doesn’t mean that the requirement has been waved on the item, unfortunately. Most sellers don’t realize that eBay enforces requirements technically.

That said, the error you got is far more commonly a requirement to have a Paypal account linked to your eBay account. (Not just have a Paypal account, but have linked it to your eBay account through their interface.)

Country-requirements are certainly a possibility, though, yeah…

That message is really specific, it means eBay rejected the bid with the text:

This seller has set buyer requirements for this item and only sells to buyers who meet those requirements.

It’s one of the longest, most specific error tests in JBidwatcher… So either it’s the Paypal linking issue, or eBay enforcing the country distinction, despite your seller’s wishes.

Best of luck,

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre8 saying bid too low, but wasn't

Greetings,
I don’t understand why you blocked out the item numbers; I generally need that information to dig into it; the item number and the amount your snipe bid was set for.

That error Snipe was too low, and was not accepted. specifically comes from a response that reads either: Your bid must be at least or Enter {amount} or more both of which mean the same thing. That your bid was too low at 2 minutes out.

Now it’s possible that when you changed your bid, it still sniped with the old value (presumably IT was below the ending price?), and a snipe with the new value didn’t get fired for some reason, but that shouldn’t be the case. (As in, I’ve looked at the code and can’t find a path that will cause that, but it’s a theoretical possibility.) The only reason I think that is your reference to the canceling snipe message, which suggests that there was still an outstanding snipe, despite it attempting to cancel it at 11:32:26 PDT.

I’m not sure what would lead to that behavior… Anyhow, item number, initial snipe price and adjusted (what you increased it to at 3 minutes out) snipe price would be helpful. Submitting the log to a ticket (as an attachment!) on the JBidwatcher issue tracker would also help me debug the problem.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / 16x16 icons missing

Greetings,
Whoa; I had forgotten you could even do that. :)

Yeah, I supply 24 and 32 pixel icons; I believe I have 16 pixel icons, but I didn’t include them…

One thing I don’t do when you shrink the icons (as I recall) is shrink the minimum window width, so it can be a little annoying to have a ton of dead space.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / unable to snipe with right click

Greetings,
JBidwatcher 2.1pre7 had some problems distinguishing ‘fixed price’ from ‘auction with Buy It Now available’ listings; they should be fixed in 2.1pre8. Let me know if you’re still having issues!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / pre7 on snowleopard not logging in

Greetings,
JBidwatcher doesn’t use your browser at all, internally. The default browser is only used when you tell JBidwatcher you want to browse to the eBay page for an item.

Hover your cursor over the ‘not logged in…’ message, to see if there is any error causing the problem.

Also upgrade to 2.1pre8…

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: That's SO beta! / Is this a bug?

Greetings,
It might be a bug; upgrade to 2.1pre8 (make sure by looking in the ‘About’ dialog), update the auction (right-click or ctrl-click on it, and select ‘Update’), and see if it shows up right.

If not, it’d be useful to know what it shows.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre7 search not working?

Greetings,
@gurumarkb – That’s…weird. On the server, they are:

-rw-r--r-- 1 jbidwatcher jbidwatcher  4178588 May  2 08:30 JBidwatcher-2.1pre6.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbidwatcher jbidwatcher  4424807 May 31 10:26 JBidwatcher-2.1pre7.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbidwatcher jbidwatcher  4425699 Jun  6 09:02 JBidwatcher-2.1pre8.exe

You should probably move to the 2.1pre8 version.

…

Okay, in the field of ‘extreme weirdness’, I just tested and built the ‘scripting-enabled’ version of JBidwatcher, and it came out to around that size:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 mrs mrs 12053538 2010-06-11 02:56 JBidwatcher-2.1pre8.exe

But I haven’t built that in…well, months at least, and maybe years, and it’s definitely not on the web site. VERY weird.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Internal server and RSS

Greetings,
Yeah, I punted on the internal web interface when I realized that most users can’t access their home systems from elsewhere, and then I focused on the My JBidwatcher project, which allows folks to upload listing information to my central server, so folks can view their listings there.

I’ve started using it a bit more, using the web service to sync to an iPhone app.

It still looks like…tush, let’s say. :) I hate developing in XSL.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Change default time pictures show with mouse over.

Greetings,
Have you tried Thumbnail mode in JBidwatcher 2.1pre8? It always shows tiny thumbnails, and lets you hover over them to see the full thumbnail.

You enable it with the custom columns setting; available by right-clicking on the tab name, or clicking the little ‘*’ above the scroll bar, or under the Tab menu in the main menu. Just check the Thumbnail column, and it’ll be in that mode. (I usually move the thumbnail over to the left side of the display.)

If you’d like, you can see me flailing at describing pieces of this.

Man I suck at documentation. :( That’s from a recent attempt to document the UI; I’ve got two pages, pure image, no non-embedded text so far…

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

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

Greetings,
@gl – Thanks for the detailed report! I’m sure something’s flaky there, and I agree JBidwatcher needs a good bug pass. I’m trying to reduce the ticket count in Lighthouse to something reasonable, so I can actually use it as a bug tracker. Currently it’s kind of acting as an auxiliary forum. :( The big problem is that I don’t know all the actual current bugs. A lot of bug reports are, ‘It doesn’t work!‘, essentially, without item numbers, descriptions, logs, or even what platform or JBidwatcher version. Then there are bug reports (sometimes really detailed!) that are still MPTNMI’s (stolen from the Passenger project, that stands for Mysterious Problems Than Need Massive Investigations) which I don’t always have the resources to do.

Often it takes someone dedicated who’s having the problem, working in a tight loop with me, sending them test versions which expose different debugging parts of the system, getting their logs, tweaking my version, and sending it back to them.

For example, your issue of getting your ebay username ‘crossed out’, is usually a communications failure talking to eBay. (Hovering over the strikeout will tell you what happened.) The log file will also often identify the issue; sometimes it’s because eBay’s just being stupid.

Sometimes it’s JBidwatcher being stupid. :)

One of my biggest concerns right now is that JBidwatcher is ‘partially database backed’, which means that it caches a lot of the items in memory, and I’m worried about parts of the program that might get out of sync with each other because they use the cache, or use the database and bypass the cache. I’m unsure about going to ‘everything that talks to an AuctionEntry uses the database’, because that’s probably not performant, so I’ve been trying to get everything to use the cache (which does the lookup on cache-misses) for read, and write-through when necessary.

For the two issues you raise:

1. JBidwatcher will download completed listings from your My eBay; it’s part of the information in My eBay, so it considers it important. They should move to the ‘completed’ tab, though. At the very least, if you select them, right-click, and choose ‘Update’, it should move them then.
2. For time sync, JBidwatcher synchronizes the time every (roughly) 40 minutes; I can’t imagine that it’s getting out of sync in that amount of time…? JBidwatcher starts the snipe 2 minutes early, but doesn’t submit the confirmation form until the snipe time. If the bid is under at the two minute mark, JBidwatcher will report it at that time, and cancel the snipe (because it can’t win, or even be submitted to eBay). Could that be what you’re seeing?

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Get my Ebay Items not work new item not updated !!!

Greetings,
This should be resolved in 2.1pre8.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: That's SO beta! / Pre7 working well thus far

Greetings,
The API is reasonably stable; you might like the fact that there’s a Multicast DNS service I’ve built into it recently. If you have the internal web server enabled, it can advertise itself as a service using Bonjour. I’ve even written an iPhone app that uses it to let me pull up all my current items wirelessly, as long as I’m on the same network as it.

There are two lines that are commented out in 2.1pre8 that enable that feature; I’m hoping to uncomment them out during the 2.1 final release. :)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre7 mishandling auctions with BuyItNow and no bids

Greetings,
I believe this has been resolved in 2.1pre8.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Feature Request: self test

Greetings,
The problem with this is that there are about a half-dozen different listing types, each with slightly different behavior, and varying by whether a user has bid on them or not. Essentially, there are:

• normal (known inside eBay as ‘Chinese’, but actually ‘Vickrey’ style) auctions
• auctions with Buy It Now
• auctions with a reserve (met and unmet!)
• private auctions
• Fixed Price listings
• Second Chance listings

…then there’s eBay Motors, with a bunch of other small features. The views also vary by who is looking at the listing. (So, for instance, the seller and the high bidder can see the bidder name, but other users can’t.) Now listings with a Buy It Now become ‘normal’ auctions, once someone has bid on them, so that variable isn’t as bad, but in general it’s a lot of listing types.

Unfortunately in order to detect whether something is wrong, I need to be in control of all the variables (price, bidder name, etc.), and be able to detect when something’s wrong. This means that I need to list the items, I can’t just use a random item on eBay.

Listing items is, frankly, pretty expensive for me, so I list about 20 items a month, purely in the test area right now, and about half the time, eBay shuts down my accounts for ‘shill bidding’, even though I’m obeying their test-account requirements to the letter. I have three accounts for testing, two bidder and one seller, all with ‘test’ in their name, every auction is listed with ‘test’, every description notes that it’s a test, and I never leave feedback from or for the accounts. Still, sometimes eBay’s automated systems freak out, and I have to contact their shill bidding folks to get my accounts reinstated. Including my personal one, which isn’t involved in the testing at all. :(

In order to have a complete set constantly running, it’d cost me more in listing fees than it costs me for hosting JBidwatcher, My JBidwatcher, these forums, my personal domain (resume, blog, project list, etc.), combined.

So. I rely on users telling me, ‘Hey, something’s not right!’ (And giving me item numbers so I can see for myself, when possible…)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / multisnipes broken and costly

Greetings,
This should be resolved in the most recent version (2.1pre8 at this time). I think it was due to eBay’s text change that meant it wasn’t picking up high bidder names anymore. :(

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: That's SO beta! / JBidWatcher 2.1pre7 Shows 0 Watched Items

Greetings,
Yeah, this should be resolved in the most recent version (2.1pre8 at this time).

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre7 DISPLAY.CFG not updated

Greetings,
This should be fixed in the most recent version (2.1pre8 at this time).

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1pre6 & 2.1pre7: excessively large derby.log

Greetings,
This should be fixed in the most recent version (2.1pre8 at this time). I was logging the full SQL of every statement JBidwatcher generated. :( Great for debugging, not so great on the disk space.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

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

Greetings,
@Liam – This should be fixed in the most recent version (2.1pre8 at this time).

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!