I'm writing this news post mainly to let members of the community know what's going on with FahMon development-wise, since there have been no new announcements since April.

Developments

For those of you who are not aware, FahMon is coded entirely in my spare time, which recently I have had virtually none of (writing theses was the main culprit). However, I'm about to start a major drive to get various bits of core code in FahMon up to scratch and more stable.
There are already a number of GUI enhancements in svn including re-organised menus (for those who were confused about the lack of a "client" menu), configurable columns in the main view and the ability to hide the "WU Information" panel. There may be a few more tweaks to the GUI being made of the next few days to try and make the whole thing a little slicker than in the current release.
After finishing the GUI updates I'll be taking a look at the innards of the monitoring code, and possibly re-writing major portions of it to increase stability, and compatibility (mainly with SMP clients inside Virtual Machines).

I also hope to be able to put together some build-bots to automatically compile the latest svn code to ease the testing process.

Contributing

There are a number of ways that you can help contribute to the development of FahMon, and only 1 of them requires you to have any programming knowledge:

• Bug reporting. This is very important to help improve FahMon, because unless I know a bug exists, I can't fix it.
• Ideas for features. You guys might come up with something I had'nt thought of.
• Code contributions. I welcome any patches to code, from typos to new functions.
• Monetary donations. There's a paypal link on the homepage. There's no obligation, but if you want to donate, the facility is there.

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It has come to my attention that the system tray icon restore behaviour is still broken in this release, and may in fact actually be worse than previous versions.
I believe this is actually due to a broken compile, as the code added did work during testing. Unfortunately I cannot release a recompiled build until early next week as I have to create a fresh Virtual Machine of XP and the FahMon build environment owing to my current VM now being broken beyond all usefulness.

If you do experience significant problems with the current build of 2.3.2a, switch back to 2.3.2 until I can recompile 2.3.2a correctly again.

Download: 2.3.2 Zip file | 2.3.2 Installer

Please note: This issue does not affect Linux or OS X users.

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This is the third and hopefully final unsupported beta for FahMon 2.3.2 to clear up some additional reported bugs.

This release fixes an issue with the download time and effective rate calculations which were being translated by incorrect amounts from UTC by the timezone logic. An issue which caused FahMon to crash at the end of perculiar WUs have also been dealt with.

Assuming this beta is stable, and I can get all the outstanding translations back in a timely fashion, 2.3.2 should be released publicly sometime next week. There are a number of documentation files that need to be altered in the meantime.

As always, report bugs in this release using trac: http://trac.fahmon.net.

Download: Windows Linux/Source]]>

This is the second unsupported beta for FahMon 2.3.2 to test a number of new bug fixes.

The main bug fixed in this beta is the crash bug when project data is missing. A number of bugs related to the web output translations have also been fixed, but the WebApp output is still incompatible with IE7 at this time.

There have been two reports of a bug relating to the manual timezone setting but I cannot replicate the bug so it needs to be tested more thoroughly.
The bug reports state that the manual timezone setting is not restored across restarts of FahMon, and that while the setting does not affect the effective PPD or ETA calculations resulting in incorrect information being displayed.

To reliably test this version please make sure that you trash prefs.dat beforehand (or install the beta to a separate location), and as always report bugs using trac: http://trac.fahmon.net.

Download: Windows Linux/Source]]>

FahMon will crash if the project database doesn't contain project info for a WU it is monitoring.

The simple web output erroneously adds an extra "points" string to the credit field.

Several text items on all web output files cannot be translated. ]]>

This is an unsupported beta release of FahMon to check a number of bug fixes to allow me to close various support tickets.

The specific behaviour that needs testing is as follows:

• Do 50 frame DGromacs WUs now report PPD and ETA correctly?
• Does reloading client information still cause high CPU usage in Windows?
• Does FahMon still enter a state that uses 100% CPU time when left running for several days on Windows?
• Do client locations still get corrupted when monitoring large (> ~30) numbers of clients (Windows or Linux)?

If you test this release please comment on the above bugs using the bug tracking system.

For the full list of changes so far please refer top the changelog for this release, and also check the tickets that have been reported for this release here

One bug that has not yet been fixed is ticket #77 where the web output is displayed incorrectly in IE 7. This will be fixed in the official release.

This release also represents the an opportunity for translators to update the translation files ready for the official release. This time there are only very minor changes to the files required.
Any budding web designers may want to try out the templating system in this release too

Download: Windows Linux/Source]]>

In order to fix some serious bugs in the web output system (and the rather stupid object code it generated), I've adapted it to use a templating system.

This makes it easier to fix bugs in the pages generated, like the current IE7 rendering issue with the fancy output page. Another upside of this is that now you, the end user, can make your own templates and make the output pages appear just how you want them.

For the moment you can still only generate 3 pages, and the template filenames are fixed, but you can still edit the predefined template as you see fit. Future revisions may allow you to specify the template file to use for the output page. Also, if you make a particularly nice output page, submit it in a ticket and I'll consider including it with the next FahMon release.

Template files are stored within the templates subdirectory of your FahMon installation on Windows, and you can edit these directly. On Linux, the templates are installed to /usr/share/fahmon/templates or /usr/local/share/fahmon/templates by default. However, if you want to modify these, make a new directory inside your .fahmon/ config folder called "templates" and copy them there.

To check out these modifications now, checkout the latest revision from svn (source only). To learn how to use the templates, have a look at this file: http://trac.fahmon.net/browser/trunk/TEMPLATE_SYNTAX?format=raw.

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Starting with FahMon 2.3.2, several pieces of data crucial to FahMon's operation will now be obtained directly from queue.dat, since this is the only reliable source for these data.

To this end, some of the core code from qd has been ported into FahMon to access data from the queue in a tried and trusted fashion.

My thanks go to Dick Howell and Bas Couwenberg for this code.

With the introduction of qd into FahMon, the messages windows now displays the following licence text upon startup:

FahMon  is licenced under the GNU GPL v2
Copyright (C) 2003-2007 Francois Ingelrest
Copyright (C) 2007 Andrew Schofield
   
FahMon contains code from qd, also licenced under the GNU GPL v2
Copyright (C) 2002-2005 Richard P. Howell IV.
Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Sebastiaan Couwenberg

The overall upshot of these changes is that FahMon should be much more stable, and no longer crash or mangle machine names when monitoring large numbers of clients.

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Given that the wxWigets library is supposed to be a platform independent API, and since FahMon already exists for Windows and Linux, why can't it exist for OS X too?

Well the answer is, it can!

Thanks to some prodding from Shello from P@F, I've started modifying the platform dependent portions of FahMon to be compatible with OS X, using a Mac that I've been able to get my hands on. Shello has also graciously offered to help in this regard with his Mac.

Currently the state of the port is quite early on. The source compiles and runs on OS X, but there are still a large number of bugs, mainly due to the difference in the way OS X handles application frames etc. Some of the bugs at the moment seem to be a bit strange in their behaviour, like crashing when you right-click the client list for example.

I'm fairly confident that these can be resolved in short order though, once I understand what is causing the problem.

The OS X conversion is taking place in parallel to the existing Windows and Linux versions, so if I accidentally break something in the OS X build, it won't affect the Windows or Linux versions until the conversion is complete, by which time everything should work.

Here's a little screenshot of what it looks like so far:

Once the conversion becomes a little more stable I'll start releasing binary test builds, but at the moment given it's infancy and instability, the only way you can access it is from the svn repository.

svn co http://fahmon.net/branches/mactest FahMon_mac

To actually compile FahMon, you'll need Xcode and wxWidgets compiled as a static library (only required for build-time, not run-time). The best place to find information on how to get this is on the wxWidgets wiki
After that it's just a case of running

./configure
make
make FahMon.app

At which point you should have a FahMon application bundle!

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For those of you interested in downloading bleeding edge code, svn revision r38 is reasonably stable and adds a few new features in addition to a number of bug-fixes

To download this specific revisions, you can either download the snapshot as a zip file from here or you can export it from the svn repository using the following command (you should be able to do this anonymously):

svn export -r38 http://svn.fahmon.net/trunk fahmon

This revision contains the following changes:

* Updated and improved documentation (this is still "Work
  in Progress").
* Added Czech translation.
* Preferences dialog and client list now save changes
  immediately, which should help in situations where FahMon
  crashes, like fast-user-switching or closing RDP/VNC
  sessions.
* Added Drag-and-Drop function to the client list to allow
  new clients to be added more easily.
* Add Gromacs SMP CVS (GROCVS) core support.
* Adjusted margin on the benchmarks dialog.
* Fixed bug in "Effective Duration" code that produced
  incorrect results when calculating values for WUs with
  less than 100 frames
* Detailed instructions on how to compile fahmon using the
  MS Free Tools are now provided.
* Altered progress detection method to use FAHlog.txt, this
  should help with cores that don't update unitinfo.txt in
  a timely fashion, or at all. Unitinfo.txt is still used
  as a fallback if 1) The projectId is unknown, 2) The WU
  is still in the "startup" phase (i.e. yellow).
* Added WebApp module. You can now export the monitoring
  status to 3 different formats, WebApp - a fancy jscript
  powered web page that mimics the FahMon interface; Simple
  Web - a simple web page containing useful data arranged
  in a simple table; Simple Text - similar to Simple Web,
  but optimised for shell based viewing - useful for
  monitoring over SSH.

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