Friday 15 June 2007

jmol troubles

Jmol is such a cool program that not using it in my blog is not an option. The problem is that it causes weird error messages. If you had problems accessing my blog the last couple of days, it's because of jmol. The weird thing is that it works alright if you click a link that leads you here. But if you type the address into the address line, it doesn't work. I know one thing: the problem wasn't with the jmolInitialize command. It doesn't seem to matter to call it several times on a page. The routine jmol.js was programmed in a way that it is just skipped if it's called a second time.

If you weren't able to access my blog, these are the posts that caused the trouble: Methane vibrations, p-Cresole vibrations. Take a look if you haven't been able to. And don't tell me they are not cool.

4 comments:

Lightnir said...

Maybe i can help again...
What kind of "weird error messages" are you getting?
Are that errors browser independent?
I wonder a bit because I had no problems accesing your blog directly or trough a RSS/ATOM feed.

Felix said...

I use firefox. sometimes if I click the wrong thing the browser just freezes without telling me why. and then I am asked to send an error message to microsoft.

the weird thing is that it is not reproducible. yesterday firefox crashed when I clicked the "theoretical chemistry" category. today it works.

it's difficult to debug something if you don't get an error message and if you don't even know when the error occurs

Lightnir said...

Hi again.

I did some tests under windows and linux with different browsers. I didn't get the browser to crash, but it seams like the Java Virtual Machine is using too much memory as it should. For example my Firefox uses normaly about 30MB memory, but after going on theoretical chemistry link it uses up to 100MB - pretty damm much if you ask me. And the memory stays allocated even by visiting other pages and clearing the browser's cache. Killing the Java VM frees the memory but causes a browser crash.

If it's the fault of some bad coding in the Jmol.js it's possible to fix it. But since my session is still in progress and still got some exams waiting for me i didn't got much time to go deep into it. But i'll try to find a solution.

Regards
]:)

Felix said...

thanks for helping. it's just a weird thing. today firefox crashes again if I click biochemistry or theoretical chemistry.

theoretical chemistry is kind of extreme because there are more than 10 applets on that page maybe that's why it needs so much memory. but it doesn't work with the two on biochemistry either.

it would be cool if you find something. but maybe the cleanest solution would be to have people click somewhere if they want to start the applet. that would also have the advantage that the site doesn't take as long to load.