The hamsters ate the OP the first time I tried to post this.
I use a program called Trillian to chat on the internet. It keeps a log for you of your conversation with the other person in a text file on the computer. Apparently it writes to the file as you talk, because the text file is in use while Trillian is running.
Yesterday, I was using it to chat with a friend, and there was a thunderstorm. The power went out for a second, and I thought my log file would be lost. Instead, I looked at it, and the html code of a webpage I was viewing was there, along with some seemingly random character strings, for example:“¨WA@¨`˜7pTè%R@sBj ò‚gÿ ¹hä^”.
2 Questions:
- How did the html and this random stuff get placed in the file?
- What exactly could the random stuff be?
If you hiccup while typing, one hand may inadvertently shift over, and you could be hitting the “i” key when you meant to hit the “o”. Its sorta like that. The power blink gave the computer a hiccup.
Before the power blink, the computer may have been streaming all information that was identified with port 900 to the text file. After the blink, the computer may have been streaming everything associated with port 901. Then, when the computer encountered information it was not familiar with (it expected to receive, for example, only ASCII text, but the information coming in on port 901 included all sorts of other data) it started to output junk.
I use Trillian, too, and every once in a while you’ll get a hiccup that displays a weird character like é or ² or something with a seemingly random string of weird characters. From what I can tell, it’s a bug in the “skin” you’ve applied, and it happens at different frequencies depending on what skin you’ve applied. I get this maybe once a month with about an hour’s use of Trillian nightly on the latest version’s default skin.
I use the “Blue Turtle” skin, and I’ve used that since January. I’ve never had it happen before. And it wasn’t just one or two lines. This was about 500kb of garbage in the log file.
If the random characters show up in the text file, this would have nothing to do with what shows up on the skin.
It could be a memory problem. Sometimes when running very very low on RAM, accurate character processing seems to be the first to go.
It may be that the program uses some sort of on-the-fly binary compression, in whcih case, one missing bit can make garbage out of the whole thing (although there is usually some sort of error-correction).
Well, none of the conversation was missing from the log file, before or after the reset. So I think that rules out Mangetout’s idea. And Trigonal Planar’s idea is unlikely, since I wasn’t running any more or different programs than usual before the outage. I think Pencil Pusher may be on the right track, but would there be enough time to stuff 500kb worth of random text from a port while the power had already begun to lose power from the outage? I mean, the computer actually reset, and I haven’t had the problem since then, so I have to assume it actually happened while the computer lost power from the reset.
correction, “while the computer had already begun to lose power”. Preview is my friend.