I should post this praise in the feedback section, but I love it.
Unfortunately, after running to queries, I walked away from the computer. Apparently, the windowserver crashed and killed the login context. The computer didn’t fully restart at that time, but I had to login again, and there were no ghost processes, but all my applications had to be started again as if I had restarted.
On my next restart of DA, the archives were gone. I can see them in the ~/Library/ folder, but apparently DA can’t or doesn’t want to.
Sometimes when flaky things happen, it’s because the computer has accumulated “cobwebs” in memory. Restarting the computer will often clear the cobwebs and freshly load the operating system into memory.
Here’s something to try:
In DEVONagent 3.0, click on the application name in the menubar and choose “Empty Cache”.
Restart the computer.
Launch DEVONagent and choose Window > Archive. Is the Archive displayed?
Nope. it’s still gone. After that odd event yesterday, I went ahead and ran Yasu, clearing all system, domain, and local caches, as well as fixing permissions and such.
Then after restart, came back to DA, scoured the console.
about the closest stuff I could find is a massive string of messages similar to this, all occurring within 1 minute:
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM DEVONagent[18082] HIToolbox: received notification of WindowServer event port death.
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM DEVONagent[18082] port matched the WindowServer port created in BindCGSToRunLoop
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM System Preferences[311] port matched the WindowServer port created in BindCGSToRunLoop
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM iTunes[272] HIToolbox: received notification of WindowServer event port death.
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM com.apple.loginwindow[56] Sat Feb 12 09:30:51 Constantinople.local loginwindow[56] <Error>: kCGErrorFailure: _CGSLockWindow: Cannot synchronize window backing store
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM Safari[4468] HIToolbox: received notification of WindowServer event port death.
2/12/11 9:30:51 AM Mail[253] HIToolbox: received notification of WindowServer event port death.
Those “received notification of WindowServer event port death” messages, and web search results for it, look like a sign of trouble with your system that’s not a DA-specific issue. Have you noticed any suspicious symptoms with other apps?
These are the old 2.3.1 archives. After installing the 3.0pb2, these archives had appeared in the archives window for two or three runs of DA.
It was during the third run that the window server event occurred. On the next run is when the archives no longer appeared. I had not, during the earlier runs tried to open any of the archives, so I’m not sure if they were ever accessible, but only know that DA3.0 was showing them prior to the window server event.
SJK,
Yes, it was a very odd event. Looking at the logs, I have a sneaky suspicion that there’s an errant plist, but need to look at it further. The plist file is a wierd one. It is name something like: 00993737262727383.com.apple. I haven’t looked at it close enough but saw some messages about this file prior to the event.
To be clear, it doesn’t appear that DA caused the windowserver event. I had never experienced this sort of behavior on any of my macs, but when wierd things like this happen, experience has shown me that the “usual suspect” can usually be found by locating any bad preferences files. In this case, hunting down that errant plist file’s origins will likely show the cause.
Meanwhile, that’s what I think happened to DA is that the plist got corrupted by this other interloping process who crashed the windowserer. Question now is how to reconnect DA an the old archives, or whether my earlier listing of those archives was in itself an anomaly. But Christian’s question about the origin of the archives makes me think he’s thinking the same thing.
You could remove the folder ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONagent/Archived (that’s the archive of version 3.0), delete the preferences (com.devon-technologies.agent.plist) and launch DEVONagent 3.0 again. This should convert the old 2.x archive (~/Library/Application Support/DEVONagent/Archive) again.