sd%chem@UCSD.EDU (Steve Dempsey) (10/13/89)
Has anybody noticed any problems with 'picking' on the 4D workstations? Recently, several people running my molecular modeling software (MMS) have called to report that it has stopped working. I have traced the problem to erroneous results being returned by 'endpick'. Just to make life complicated, different models of the 4D report different results, and on the one 4D that I have routine access to (a 240GTX running 3.1G) the problem does not occur. Most bizarre has been the behavior of Personal Irises. These machines are running 3.1D and 3.1G. In three cases people reported identical situations: 1. They had been using my software for weeks or months without problems. 2. Their machines crashed because of a local power failure. 3. My program would not operate properly after power was restored. No hardware or software changes had taken place between steps 1 and 3. In one case the PI was turned back off for the weekend, and when it was restarted on Monday morning the problem was gone! What I am expecting from 'endpick' (and what I see on the 240GTX) is a function value of 1 (indicating 1 hit) and a pick buffer containing two values; a 1 (length of name stack) and the value placed on the namestack with 'loadname'. The Personal Irises are returning 0 from 'endpick', indicating that no hits occured. A 70G (3.141592638...) and and a 70GT (3.0) report multiple 'null' hits in addition to the real hit. For example, if 'endpick' returns a value of 3 the pick buffer contains: pickbuf[0] = 0 0 length namestack pickbuf[1] = 0 0 length namestack pickbuf[2] = 1 namestack has one value pickbuf[3] = expected value -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Dempsey (619) 534-0208 Dept. of Chemistry Computer Facility, B-014 INTERNET: sdempsey@ucsd.edu University of Calif. at San Diego BITNET: sdempsey@ucsd La Jolla, CA 92093 UUCP: ucsd!sdempsey