breveCreatures screensaver doesn't update prefs file anylonger
My breveCreatures screensaver hasn't updated its prefs file ~/Library/Preferences/breveCreatures.xml since 04-Jan-2007, though I use it every day. Every time I looked at it, the Generation seemed to say 3140 or 3141, and the Best distance didn't change either. Here's a few lines from my breveCreatures.xml:
58.39219411927297
30
11
1
3139
0
I believe I use the latest version (2.0) on my Mac (with OS X 10.4.10).
/Jon
Permissions and ownership?
Is there any possibility that permissions or ownership of the file got messed up somehow? Try doing a "get info" on the file to see if those settings look okay.
You can also try moving the existing XML file out of the way and see if the screensaver successfully writes to a new file.
Finally, you can check the system console (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app) to see if there are any error messages which could shed light on the problem.
- jon
Permissions and ownership seems OK
The permissions and ownership of the file breveCreatures.xml seems OK. "Get info" says "You can Read & Write", and an "ls -la" in the terminal shows "-rw-r--r--".
I removed the existing breveCreatures.xml, and confirmed that the screensaver successfully creates and writes to a new file. The permissions and ownership of this file are the same as those of the old file.
In the console.log, an entry is added each time the screensaver is activated, but this happens both when I use the old and new breveCreatures.xml files. The entries look like this:
2007-07-23 10:04:48.005 ScreenSaverEngine[242] display: 1, 0x18f68600
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named breve
My old breveCreatures.xml can be found here:
http://folk.uio.no/jkleiser/breve/breveCreatures.xml
/Jon
I'll leave the old file behind
Yesterday I installed the screensaver on my wife's Intel Mac. When I transferred my old breveCreatures.xml, I got the same problem: the file was not updated. I also checked the console.log, and there were pretty much the same Traceback entries as I reported yesterday.
Today I noticed that the creatures that appear when I use the freshly created breveCreatures.xml look more interesting than they used to be with the old file, they often have more blocks. With the old file (which was created with an older version of the screensaver) the max. number of blocks seemed to be 7.
I think I'll simply leave the old file and its problem behind ...
/Jon