TT*ware 3.09 rules at French Creek MTB race

Typically I will return home from a race and e-mail the results from home to the race director and whoever else may need them. Recently, I have experienced some "funky" issues that Fred and I believe are likely my PC. One thing I can confirm, TT*Ware will not allow me to open a race file while I am connected to the internet. I am using Internet Explorer 6.0 and a telephone line. The message I get says that "the file cannot be accessed because it is being used by another process" It does say "process"?? When I disconnect from the internet it is fine. The TT*Ware will open while I am online, there will just be no data in the timing window since it cannot use the race file. By the same token, I cannot connect to the internet while I have TT*Ware open. This is not a real problem at this point. I just know how things have to be done.

I also have fairly consistent errors when I try to print from the TT*Ware. It claims that the ttcomma files can not be accessed. Fred and I have tried putting ttcomma files from another PC and that does not solve the problem. The problem can be solved by rebooting the machine. It will then print fine. Again, I have a solution to the problem, but there must be some problem. Do you have any ideas of what I may look into to resolve the issue...particularly the print issue? Should I try something different with my PC...or my Internet Explorer?

Bob:

That's a new one.

Are you, by any chance, running out of hard drive space?

What flavor of Windows are you using?

Do you have anti-virus and/or firewall software installed?

This problem intrigues me, because Fred was using the same version of software at the same event, with the same data, and the same time base, on a different PC, and it all worked perfectly.

Improperly configured firewalls and anti-virus software can wreak havoc with all flavors of Skunkware, because I broadcast tons of TCP/IP packets on several different sockets to the broadcast address (255.255.255.255). Many switches (Cisco, for example) have the broadcast address disabled by default as a security measure.

Please e-mail me directly or give me a call, as you are the first customer to report anything like this, and the problem is no doubt a complex one .

James Broder
Broder's Skunkware Scoring & Timing Software
http://www.skunkware.tv

I am currently on line and printing from TT*ware at the same time.

I have Norton 2002 AV Pro, AOL 8.0, W2000.

I checked perfomance and I am using 5% of CPU and 135700k of memory. Nothing.

Bobby reports that his PC acts funky sometimes as well. His HD is partitioned in 3 sections. Boot -C, Recovered files D, and Files E. My PC has no partition and runs everything on C

Always trying to expand our abilities with TT*Ware...and our timing services, we played with some new tasks today at Fell Mountain...one of the Mid-Atlantic Super Series MTB races. Using two PCs that are networked via a Linksys wireless access point, we opened the same TT*ware files on two PCs at the same time. This was great to print results while we were still racing. This event had sport and expert riders on the course at the same time...16 classes doing various numbers of laps. We were able to give current up to date results in a hard copy for the riders who were finished...while we waited for many of the longer races to come to an end in the wet, muddy conditions. It worked great! Riders were happy...and impressed...that they could see unofficial results with 75-100 riders still on the course. You are able to go to the print feature on TT*ware pretty quickly and print results when only using one PC, but this worked well for an event where there were constant finishers...the second PC eliminated needing to go back and slide times from the data log to the rider's information and calculate times.

After printing with the second PC, we just closed out of TT*ware completely...thus having the most up-to date data and results when we opened the file again. To do this, we actually opened the same TT*ware EXE file on both PCs.

Bob:

Interesting. Printing from the same race data file across the LAN shouldn't be a problem, as long as network permissions are set correctly. Printing only reads the data files, it does not write them, although the print routines do save some print setup datafiles to disk (such as page headers).

You might encounter some Microsoft error messages on the printing PC if the network settings aren't very liberal, because the timing PC owns those files and the printing PC is an interloper.

When doing this, I would suggest using TT 3.11 or above, as starting in 3.11 I started doing all the printing-related database stuff in memory rather than via file to get around the Windows XP networking bug many users have experienced.

Keep pushing those frontiers. TT has turned out to be a very useful testbed for technologies which have eventually found their way across the entire line of Skunkware professional timing software solutions.



TMS

James Broder
Broder's Skunkware Scoring & Timing Software
http://www.skunkware.tv