Quirky Computers

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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As they say stuff happens.  Recently two avid readers of the Saugeen and Kincardine Times asked for help on what appeared to be unrelated issues.

One reader while traveling in Europe all of a sudden could not reach a familiar web page linked to from the Saugeen Times. He could not go to the site directly either.  He was using a laptop MAC and the browser Safari.  I tried it here on 4 different computers including a MAC and 3 different operating systems and 4 different browsers.  It worked just fine!

Eventually his problem mysteriously went away, but why?

Another reader could not reach a different site using Fire Fox.  Two other computers at her house could reach the site with no problem.  So how did we help this person?

She reported a 'compression error' comment from Firefox.  Our advice was to clear ALL the history and cookies.  That cleared up the problem.  She was thrilled.  FireFox tries to compress and decompress the history cache to save space on your machine.  Other browsers probably do the same.

So what happened?  Well, we can't be sure, but you can corrupt the history cache through no fault of your own.  Some 'glitch' happened  in the past and the stored link in the user's history was destroyed.  Once destroyed, this link would repeat the error over and over again

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17/09/2009 09:50 PM

This does not correct itself when you reboot or refresh.  Since you can't get to the good link, you can't refresh it.  All you get is the same error over and over again.

So what is our advice?  We advise you to clear your history from time to time no matter what browser or operating system you are using.  There is a chance, not a very big one, that you may get this same error in the future.

Even without clearing the cache, the error would eventually clear itself because the oldest links are the ones that are eventually flushed to allow newer ones to come into the saved history of what you've been doing.  Could that have been the cure for the man in England?

These things are bugs, but they won't be soon corrected and they can cause you fits. Sometimes you can get some help by searching the Internet for like problems.  I did on this one, but the advice was not clear and was conflicting in some respects, so it's still a matter of intuition in solving some problems.

A few months ago, a friend said that they could get to their own web site, but some people said they could not.  After testing the problem, we found out that the web site had never been registered internationally and could only be reached on the server Renee at BMTS.  All BMTS customers could reach it, but nobody in the rest of the world could.  A simple application to register the DNS address solved the problem, but it took testing on multiple computers on multiple providers to unearth the real difficulty.  This mistake had been going on for two years.

What solved it?    Broad based testing and noting that it worked on BMTS, but on no other provider.

Where is Sherlock Holmes when we need him?