no debug info, no response?

[ludicri]

Hello everyone,
I just met my hal a week ago. Actually, I have very little programming experience, only enough to analyse the halbrain, and add some minor plugins (for now)...
I hate the idea of asking a question on my very first post, but something really weird happenned today.

I've been taking some notes and scripting alot on the halbrain, to get used to the language.

Lately, I wanted to see if it was possible to add a password for certain situatons.

"So roughly,
I create a custommem(z), = 0
and if sent1 = x and then = "what's the password?",
if sent2 =  y, and "prev hal sent = "what's the password?",
then (z) = z + 15"

then, I went to debug to try it and there was no response... That's ok, so there was no error. I checked the debug info for it, an this is what came up:

+ Debug information
   - OpenDatabase
   - CloseDatabasew

well, I tag the script to disable it, and still get the same response.

Then I deleted the lines, and it worked pretty well.

But I don't get it, why could this be happening? I guess it might be a filesize limit, but it seems bizzare..

-----------------------------
Edit 1:
well, just realized, it can't be a file size limit, since it gave the same error after I deleted a huge script and huge amount of related notes... that makes this more interesting...
-----------------------------

Edit 2:
Yeah, it took 2 hours of my precious time to spot the tiny little unsupported character in an irrelevant string... Problem solved, but my halbrain editor got weird now. It slows down my computer and doesn't run normally.

[Art]

Welcome aboard!

We have found it is best to always make / keep a backup
of your halbrain.db file before attempting any modifications.

As for your error message, I'm at a loss but perhaps OTCE "Jerry"
might shed some light.

[ludicri]

Thank you Art.
I finally solved the previous problem: it was about an unsupported character "þ" in the script somewhere.  I don't know how it got there though, must've typed it mistakenly.
But now, I've a new problem. My hal won't work at all: That's pretty sad.. I'm waiting response from the responsible (medeksza I guess..) to be able to reinstall it.
Unlucky day I guess..

[Bill819]

Welcome to the Ultra Hal Forum.
Like all new guys you make some of the same mistakes that they all do. First of all they want to get in and make some changes, after all it is written in a dialog of basic, isn't it. That means it can't be hard.  The second thing they do is critizize and make dozens of suggestions on how it could be better while the majoirty of the users who have been using Hal for 3 or more years like it just the way it is. Yes changes do come, but very slowly and with lots of testing and even then sometimes they don't work exactly right as they may mess up some other parts of Hal's brain.
I am not saying that you are 100% in this group but you started off on the wrong foot by trying to modify Hal's brain without some proper counseling. None of us ever work on a "good" brain without makeing a copy of it else where first. In that way if our changes screw up we can simply restore the old 'good' version and think about what we did wrong.
I would make a suggestion to all newbies, ie. users and that is before you try to do anything with Hal spend a few weeks reading all of the postings in the forum. In doing so you will read about people who have done exactly what you did and all the advice that was given to them. We all like to think that we are very smart and in fact a few of us are, but the majority of us are just normal human beings with normal IQ's.
Making mistakes is not necessarily an indicator or low intelligence but, because we all make them, but some of us think of what might happen if we screw up so we make lots of back up copies of our most valuable works.
In the mean time, Mr. M. as we call him is a full time college student and some times it takes a day or two or three before he gets to catch up with all the forums messages so pleas give him time and don't give up we all like new members as Hal slowly becoumes the world largest A.I. program in popular current use.
Bill

[ludicri]

Thanks for the suggestions. Yet it's still sad that it crushed on a single unsupported character "þ"...
Had three different backups of the brain, that won't help since the program files are corrupted.. Also pretty unlucky to be temproraly far away from my home and being stuck with this virused laptop swarming in messed up registries.. That may be another reason why it crashed.

Everything happened while I was trying to bypass this network firewall.. So this is learned for sure: don't ever mess with the environement you're stuck in... [] (kind of reminded me the film U-turn)

Will be carefull with hal from now on though - if I get to fix it. That's how we really learn in the end: from our mistakes.