Shoutbox

Maaaaattttiiiiiiiiiii

Where are you? The merge feature gets stuck at 66.7% .

Alright, that's it. Enough about this. If you want me to help you, then you first will have to help me!

I'm planning to recreate Log Manager as a Visual C++ or C# application, which gives me the ability to work in multiple threads and integrate some kind of scheduling feature. The only problem: I have absolutely no experience with programming for the Windows environment in .NET languages. So basically, I need someone to teach me!

My most important questions in this project are as followed:

• I need some way to keep track of the progress while "Log Viewer.exe" executes the command-line encryption process. Messenger Plus! Live seems to be able to detect this quite accurately while encrypting a log file to display its contents afterwards, so I need some way to get the same result.
  
• I want to make the user interface share some elements of Windows Live Messenger 2009. I already wrote some code to get the wavy header background in the window using GDI+ (with doubled buffering drawing), but I think there has to be some better way to make custom GUIs.

Well yeah, if someone could help me with this?

When I try to merge my PLE files, they come out in a big paragraph of text, and it looks to be only 2 months that actually do merge out of all of them.  Opening the resulting .html file shows

T h i s  i s  a n  e x a m p l e

rather than anything in HTML.  It's like the decrypting doesn't work.  ANd I can use other scripts to decrypt it myself, but this program doesn't recognize plain text to merge it.

How did the rest of the people who posted here get it to work?  I realize it was some time ago, but the logs aren't new either.

First of all, this project is sort of discontinued. I'm not planning any updates in the near future. The main reason is that the way the script interacts with the Log Viewer executable is still unreliable and there's no easy way to make this better with a Plus! script.

I just tried to do a merge process and it still works more or less. I managed to merge three encrypted log files into one log file. It's not completely broken yet.

However, it is very possible that only two months are merged in the case that the script thinks that Log Viewer is done decrypting while it's not. This detection is done using a timer which checks the last modified time on the decrypted file to determine whether Log Viewer is still working on it or whether it's finished. If Log Viewer hasn't changed the file in a certain time interval, the script thinks that it's done and continues with the next file.

The only reliable way to detect this is by receiving the exit code from the Log Viewer process itself. However, this is not possible in a Plus! script as such asynchronous monitoring is not supported. That's why I started porting the script to C# where such functionality is available.

I'll try to find some time to polish that C# project and release it. It's just that I don't have much time...

---

On another note, it appears that there's a small error in one of the script files. For the time being, I'll have to ask you to do this change manually though.
In _mergeProcess.js, find this line:

Javascript code:

---

this.TempFolder = PathAppend(GetTempPath(), "Log Manager");

---

and add the following line beneath it:

Javascript code:

---

this.TempFolder = PathAppend(GetTempPath(), "Log Manager");
if(!IsFolder(this.TempFolder)) CreateFolder(this.TempFolder);

---

It probably won't fix some files being skipped but at least the merge process will effectively be able to start.

Thanks for the reply and update!

I just tried a merge of 3 months and it looks like there are 2 problems.  1.  It only used the first month.  2.  Something happens during the merge (doesn't happen with decrypt alone) to the first line, and there is no HTML formatting.  It shows in the examples below

Here's an example of the original PLE log:

code:

---

.--------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Session Start: Wednesday, March 12, 2008                           |
| Participants:                                                      |
|    B- ALL ABOOOORT!   *toot toot* (email1@hotmail.com)             |
|    ...e not to sell your perfumed secrets (email2@hotmail.com)     |
.--------------------------------------------------------------------.
[04:25:36 PM] I promise no: morning
[04:25:56 PM] B- ALL ABOOO: morning
[04:25:59 PM] B- ALL ABOOO: literally
[04:26:22 PM] I promise no: how u doin?
[04:26:47 PM] B- ALL ABOOO: i dunno i just woke up after like 13
              hours
[04:26:55 PM] I promise no: i just woke up too!

---

After merging, only the one month is shown and it looks like this in notepad

code:

---

.---------------.--------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Session Start: Wednesday, March 12, 2008                           |
| Participants:                                                      |
|    B- ALL ABOOOORT!   *toot toot* (email1@hotmail.com)             |
|    ...e not to sell your perfumed secrets (email2@hotmail.com)     |
.--------------------------------------------------------------------.
[04:25:36 PM] I promise no: morning
[04:25:56 PM] B- ALL ABOOO: morning
[04:25:59 PM] B- ALL ABOOO: literally
[04:26:22 PM] I promise no: how u doin?
[04:26:47 PM] B- ALL ABOOO: i dunno i just woke up after like 13
              hours
[04:26:55 PM] I promise no: i just woke up too!

---

The top line is different.  The headers after this one are identical to the original though.

Opening the original in wordpad is identical to notepad.  But this file produced from the merge operation (the code above) looks different in wordpad.  I can't even copy it into this window because it must have invisible characters in it, but this is how it appears by my typing it out:

code:

---

. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - (continues)
|  S e s s i o n  S t a r t  (header continues)
[ 0 4 : 2 5 : 3 6  P M ]   I  p r o m i s e  n o :  m o r n i n g  : )

---

I hope that makes sense to you.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but my logs have almost the same modify date, because I encrypted them all using another tool found in these forums.

I see, you're working with log files in text format. This script only works with HTML formatted log files (encrypted or decrypted). Encrypting and decrypting will work just fine but merging works with the actual log contents and needs those contents to be HTML.

The problem is caused by the script seeing a PLE file and assuming that the content is HTML. It doesn't check whether the decrypted content is valid HTML. I understand that this should actually be checked by the script, I never actually tested it with text log files. I don't see why anyone would still want to use text logs when the HTML logs are so much better though.

(Those "invisible characters" are actually null characters as the script writes as Unicode. However since there's no byte flag or content type specified, Notepad and WordPad will open it as ANSI and show those null characters as spaces.)

quote:

---

Originally posted by Matti
I don't see why anyone would still want to use text logs when the HTML logs are so much better though.

---

I totally agree!  But unfortunately years of my logs are in text.  Is there anything that can transform them to even basic HTML logs? 

quote:

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Originally posted by JimmyJazz
Is there anything that can transform them to even basic HTML logs?

---

No, not automatically. There are way to many variables and unknowns in regards to text logs to make something fully automated. A lot of examples of these unknowns and problems can be seen in this thread. But note that there are also other problems not yet described in that thread too. It is just a massive undertaking to write something which can convert text logs to html files in a reliable way and it will never be a fully automated process anyways (it would always require user interaction to answer some unknowns etc). And then I'm not even talking about language dependant stuff in those logs.

Well I guess my best bet then is to find a program to combine text files in a chosen order, so I can at least have them streamlined into 30 files rather than 700!

Thanks for the advice, both of you.

Sorry for the trouble, but I've been having MSN Logging problems for years (multiple logs on multiple accounts as well as different formatting). If you can reply to my query it would be greatly appreciated.

Whenever I try to merge two encrypted logs together (with an unencrypted output), let's say 'email@hotmail.com.ple' and 'email@hotmail.com.ple (2)' I get an error message either at 50% or 66.7% that says:

   The process failed because an error occured.

   Error: Error while reading temporary file.
   Paramaters: C:Users\Chase\AppData\Local\Temp\Log
   Manager\email@hotmail.com.tmp

   Please try again.

I don't really know anything about scripting or coding but i tried creating a folder in Temp called Log Manager and that didn't work. Any suggestions?



Also, regarding the editing of the _mergeProcess.js script, where would one find this file? I can't seem to find it.

Thanks for your time.