Ghosts and Gremlins

[rembetis]

My Xlobby is possessed! Can you help me perform an Exorcism?

The Ghost in the Machine -- At about 5 min. before the hour, every hour (but in the p.m. only) one of my X-10 light switches comes on. I am running the xAP plugin (with built-in Hub), which connects over my LAN to a PC in the office running Homeseer. I have no timed events in Homeseer and no history of poltergeist activity. It is freaking my wife out (she's convinced some bored hacker is playing games with our heads). Any idea what's happening?

Foobar Gremlin -- just lately the Foobar plugin has been acting very buggy. If Xlobby sits idle for a while, or I play a movie in the interim, then the Foobar plugin breaks and neglects to send any files to the player (the internal Xlobby playlist is populated but not transferred to Foobar). In the past, the problem sometimes lay with my soundcard having difficulty switching between 44.1khz and 48khz material, but I could always solve this by hitting Stop and Play again. Nowadays nothing helps but rebooting Xlobby. Anyone else experiencing the same problem?

Foobar Gremlin Pt 2 -- along those same lines, the very first time I play music during an Xlobby session, if I choose one song to play, and then try to queue a second and third, inevitably the second song is missed. Queuing works perfectly after that, but the only workaround for that first session is to hit "Queue Song" three times (for add song, remove, and add again). What gives?

Disembodied Tags -- I've posted about this before, but gotten few replies. The vast majority of my music is FLAC encoded, and tagged with Tag & Rename. Occasionally, a file gets mistagged (genre, album title, etc) and I have to correct it. I manually delete the entry from my database, fix the tag, and re-import but occasionally the deleted and disembodied tag still gets read. I have checked and double-checked and no trace of the old tag is present in any of those files, and yet Xlobby still finds it. How is this even possible?

Please help. I'm living in fear of my HTPC...

[Marbles_00]

I have to admit, this has been one of the most entertaining posts to read. Very creative. Though I can't help you totally, but are you able to monitor network activity at the time the light turns on? This will help isolate if it is indeed the system with the XAP plugin, or the computer running Homeseer. *EDIT* Maybe even unplug one of the systems from the network prior to the light event happening?

Can't help you with Foobar problems as I'm running Winamp.

As for your tagging problem, though a little unrelated, I posted a problem in the bugs section where I talked about Xlobby editing category information on its own, to which Steven found legacy code and deleted it. Maybe, their is that sort of similar problem going on here?

Hope this was helpful.

David

[rembetis]

Steven found legacy code and deleted it.

uh oh... Legacy Code. I don't like the sound of that. Sounds like the title of a bad thriller.

In all seriousness, this is some frustrating stuff. Don't even ask me about the dreaded Ground Loop that has been stalking and terrorizing my AV equipment for years now...

[stevenhanna6]

I doubt the legacy code I took out caused these gremlins to appear, lets take it one at a time though. I did redo the foobar plugin for the new 0.9 version try that out....I dont even know if the plugin works yet though I havent gotten any feedback....I'll check into the queue issue could be foobar related.....the lights....well I have no idea why the lights would go on for no reason....maybe a polling bug in the plugin?

new foobar

http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4129

[rembetis]

Thanks Steven. The legacy code thing was a (bad) joke. I have installed the new foobar and the new plugin and so far the new plugin is working well. I'll let you know if the delayed malfunction occurs with this new plugin. I still get the same queue behavior as I described before, but I discovered that, during the previously problematic first music session after running Xlobby, if I queue the very first track instead of simply playing it (which plays it by default) then the second track is also queued properly. Just to be clear, the bug (and it's a tiny one at that) only occurs if I ...

1. Run Xlobby
2. Play a single track
3. Toggle my default behavior for clicking the musicdetails field from "Play" to "Queue" and then queue a second track (which is not added to the queue, though all subsequently queued tracks are).

I more or less copied my music overlay from Baddabing's Redeux II skin, so I guess I need to go back and check the xml closely, but I'm curious whether anyone else gets the same behavior.

[stevenhanna6]

try this fix out.

http://www.xlobby.com/xlobby2screentest.zip

[rembetis]

try this fix out.

Well that squashed the tiny queue bug. Thanks Steven!

Off to tame the x-10 djinn and rogue tags...

[bmblank]

Just to make the wife happy you can disconnect your network from any outside sources. Then if the lights continue to turn on, it's not a hacker. But then I guess that would mean that you DO have poltergiest... Do this at your own risk:).

[rembetis]

Just to make the wife happy you can disconnect your network from any outside sources. Then if the lights continue to turn on, it's not a hacker. But then I guess that would mean that you DO have poltergiest... Do this at your own risk:).

Thanks. FWIW, I don't even have Homeseer installed anymore and the lights still come on from time to time. I think it's just random "noise" on my (1960s) wiring. X-10 stuff is pretty notorious for flaky behavior, so my wife and I have stopped worrying about it.

[Mannyman]

As far as X10 goes:
Just throwing it out there, but have you tried changing the house code?

It might be another x10-using-neigbor has something scheduled if the time the light goes on is consistent.

Also, I'm the only person I know of that this has happend to:

I have a neighbor whose teenager has a very fancy remote controlled toy truck. When he off roads the vehicle in the field behind my house, my rf controllers would go crazy. It would pretty much hit each house code and command code. It was fairly consistent for a few months happening after school hours.

I ended up getting new rf controllers with secure frequncies.