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Subject: about a possible problem with movei's logfiles(also for other programs)

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 02:43:25 03/02/04


Movei of today saves all it's games with slightly more information in a log
file.
Every game is only few kbytes but if somebody play thousands of games the log
file may be some mbytes.

When I think about it then I think that it is not ok to steal memory from the
computer of the user unless the user gave a special permission for it.

I even thought that people may complain that chess programs like movei and every
chess program that has a logfile or use a learning file that gets bigger is a
virus.

I can explain why.

1)I am afraid that Movei can cause a demage to the computer of the user by
forcing it to save a logfile.
What happens if the computer has not enough memory to save the logfile?

It is not allowed to cause intentionally a demage for computers of other people
and as soon as I know about the problem I cannot say that it is not
intentionally.

I plan in any case to release a fixed version of movei in a few days that has
log off as default and enable logfile only if the user changes parameter
of steal memory from 0 to 1.

2)Movei's learning is done at files with limited size and it only can learn to
change the first move so I guess that it is not a problem but it may be better
also if I tell the user information about the name of the files because
otherwise the user may be unlucky to have files with the same name in movei's
folder because the name of the file that book learning is done is
experimentalfile.d and I suspect that some people may have important information
in that file.

Usually it should be no problem if the user saves movei in a special folder that
have no other important files and I know nobody who complained about it in the
past but it is better to do things before people complain and not after they
complain
and the name experimentalfile.d has chances to be a file of another user.

What is your opinion?

Should I ask Leo to temporarely remove movei until I fix the problems that I
mention?

In that case I think that other programmers also should fix their programs and
yace for example generates a lot of logfiles even without asking me if I let it
to steal memory.

I have hundreds of logfiles of yace and everytime that I run yace on chessbase
interface I get a new logfile with a different name that make the task of the
person who want to delete the logfiles harder(at least with movei I have the
same name for all the logfiles).

It is not that I complain about yace(I thank dieter for halping me in advice and
in source code) but other people may complain.

Uri



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