White Screen News

[fred]

It think it is safe to say that we are finally on top of this problem and in all likelyhood white screens will pretty much be a thing of the past soon.

 

We have identified 3 causes of white screens:

 

1. Some random combinations of mouse movements and clicks in various parts of BBO will lead to the white screen condition. This was the result of a bug in the program (which was trivial to fix once we knew what was happening). In version 3.9.7 this was fixed (but the fix left an intentional annoying side effect that a few of you noticed - that side effect will be eliminated in the next version).

 

2. That the part of the BBO program that handles basic network messaging between the client and the server would sometimes "freeze up" due to a very busy BBO, your ISP having trouble, or some other external network problem. Most likely this is what caused the majority of the white screens. We understand the nature of this problem now (and it explains why white screens happen more when BBO has a lot of people logged in) and we are working very hard to come up with a fix. Hopefully one will be found within a day or so, but this is not 100% clear. See nice story about this below.

 

3. If your PC gets overloaded because you are doing too many things with it at once, the white screen condition can occur. Thanks to Dr. Todd for showing me how to replicate this condition. Unfortunately this is not something we can really control (and the white screen effect happens to all programs under these conditions - not just BBO). Good news is that it really takes a lot of work to do this to your PC. 99% of our members will never stress their computers to the level that is necessary and, for those that do, there is an easy solution (stop running badly written CPU-intensive programs at the same time as BBO).

 

Now the nice story about type-2 white screens:

 

Dr. Todd reported an unexplained white screen with 3.9.7 at a time when his (healthy) PC was not running any other programs. Before this happened we did not know about the possibility of type-2 white screens.

 

Having spent day and night during the past week trying to deal with this problem (without apparent success), I decided to take drastic measures:

 

I e-mail my friend Bill Gates, an avid bridge player and a big fan of BBO (seriously). I described the nature of the white screen problem and asked for his help.

 

Within an hour I received an extensive reply from him that included his thoughts about what was going on and offered some suggestions. He cc'd this e-mail to one of his ace programmers at Microsoft. Shortly thereafter I received an extensive e-mail from this guy that pretty much pinned down the type-2 white screen issue and a recommendation for how to deal with it (which we are now studying).

 

Whatever you happen to think of Microsoft, their software, and their business policies, and whatever you might have read about Bill personally, I hope you can agree that it is rather remarkable that the world's richest man (who is no doubt one of the world's busiest men as well) would make this kind of effort for the sake of bridge and BBO.

 

By the way, I have spent quite a lot of time playing bridge and talking with Bill during the past few years and I have many other indications that he is truly a good guy. It's nice to have friends in high places and, without a doubt, Bill is a good friend.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com