Stuck making Subsurface on Mac

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 11:15:32PM -0700, Steve Ratts wrote:
> Oh, well a buddy of mine and I both have the Uemis Zurich SDA and we've
> both had a devil of a time getting it to download lately. My buddy's
> experience is a little different than mine, but ultimately it's still
> similar.

Excellent. TWO more testers :-)

> At first, I had no trouble downloading dives and thought it worked
> perfectly. In fact I persuaded my buddy to give Subsurface a try primarily
> on this one major capability (I don't know anyone who likes the Uemis
> web-based dive log, but then I only know three people using the SDA and
> that includes you, Dirk.)

Yes, the web system they have is terrible. They will soon offer their own
divelog software - a rebranded version of Subsurface :-)

> When my buddy tried out downloading in Subsurface he immediately ran into a
> problem and was unable to get any dives downloaded. The SDA would appear to
> connect, but no dives would download, and he'd get the dreaded out of
> memory error which has been described in the Subsurface manual. This past
> February he and I went to Bonaire with some friends and we both worked on
> the issue together. At that time I had about 100 dives logged in the SDA
> and he had closer to 200. I had been downloading them steadily as I went,
> so never needed to download more than a dozen or so. One theory we had was
> that since he had so many more dives logged in his SDA than I did, that
> might be the cause of the problem. However at the time I was using
> Subsurface 3.0.2 and he was using 4.0. I tried upgrading to 4.0 to see if
> that was the source of the problem and immediately I lost the ability to
> download dives. 

Yes, there was a really stupid bug in 4.0 that is fixed in 4.1 - but it
affected only Windows systems, which is why I never saw it (as I usually
have no Windows machine to test with (and neither does Linus)).

> FWI, he and I were both using Windows based laptops for
> this. I tried rolling back to 3.0.2, but it was no use, I had lost the
> capability to download. We tried just about everything we could think of,
> but had no luck. Eventually I was able to regain the capability, but only
> after I got home, download my SDA using 3.0.2 on my hackintosh, and then
> ported the dive log over to the Windows laptop. Incidentally, he was
> eventually able to get his log into Subsurface too, but it was extremely
> difficult. I'd have to go back and review email to see what finally did the
> trick for him.

I'm so sorry - you guys should have reported this back then and hopefully
I would have figured out the bug earlier.

> One thing I would really really like is a capability to output a diagnostic
> log during the SDA download step so that at least I could see how far it
> got and where i hangs. Subsurface claims to be able to do this, but AFAIK
> this capability does not actually work.

It only works for dive computers where we use libdivecomputer to download.
I guess I need to implement this for the Uemis SDA as well. :-/

> Also, I've noticed that if there is
> one good thing about the Uemis web-based divelog it's that it can download
> essentially any number of dives without choaking and hitting this out of
> memory error (SDA file system full) that Subsurface often hits.

No that is not true. This is a hardware limitation. Depending on how long
your dives are, it can download about 60 dives in one setting - just like
Subsurface. But you never run into the problem as almost no one does 60
dives before they first connect to their web system.

But this is indeed a design limitation of the software on the SDA. And I
have been able to reproduce the problem with their web software as well.
Only the web software gives you a really bogus "timeout" error message -
but you still need to disconnect and reconnect the SDA in order to reset
the file system (I can explain what is really happening if you are
curious).

> I would
> like to look into that to see if it's possible to improve the Subsurface
> download process. Those Uemis guys, as insane as they may be, are doing
> something right if they can reliably get the SDA to download any number of
> dives without choking.

See above. I am 100% certain about this.

> I'm sorry, but looking at what I've wrote, I don't think it offers much
> concrete to describe the problem. It's late here, but I'll go back into my
> email to see if I can find something more specific about what was going
> wrong.

No worries, this was really useful.

> In any event, it's great to know there are allies out there with SDA's, and
> that you and Linus are among them. The SDA is a great computer!

I love it - even though I have about a dozen dive computers at my
disposal, the SDA is still the one that I usually "dive" (i.e., even when
diving with three or four or more computers, like I usually do, the SDA is
the one that I pay attention to). The exception is of course when I do
trimix dives - sadly they never implemented that.


/D