Just a silly patch day morning rant...

[merlight]

Morning. Don't read this unless you're into scripting and have nothing better to do. I'm stuck and need to write down what I did, while waiting for Update 6 to download.

Topic is Auto-updating add-ons. Because today my crafted update script stopped working.

What it did was take a list of download links (like http://www.esoui.com/downloads/download7-LibAddonMenu), do a HEAD request, which would return "302 Found" with a Location header leading to http://cdn.esoui.com/. The Location contained the latest version's timestamp, so I could easily skip re-downloading files I already had. But the old download link doesn't return 302 anymore, it's now an actual page that automatically starts the download from CDN. I spent half an hour investigating headers, trying to find another way to get the timestamp given the add-on ID... and only then noticed the download link on add-on page is a little different now: http://www.esoui.com/downloads/dl7/LibAddonMenu... and this one returns 302.

So my script works again. Why am I writing this then? There's a small issue I've been aware of for quite some time, yet it didn't deserve a topic of its own. Every time I send the initial request, e.g. HEAD /downloads/dl7/ , the file's download counter goes up. Downloads are counted on the redirect, not on the CDN.


Second topic is Minion. Because before I proceeded to fix my script, I though I might just install Minion. On Linux/Wine, that is

~160MB... um... ok... Stupidly enough, I started with the wrong installer. It doesn't check what system you install it on - it successfully completes installing 64bit Minion on 32bit system. "It won't run here" warning would be nice. Another weirdness - in requirements listed on the web is VC++2010 runtime, and it says Minion will prompt to install it. Why not the installer?

On the second try I got the correct 32bit installer. However, that didn't get me much further. Minion crashes right away (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION in [iphlpapi.dll+0xc010]). Going through the crash log, I see... wait what? Direct3D?! Why the... even if it doesn't crash on that (and I presume it doesn't, it crashed in the same way before and after I installed d3d), who wants 3D graphics in an add-on manager? That was when I went back to my 50-line script


Third topic is Unlikely. Because it's extremely unlikely someone reads this, has working Minion and knows how to use Wireshark. Could you imaginary friend please take a look at Minion's communication and see how it gets the list of add-ons with version timestamps? So that I don't have to bump all download counters every time I check for updates. Thanks.