Who likes manga?

Manga 0.31 works fine for me! (still Pi0, RO5.24)

Is it just me, or has CloudFlare broken MangaReader.net?

It seems to drop the ball partway through fetching stuff (after the transfer speed descends to zero with each block received). It’s not much better using a browser, fetching a page of Azumi (in Firefox) did work, but it took a shade under a minute…

Seems OK for me. I’m still on 0.27 but everything seems to be behaving itself.

Maybe it’s a geographical issue? Maybe Cloudflare’s CDN is shonkier than normal? Maybe they don’t like Frenchies? Who knows?

But the number of times Manga was freezing drove me crazy). Twice, because when TaskKilled, it would leave open incomplete files. Grrr…

So I did something about it. But you’ll need to use SecureSockets (for now) as AcornSSL doesn’t work (for me) in non-blocking mode.

Update will be offered by Manga, or you can get it from http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/

There’s an !!ReadFirst file that explains the issue. I’ll quote that below as it makes more sense than the entries in the Versions file…

MANGA WAS FREEZING WHEN TRYING TO FETCH FILES?

The mangareader website has become horribly slow and unreliable for me. Chris
Mahoney (on ROOL forum) reports everything is okay for him, so it may be a
geographical issue (they've recently switched to cloudflare for their CDN).

At any rate, if you are one of the ones affected by Manga freezing when trying
to fetch/read manga, this v0.32 update will help you.

FIRST THING - YOU *MUST* BE USING SECURESOCKETS. The AcornSSL implementation
does not currently work non-blocking, so that will hang, there's no way around
that, that's what blocking means. :-)


IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE ACORNSSL BETA:

You don't need to do anything. Skip ahead to Fetching Stuff.



IF YOU HAVE ACORNSSL BUT DON'T NEED IT RUNNING:

You cannot have AcornSSL loaded when starting Manga, as it will use that by
preference even if SecureSockets is loaded.

Open Manga's !Run file and locate this:

  | Comment out the following two lines if you don't need AcornSSL running
  | X RMKill AcornSSL
  | RMLoad <Manga$Dir>.SecureG

Remove the '|' from the RMKill and RMLoad lines, then save !Run.

Skip to Fetching Stuff.



IF YOU HAVE ACORNSSL AND NEED IT RUNNING:

If you need to have AcornSSL running, there's a way to override the default
behaviour.
First, let's ensure SecureSockets is available. Open Manga's !Run file and
locate this:

  | If you need AcornSSL running, comment out the following line and be
  | sure to start Manga whilst holding the 'S' key (to force SecureSockets).
  | RMLoad <Manga$Dir>.SecureG

Remove the '|' from the RMLoad line, then save !Run.

When you start Manga, do so WHILE HOLDING DOWN THE 'S' KEY. This will force
Manga to use SecureSockets.



FETCHING STUFF:

Fetching stuff now has a five second timeout. If the fetcher pops up the "I'm
doing something" window, then you'll be told that there was a timeout, though
you could probably see the fetch status freeze up.

If precaching, the fetch will fail silently, and trying to go to the next page
will cause it to become a foreground fetch (the precache won't retry the same
fetch). When you successfully fetch a page, the precache will be invoked for
the one following.
It's a bit hit and miss if the fetch will be successful, so don't worry if the
precache doesn't always succeed.



AND FINALLY...

At any rate, Manga should no longer freeze and need to be task-killed, leaving
incomplete open files. Well, so long as you're using SecureSockets. :-)


I've just been reading "Cats are facing west". It's not as slick as it used to
be thanks to the server flakiness, but Manga copes with it, we just need a
little bit of patience...


Rick, 2018/09/21

Just to clarify something – Manga has three fetchers built in. The first is http, not important. The second is AcornSSL. This has not been modified – no point as it’s blocking. The third is SecureSockets. This is the one that has been modified to support the above features.

I hope to poke around (Real Soon Now™) and see if I can work out what’s happening with AcornSSL’s non-blocking and why it is returning gibberish error messages.

Maybe it’s a geographical issue? Maybe Cloudflare’s CDN is shonkier than normal? Maybe they don’t like Frenchies? Who knows?

If you like, you could ping 1.1.1.1 and see what sort of response time you get.

Updated to v0.33 – in the usual place and on !Store.

• Now copes with putting the window to the top of the image when going to a new page of manga that uses the tall-strip format (the one I came across this with was “Song of the Cloud” with images something like 620×9000!).
• Now throws in the towel if the image is damaged, and displays the Blue Screen Of Woe (a message saying there’s no image) instead of trying to render gibberish.
• The main window menu (the one with the chapter numbers) has a new option “Refetch”. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Useful for trying to fix the above problem. ;-)

Is there a way to stop the ‘loading in progress’ sound?

Is there a way to stop the ‘loading in progress’ sound?

Patience? ;-)

If you mean the beep that happens when you click on the main window when it is still doing a fetch, then there is no official way to disable the beep.

Unofficially, however…

• Drop the executable (v1.33) into !Zap.
• F5 and go to address &12328.
• It’ll say “BL &0001AC30”.
• Replace that with NOP (a MOV R0,R0).
• Save.

For any other versions:

• Drop the !RunImage file into Zap (after making a backup copy).
• Switch to text (Ctrl-Shift-F1).
• Search for “main_clickhandler”.
• Switch to disassembly (Ctrl-Shift-F5).
• Press right arrow (should jump to the location of main_clickhandler).
• Scroll down slowly, looking for two comments in green on the right.
  The first will say string: “wimp.prefst” and the second call: message_read.
• The instruction immediately before that will be a BL. Go to that instruction.
• Arrow right, you’ll jump to a different part of the code, an STR instruction followed by SWI XOS_WriteI+7. If so, this is the right thing to change.

Now, to silence all Manga beeps that aren’t Wimp_ReportError beeps, make the XOS_WriteI+7 call be a NOP.

To silence only the beep if clicking while a fetch is in progress, arrow left to go back to the BL instruction in main_clickhandler and make that BL instruction be a NOP.

Job done.

:-)

0.33 works fine here. OTOH my net connection is so slow I hadn’t noticed mangareader being slow themselves.

Job done.

:)

I’m not sure it works like this, but please check if ‘double right’ will not go from page x to page x+2. when page x+1 doesn’t come, I tend to press keys several times.

Quick note to say there’s “work in progress”, however I’ve made an interim release for people to test. It ought to show up when you start Manga, or pop over to http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/

• Now works nicely with AcornSSL (uses the URL fetcher stuff).
• Tidies history backups to retain last five.
• Tidies stray files in the cache (if they’re not part of a manga in your library, and are over a week old).
• Some other stuff (it’s gone midnight, I’m tired)

Let me know how you get on.

Did mangareader change their site?
!manga 0.40 says “request failed unable to fetch mangareader.net/alphabetical”
when I have that page sitting open in netsurf…

pi2/RO5.24

never mind
rebooting my pi fixed it

Using Manga today, I encountered a 301 error.
That’s a permanent redirect.

Turns out, after all the effort getting SSL working nicely (first SecureSockets, then AcornSSL) that MangaReader have thrown in the towel and are now using bog-standard boring HTTP.

Where’s nemo when you need him? I want to know the &#blah; code for the FACEPALM emoji…

So I’ve amended Manga to use plain HTTP instead of HTTPS.
BUT NOTE – THIS WILL ONLY WORK WITH ACORNSSL (because SecureSockets is much more involved, does anybody still use SecureSockets with Manga?).

Anyway, it’s version 0.41 and you can get it from !Store or from my private server (if Manga didn’t prompt you itself): http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/

Turns out, after all the effort getting SSL working nicely (first SecureSockets, then AcornSSL)

Not that I’m begrudging it, it was fun in a my-brain-hurts kind of way. But I’m weird like that.

I especially like that, with the URL fetcher, that all I needed to do was botch the “https://” links to be “http://” links, and the fetcher takes care of the rest. That’s why the AcornSSL stuff works, while the SecureSockets stuff doesn’t. ;-)

So I’ve amended Manga to use plain HTTP instead of HTTPS.

Odd they’re going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world. Indeed Firefox plan to turn off TLS 1.0 next month and the article includes a graph showing the vanishingly small number of sites still using SSL, which can be cracked using a Tandy calculator watch (pretty much).

Manga 0.41 works fine for me! (Pi2, RO5.24)

Thanks Rick!!!! :-)

Indeed Firefox plan to turn off TLS 1.0 next month and the article includes a graph showing the vanishingly small number of sites still using SSL,

Well that should produce a few bleats from a few medical equipment suppliers who can’t get the certificates right never mind the fact that some think SSL3 is still a good idea.
I’d say there’s good odds most of those members of the “vanishingly small” club are one and the same as my “hall of shame” manufacturers. (Medtronic are still being dim months down the line, but they have shifted from the self-certified version¹ – shortly before our T-Con which ended with them somewhat embarrassed)

At least with a site that is only HTTP you know the link isn’t secure and never could be.

¹ https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=lmm-nl-prod.medtronic.com
This was formerly a self-signed, now they gone to “Industry best practice”² by building their own CA and issuing a certificate from that

Thanks for the feedback Willard.

I have been rummaging and have a list now of loads of little fixes and corrections to apply when I have both time and concentration.

Odd they’re going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world.

It’s basically piracy ¹ so maybe whoever supplied their certificate said “nope”. They don’t appear to have a blog and a few Google searches didn’t turn up anything, so no idea why they have gone back to plain http.

I did note, in trying to track down the origin of the https links I’m having to fix, that it is specified that way in all of the page image links. Trying to fetch it will perform a redirect to the non-SSL version. I wonder if they just forgot to fix that (it looks auto generated) or if something else happened?

the article includes a graph showing the vanishingly small number of sites still using SSL,

Except that when we say “SSL” we generally mean “would be shown with a padlock icon on smarter browsers” without respect to what the underlying protocol actually is. ;-)

¹ These sorts of sites generally do take down manga that is licenced for sale in the US (eventually), but for a lot of it (especially the less well known titles) it is a strange grey area for many manga that are fan translated into English but are never properly translated and released commercially; so technically it is against copyright but on the other hand there’s not exactly any financial loss either.
Actually, for all of the above, read “animé” as well (still no Yona of the dawn DVD; and dozens more).

Thank you for the awesome app! :-)

Version 0.42 adds a bunch of tweaks and fixes and enhancements.

Usual places…

Spent the afternoon playing around with some simple image scaling code.

You see, the JPEG plotter is utterly braindead when it comes to plotting a scaled image, it’ll just skip unwanted pixels.
The best-by-far option is to use ChangeFSI. But this means calling out to a third party program that isn’t particularly fast.
So, just for something to do as the weather (that I was going to go and mow the driveway) now looks a bit bleak, I threw together a few lines of BASIC to see if I could improve upon the naff method used by the plotter.
Answer? Yes. It’s not as good as ChangeFSI, but it’s better. It also takes a long time since it’s written in BASIC, but speed isn’t important right now, as I’m mostly just playing with the algorithm.

Full size: https://i.imgur.com/wYDN1n6.jpg

It’s page 2 of Have You Seen Me?.
On the left, my test scaler. In the middle, JPEG plotting. And on the right? ChangeFSI.
Scaling is to reduce by a factor of 1.25. It’s small reductions like this that show up naffness in the scaling algorithms.

Currently, the value of a pixel is determined as follows:

• Word read from source sprite, and broken into RGB components.
• RGB calculated independently: 1x for pixel to the left, 3x for current pixel, and 1x for pixel to the right. This allows surrounding pixels to be taken into account, even if the scaling would normally have skipped them.
• If R, G, and B are all less than 200 afterwards (suggesting “nearly black”), then an amount (currently 160) will be subtracted. It is clamped so won’t pass below zero. This helps make text more readable and less blurred looking.
• RGB is recombined into a word (with each value being divided by five), which is then written to the output sprite.

If I miss out the second and third steps, the result is the same as the JPEG plotter. With them, it’s better looking.
I suspect that for improved results I may need to do the same thing in two dimensions, to consider pixels above and below the current line.

Don’t know if it’ll ever be implemented, as it requires huge amounts of memory (3½MiB for the original of that image and 2½ for the scaled version, or ~6MiB in total). It was just something to do to pass the time. ;-)

Edit: Taking into account the pixel above and the pixel below doesn’t seem to have made any obvious difference…

Version 0.43 now available. It improves the UTF-8/entity parsing to support a lot more including weirdness like " and \' (both of which seen!).
Geek details at http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/changelist.txt

Software itself, the usual places.

Now off to eat a homebrew pizza and watch more Spectros.

When I try to start !Manga it complains that it cannot find Resources:$.Resources.URL.AcornSSL.StartDAS. I had not heard of this file before. Where does one get it from? Using RO 5.24 on a Rpi3B+.

Resources:$.Resources.URL.AcornSSL.StartDAS

Never heard of that before. Must be something AcornSSL does, it isn’t Manga.

I’d ask you what version of AcornSSL you’re using, but since there seems to be inexplicable resistance to giving different module incarnations different version numbers, I won’t bother…

If I’m awake enough when I get home, I’ll poke around and see if StartDAS exists on my system and if/what/how it gets put there. Usually a module registers its resources at initialisation.