In my to do list I have the following issues to address (cont'd):

2 cont'd My *suspicion* is that this is related to the Konfab/curl linkage -- National Rail redesigned their web site a while back and the server no longer closes connections properly. In order to make the widget work again, it has to call a Perl script that calls curl to download the page. Obviously this is a *hack*, and an ugly one at that, but there was no other 'easy' way to terminate curl connections in a… timely fashion within Konfab (although looking at the documentation I wonder if runCommandInBg() might be a better way to go...). I requested fixes to the URL.fetch() method but as of 1.8.2 they haven't been implemented. More

In my to do list I have the following issues to address:

1. Multiple instances -- this seem to come up fairly often, and while you *could* use the 'recent stations' to swtich back and forth between two or more stations this isn't ideal. What I need to work out is 1) how to instantiate multiple widgets (there are display issues at the very least), 2) how to avoid race conditions (where two widgets are hitting the same site at the same time and competing for resources on the host m…achine.

2. Resource usage -- I haven't been able to duplicate this, but at times it appears that the Rail widget runs amok and ties up resources on the host machine. My *suspicion* is that this is related to the Konfab/curl linkage -- National Rail redesigned their web site a while back and the server no longer closes connections properly. In order to make the widget work again, it has to call a Perl script that calls curl to download the page. Obviously this is a *hack*, and an ugly one at that, but ther More

Thanks for the great widget. I've come up against a bit of a problem; I like to have two instances of the widget running, one for my home station, another one for work. I just do this by duplicating the widget and running them both. For some reason, when I run this way, one or both of the pair sometimes freezes, hogs lots of CPU, and can't be accessed by mouse or menu -- I need to quit Konfabulator.

I imagine many people would like to have access to more than one station at a time, s…o consider this both a bug report and a feature request! (But thanks for the great work even if you never get to it.) More

Also -- if you would like to contact me directly to report a problem (such as the update to the National Rail site), you can always email me directly at widgets - at - reades - dot - com (hopefully the spammers' spiders aren't smart enough to figure that out).

I can't always promise to do anything about it right away, but I will always keep track of the problems and fix them as soon as I'm able.

Hey everyone -- thanks for the votes of confidence, and I'm sorry not to have been able to track down the problem sooner for all you who depend on it!

I've done a little research, and there appear to be two underlying problems:

1. As many have surmised, there has been a redesign of the site and I need to track down the changes that are breaking the widget parsing.

2. But there's another problem too that's a lot harder to pin down. It seems that when National Rail upgraded …the site they tweaked the server so that connections are no longer being properly closed when the content is complete. You can test this yourself using the Unix curl utility (which is what Konfabulator is using on the back-end) and you'll see that the page is completely downloaded but the connection doesn't close to curl is hanging while it waits for the server to say "Here's everything you need". Eventually, it times out and then you get an error.

The first problem I can definitely do something about, the More