Cannot see any UI whatsoever

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Windows 7
2. Install any version of Steam-limiter clean.
3. Attempt to run program.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I do not see any way to interact with the program, no UI is opened at all, no 
way to know if it's working with my ISP etc etc.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Have tried 0.5.4 and 0.5.0

Please provide any additional information below:
1. I am in Australia, on iiNet
2. Recently moved to a rural area with very slow ADSL, hence I'm hoping this 
helps me download Steam overnight without eating into download limits.

Thanks so much for the assistance

Original issue reported on code.google.com by nathanjo...@gmail.com on 24 Dec 2012 at 9:29

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'm also seeing this issue on Windows 8 64-bit. The program is listed in Task 
Manager as 'Steam Content Server Monitor (32 bit)', so I know it's at least 
running

I've tried 'Run As Admin', and running both steamlimit.exe and probe.exe from 
the command line, also with /?, /h, -h, and --help. Nothing is output at any 
point

Are we even supposed to see a UI? All I was expecting was a simple way to tell 
which server it's picked (should be Telstra, Aus) and a way to shut it down, 
aside from using a network monitor and Task Manager. I can of course continue 
to use those to interact with it, but a proper interface would be nice

Ask me anything should you wish to debug this and can't trigger the problem 
yourself

Cheers!

Original comment by danielca...@gmail.com on 4 Feb 2013 at 10:11

[GoogleCodeExporter]

> Are we even supposed to see a UI?

Yes; there's an icon registered in the system notification area which has a 
context menu for configuration and bringing up various dialogs, and registering 
that notification icon is done in a fairly simple way.

Notification area icons are of course usually kept hidden (unless you 
temporarily expose them all) by Windows after the first time a program is run 
so they are unobtrusive, but they are definitely there for me and I haven't 
usually seen it not show up (notification icons did used to go AWOL on boot on 
Windows XP fairly regularly because the process that hosted the icons would 
tend to be unresponsive at boot).

If the icon in the system notification area is completely missing, an 
experiment to try might be to run "steamlimit -debug"; that's a thing I use in 
development when debugging a new version, and when it starts it asks any 
running version to unload and hide its UI, and then the newer instance 
registers its UI instead (and if you quit that instance, the original one will 
re-activate and re-register its UI).

I use this just so I can keep the current released version running at all times 
while temporarily trying new ones, but since it has the side-effect of getting 
a fresh UI registered I'd be interested to see if that has any effect for you 
on the visibility of the system notification icon.

Original comment by nigel.bree@gmail.com on 4 Feb 2013 at 10:30

• Added labels: Component-UI

[GoogleCodeExporter]

As a further update after actually testing the purpose of the program, Steam is 
no longer able to download any updates for games whilst this phantom process is 
running. It can populate the downloads list with updates it knows it can 
download, but gets 0 bytes/sec and no connections are listed in TcpView. If I 
kill the process mentioned above and restart Steam, the downloads start working 
again

So this is definitely a fundamental bug. Again, I am at your service should you 
wish to debug this

Cheers :)

Original comment by danielca...@gmail.com on 4 Feb 2013 at 10:32

[GoogleCodeExporter]

> If I kill the process mentioned above and restart Steam, the downloads start 
working again

Sort of. With Telstra Bigpond it's expected that most downloads won't work 
because they don't run a new-style Steam download server. Just like ISPs in New 
Zealand, they only use the old-style one that Valve started phasing out last 
year, and over the course of 2012 Valve migrated almost all games to the new 
system which Telstra Bigpond don't support at all.

For me in New Zealand, the situation is the same; steam-limiter blocks everyone 
other than the games Valve haven't migrated to the new system; a list of the 
games that are remaining on the old download system is at 
http://aiusepsi.co.uk/steam2/ and if you're on Telstra Bigpond, with 
steam-limiter running those are the **only** games you can get unmetered until 
Telstra start operating an unfiltered Steam server with the new download system.

> So this is definitely a fundamental bug

It's annoying, I grant you that, because since I too don't have an ISP that 
supports Valve's new system what I do when downloading or updating a game on 
the new system is use the context menu to turn the filtering off when I'm 
absolutely certain I can afford to have it count against my metered cap, and 
then turn filtering back on afterward.

Without the UI that's awkward, so if you can test whether you can get the icon 
to show up using "steamlimit -debug" or not that would be helpful to know.

Original comment by nigel.bree@gmail.com on 4 Feb 2013 at 10:40

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Ahh, I see. Thanks for that! It's definitely there and working for me now

You should probably add a note to the home page or somewhere. I've had another 
look and can't see anything about the UI being in the notification area, so I 
imagine other people will run into this issue now Windows 7/8 are more popular

I'd sent my update before I saw your response, sorry. I noticed the Filter 
option after you pointed out the UI and turned it off and of course things 
started working again. So it's good to know the reason now why they weren't! 
Telstra suck in general so it doesn't surprise me. I just have no choice of ISP 
where I am

I might keep the limiter running anyway to block unwanted automatic updates and 
then selectively unblock those I want to update, like you say. I don't want to 
go over my quota again. It was like Christmas this morning when it came back :D

Thanks for the quick responses and the simple program!

Original comment by danielca...@gmail.com on 4 Feb 2013 at 10:59

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi Nigel,

I had the same problem as this original poster. I browsed the entire 
steam-limiter website for half an hour, downloaded the Sysinternals programs 
and tried to run them to work out if the steam-limiter was working at all. No 
luck. Finally, I stumbled across this thread!

Could I contribute a how-to-use-this-software page? If you don't want to give 
me editing rights to this webpage, could I sent you a Word document with a 
how-to guide?

Once I read to the bottom of this thread and figured out what buttons to press, 
I was truly amazed! Well done!

Original comment by mdbau...@gmail.com on 29 Aug 2013 at 1:44

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I've added your gmail address as a contributor and granted EditWiki access, so 
feel free to add a new user guide, that would be most welcome!

Making the UI more visible is one of those things I do mean to do something 
about, but it's largely a matter of time; I have a commercial project I'm 
working on that takes most all of my waking hours and isn't letting up, and 
mostly that work hasn't cross-fertilized with steam-limiter.

But as it happens just the last few weeks on the work side I've been fiddling 
with a monitor applet and some UI that has given me an idea of something I 
might be able to do for steam-limiter.

One of the awkward parts of Windows is that the taskbar notification APIs 
(balloon-tip pop-ups and what have you) don't work at all the same between Win7 
and XP which makes them hard to program for - so while I could maybe add a 
one-time thing after install to show a balloon-tip pop-up to initially alert 
folks to the existence of the notification area icon, it's a lousy way to 
report status.

Now that Steam is all about HTTP, what I'd like to do is have a status panel 
that you can pop open and have that show information about URL fetches that the 
installed filter is permitting/rejecting (doing that before for the old 
low-level download protocol and DNS rewriting would have been hard to show in a 
way that folks could really understand), and have that panel open with a 
left-click on the notification icon. I'd still probably need to use a balloon 
tip just once to force the issue of making people aware the notification icon 
exists, though.

Original comment by nigel.bree@gmail.com on 30 Aug 2013 at 12:16

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks. I think I need to be added as a "committer", rather than a contributor 
(according to http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/WikiFAQ). Could you try to 
change my permissions to "committer"? Currently I cannot see any "Add Page" or 
"Edit Page" buttons. I tried Firefox and Chrome on this page just to see if 
browser compatibility was a problem, but it doesn't seem to have made any 
difference.

Original comment by mdbau...@gmail.com on 31 Aug 2013 at 8:04

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Whoops, my mistake; first time using the permissions controls here at Google 
Code and although I thought I added you the EditWiki permission I must have 
navigated away without saving it properly (on my laptop the save button is 
several pages down after you expand the permissions). Let me know if it still 
doesn't work, otherwise go to town editing.

Original comment by nigel.bree@gmail.com on 31 Aug 2013 at 8:42