Well, I downloaded it and it worked fine so this really seems to be aproblem with your machine. I am sorry but I can´t help you there.

And don´t worry about not being motivated enough to code a client. It took me over a year to get myself together and start it. And I never would have done it if William W. Wong had not written Furi. He definitely has done most of the work, implementing the full behaviour and doing some modifications to the code surely wasn´t so much work.

I'm getting the feeling that this is some problem on my system, because nobody else has reported it, but I'll post it here just in case someone knows how to fix it. I've downloaded the latest phex.jar file. (The new features sound really neat, I'd like to try them.) I've installed JDK1.3, and I can use it to run furi and all that, so I think the installation is ok. However when I run java -jar phex.jar, I get an error in the zip handling telling me that it has a bad CEN header and invalid signature. (Sorry, I'm at work right now and don't have the exact message onhand.) This would seem to suggest to me that there's some corruption within the .jar file and the decompression is barfing. I tried getting the .jar file from several sources, thinking that maybe one was corrupted, but all the copies I got seemed to behave the same way. So, here I am. Does anyone have an idea what this problem might be?

Aside, I'd like to compliment Konrad on making what would seem to be a big step forward in reaching the full potential of gnutella and file sharing in general. This sort of persistent file-hunting behavior is something that's been on my wishlist for quite a while, and I haven't gotten up the will to code it up. Kudos.

Hmm, ok. Still haven't figured out, and I've done an OS reinstall and another installation of JDK1.3.. I'll keep trying to figure it out.

In case anyone cares, here's the whole error message:

C:\apps\FURI>java -jar phex.jar
count = 0, total = 465
Exception in thread "main" java.util.zip.ZipException: invalid CEN header (bad signature)
at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
at java.util.zip.ZipFile.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.util.jar.JarFile.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.util.jar.JarFile.<init>(Unknown Source)

Thanks again for your work on Phex.. Sounds great, hope I can try it soon.

Problem solved. The issue appears to have been that Netscape was downloading the .jar file as a text file. Thus it was corrupted by the download. I got around this by some linux-based trickery. There ought to be some way to get my windows browser to download it correctly. Certainly one easy way would be to distribute the .jar file inside a zip or something similiar, that browsers won't confuse with text files.

Now I'm off to try it out. Cheers!

The idea of packaging the jarfile into a zipfile never occured to me because a jarfile IS a zipfile! But it is obvious that this will solve most download problems and people will be less confused about the download. The next release will be wrapped in a zipfile. It doesn´t get any smaller, but it solves problems with Nextscape, so why not?.

Thanks for the idea,
Konrad

By the way:
This is my personal opinion about the endless Netscape/Explorer discussion:

There were times when Netscape was clearly the best browser around and they invented and set standards for many important things. But this time is long gone and as a webdesigner and developer I had to realize that both Netscape browsers (4.7x and 5) are full of intolerable bugs. And they are also slow, compared to Explorer. I surely hate Microsoft as much as any sensible person should, but I think the Explorer is the (technically) best browser available at the present. If you don´t want to use it, try Opera or any other browser then Netscape, it is really worth it. Netscape causes so many problems during webdevelopment it is unbelievable. It is one the main topics in our office, because 60% of a webdesigners time goes to "optimization for Netscape", (not for the Explorer, which displays nearly anything correctly). I will add the jar/zip fix (which is only a hotfix for the poor Netscape users) although I told myself not to support Netscape any longer. And one more thing: Since AOL took over Netscape the whole software is rather a new AOL-browser which reconfigures your whole computer to Netscape and AOL content. You can´t even do much about it and this really makes me sick.

So, that´s my opinion and that´s it. I hope Netscape will "vanish" soon and designers can finally put up some really cool websites. You have no idea what we had on our desktops which then had to be cancelled completely(!) because it could not be displayed by Netscape. It is soooooo frustrating.