CocaliciousFilter: it won't stop crashing, and I haven't even used it yet!

April 14, 2006 8:01 PM

CocaliciousFilter: it won't stop crashing, and I haven't even used it yet!

I'm trying to run Cocalicious (what looks to be a great del.icio.us addon from Mac) but it keeps on crashing. At first I thought it must have been problems importing the bookmark data from delicious, but I went to open up the 'About Cocoalicious' page and it crashed on me as well. Mind you, I have lots of bookmarks to import (err, over 2000) but theoretically it shouldn't have a problem, right? Has anyone else had problems installing it? I searched a few Mac forums but no info, and I've seen a few mentions of it on here, so I thought I'd try.

I'm running 10.3, Firefox 1.5 (if it matters) and (trying to run) Cocalicious 1.0b41, which is the latest release. Any help is much appreciated. It looks like it would be incredibly useful, but if it's not going to run, I'll have to uninstall it.

posted by rmm to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Did you contact the author? The "About Cocoalicious" document that comes with the app includes the email address. If it really does crash all the time on your machine, I'm sure the developers would love to know.
posted by xil at 8:17 PM on April 14, 2006

I had horrible problems with Cocoalicious mysteriously crashing after a few seconds of attempting to download my bookmarks. It drove me mildly crazy because I had a script I really wanted to write for it.

The Sourceforge site is pretty much a ghost town, but the author was polite and responsive when I contacted him directly. He couldn't do anything for me.

I ended up waxing my delicious account (which had around 450 bookmarks), recreating it, verifying that cocoalicious could, indeed, run, and reimporting in batches of 50 looking for another crash. Once I managed to crash the program again, I started removing bookmarks from that batch until the crashing stopped.

It turned out that the software was bombing on a bookmark with this URL:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%25s

I'm not sure what vagary of HTML/text encoding is involved there, but once that bookmark was gone, the program acted fine again.

Just for the sheer hell of it, I just added a bookmark with a "%" in it and cocoalicious bombed on attempting to sync my bookmarks.

So I guess I'd export my bookmarks (settings -> export) then search through the resulting html file for a percentage character and maybe any other characters that aren't typically found in a URL. It seems like the software croaks when confronted with odd characters instead of ignoring or sanitizing them.
posted by mph at 10:36 PM on April 14, 2006

That sounds like it might be a 'format string bug', which can be a security issue. Definitely let the author know.

(translation: % has a special meaning in some C libraries, and if it's not escaped properly, it can be exploited to crash a program or even compromise the computer.)
posted by Malor at 12:31 AM on April 15, 2006

Can I recommend just running Delibar instead?
posted by atom128 at 7:29 AM on April 15, 2006

very cool - thank you for the advice and the background on the "%" problem - I'll look at Delibar and maybe editing the bookmarks. Thanks guys...
posted by rmm at 10:26 AM on April 15, 2006

Hi,
I'm the author of Cocoalicious. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to devote much time to Cocoalicious recently, but since this is obviously the source of some frustration to people, I'll make it a higher priority to fix this.

Thanks.
posted by ldandersen at 2:26 PM on April 16, 2006