This page lists some actual problems people have had using MIJ-NSR

Problem I tried to access the journal site one day and couldn't get through. The next day, I had no problems.

Solution (Sort of) Service outages will occasionally happen. Here is a list of significant service outages that MIJ-NSR has experienced.

The eventual solution will be to have a mirror site. If you're interested in volunteering to help with this, please contact the journalmaster.
Problem Dear Eric,
Thank you for giving your time for being the Journalmaster. We all appreciate your efforts. This journal is a very nice way to get results out quickly, and the figures are in color, making them easier to see. I had a problem yesterday in trying to download Vol. 2 paper #15, which is an important one for my work. After I accessed the journal, I tried to get the entire paper because I wanted to print it. After about 5 pages came, it told me, "Cannot access this file," and stopped. So I went back and got separately the title and abstract, the text, and the references. Then I tried to get the figures. Of the 7 figures, 4 appeared, but 3 others said "click here to view." Figure 2 then arrived as a new file and I printed it. But both figures 1 and 3 could not be accessed. Finally, I managed to get all 7 "thumbnail sketches." Can you tell me what went wrong? Is it me or the MRS? I have a pentium processor running under Windows 95 with a 14.4 mbyte modem. This situation has also happened before with the nitride journal.

Solution It was only 1 minute after you loaded the complete page for the paper that you loaded the text page. At 14.4, the complete page (30K) would have taken a minimum of 15 seconds to load. The figures total about 100K, so under optimal conditions, it would take at least 65 seconds to load. (A congested internet connection (8AM is probably a bad time) could easily double this time. ) This suggests to me that you just didn't wait long enough to get everything before printing. Win95 multitasking is not robust, so the printing probably interfered with the network connection, resulting in bad files.

Problem When I print out papers using Netscape on my Mac, I find that some of the figures are missing. What am I doing wrong?

Solution You're trying to get back at Bill Gates for the awful thing they did to Word 5. Believe me, he doesn't care. To solve your problem, you need to take a deep breath and get Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. It prints like a charm. The printing bugs in the Mac version of Netscape 2.0-3.0 are well-known and unfixed.

Problem I have a cool program that copies all of the content of MIJ-NSR onto my own server. But suddenly, the server is denying access to my computer.

Solution Although your cool program is violating international copyright law, and could land you in jail, that's not a problem you're having...yet.

The problem you are having is that your cool program was behaving rudely and stupidly, and your site is thus being disciplined by the stern, autocratic, Journalmaster. To find out how to behave politely, your program should read about the Robot Exclusion Protocol. Polite, law-abiding robots are welcomed at MIJ-NSR.

Problem Using the mij-nsr server from Europe is awfully slow sometimes. Did you ever consider getting mirror sites for Europe (and maybe also for Japan) ?

Solution The next time MIJ-NSR is "slow", you can help us out by checking the following:

Go to http://hellman.net/

Is it just as slow?

Go to http://www.mrs.org/

Is it also slow?

Send the answers, along with the time of day, to journalmaster@nsr.mrs.mij.org. Your answers will help us determine exactly what part of the network is causing the slowdown.

If you are interested in mirroring any part of the MIJ-NSR site, you should first contact the Journalmaster.

Problem I had trouble with submission. In the third part, no author names and affiliations were taken into account. Then, page 4, it was returned the error message:
Error -1728 at item 2 ""

Solution NCSA Mosaic versions 2.4 and earlier are sticklier about capitalization of certain protocol names than Netscape or later versions of Mosaic. The submission script (and a few others on MIJ-NSR) was telling Mosaic "post", when it should have said "POST". This problem is now fixed.

Problem On 1/19/96, All I could get when trying to read the journal was an error message: "The server does not have a DNS entry". What's wrong?

Solution On 1/19/96, a cable cut in the MCI telephone network caused major disruptions in their network. Our domain name service at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center was cut off from the internet. Although the journal host computer remained connected and serviced requests for the entire time, many sites around the world had problems finding us. It's as if directory assistance waasn't working, and your computer had forgotten our phone number. If you have problems like this in the future, you can always try connecting by IP number, at "http://192.20.225.201/"

Problem The only trouble I had was in trying to send you e-mail form the Web site and it claimed the hellman.net host was rejecting me. I tried about 3 times, so if this is a reccuring problem, you better fix it if you want anyone to send suggestions as they might try once, but failing that, will just forget it--they might be more inclined to forget the page and journal as well!!

Solution You need to set an "SMTP" host in the preferences file for your browser.

Problem In the process of referencing the published paper, there was a trouble. When I tried to see "Journal Listing", my computer showed memory over, because in the mode of journal listing, all the journals are listed simultaneously. Please change to be able to list by a particular Journal, or year.

Solution Good idea! There is now an index of journals, where you can get lists of all references in each journal.

Problem When I use the lists in "Index of Journals", I can't get the reference items by clicking on the title.

Solution Sorry, that was a bug. Squashed it be.

Problem When I search for articles I have published, I get an error message "resulttitle not found".

Solution The error message was due to another bug. It is an ex-bug. The bug only happened when no items were found in the search. You will want to enter the data as soon as the contribution forms are plugged in.

Problem I was reading a paper in the preprint server and I can no longer get text beyond the x-ray section. I've rebooted at least once and still have the problem. Could you have a look at it?

Problem The front page of the journal seems to be broken. All I get is a page that says "Document contains no data"

Solution These are problems caused by caching of bad documents, either on your machine or in a caching proxy server, such as are often found in network firewalls. You can usually fix this problem by changing the case of a character in the URL. For example, instead of http://nsr.mij.mrs.org/default.html, ask forhttp://nsr.mij.mrs.org/Default.html . Sometimes you can fix things with the reload button on your browser. Sometimes caching proxy servers are just too evil to fix. They only do it to annoy, and because they know it teases.

Problem The problem I've been seeing isn't listed in this list of problems.

Solution It probably hasn't been reported! The only way things will get fixed is if problems are promptly reported. Please, send your problem report to the journalmaster at journalmaster@nsr.mij.mrs.org MRS Internet Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research

last updated Friday, September 9, 2005 2:11:23 PM.
© 2005 The Materials Research Society