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   Support - Current Issues  Latest Version is 3.14  
 

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Program documentation

Half of the download file you installed consists of documentation. Have you looked at it? Select { Help | Contents } from the program menu to view. If nothing happens see this.

Feature Request

If you would like to see additional studies or other features added to SSChart, send your feature wish list to . 

Known Issues

These are problems we know about and are working on resolving in the next release. If you are experiencing a problem not listed here please report it. If its not reported and we don't know about it won't get fixed.

  • Version 3.11
    • Auto launch and login feature of TWS stops working with TWS release 903.7, this is due to changes in the login dialog of TWS. SSChart 3.12 fixes this problem..
  • Version 2.96
    • And possible in some prior releases the update function for spread charts is broken. This is corrected in release 2.97.
  • Versions prior to 2.87
    • IB intraday backfill does not retrieve the most recent hour (i.e; backfill is 1 hour stale), after beginning of April (advent of BST). This is corrected in release 2.87
  • Versions prior to 2.82
    • Change in format of historic data returned by yahoo servers requires update to version 2.82 to be able to retrieve historic daily, weekly, and monthly data. This change occurred on Jan 18, 2007.
  • All Versions
    • When using the auto-run feature to start quotes and launch TWS at a specific time, the quote request to TWS sometimes gets ignored, and consequently no data is returned from TWS. This issue may be timing related, and seems more prevalent after the nightly shutdown of TWS servers. The work around is to check that quotes are actually coming into SSChart for ALL symbols, and if not toggle the quote collection off and back on. This will force the quotes to be re-requested and nearly always fixes the problem. In the case this does not fix the problem, shut down SSChart and restart it.
    • When starting SSChart, sometimes a chart will come up totally blank even when you have data. It stays blank even if you drop in a new symbol. The work-around to get the data to display again is to select one of the line-drawing tools (by clicking in one of the tool buttons) then click in the chart. The data should redraw as soon as you click in the chart. After this, deselect the line draw tool, by clicking on the arrow button, or hitting <esc>.
  • Version 2.79 and some earlier versions
    • When manually stoping quotes (from TWS), TWS does not get told to stop the quotes, so they are still coming in even though the quote button is no longer depressed. This was fixed in version 2.80.

Installation Problems

Make sure you use a version of PKZIP that supports long filenames. Some of the filenames in the zip file will be truncated otherwise causing the program to not find the files when it runs. (Note this does not apply to current version that are delivered as .msi files).

If using the built in unzip in Windows-XP, make certain you actually extract all the files into the selected folder before running SSChart.exe. (Windows-XP will allow you to run the exe from inside the zip file, if you do so the program will not find the other needed files because they were not extracted from the zip file).

Unzipping with XP

If you double click on the zip file with XP (and you do not have another zip handling program like pkzip installed). XP will show the contents of the zip file in an explorer window. (See below, the files have not yet been extracted:)

If you <right-click> in this window you get a pop-up with the choice to Extract All...

Select Extract All... ,XP will give you a choice of directories with the default set to C:\SSCHART\ssc220 (for the above example).

If you instead, of extracting the files, double click on SSChart.exe (trying to run it from inside the zip file you will get the following warning:

  Last chance to choose Extract all here. If you choose Run, the program will not run properly because files it needs to access have not been extracted.

Registration key problems

If your registration key is not accepted, check the following:
  • If you didn't get your key see this faq.
  • Check the email you got with your key carefully, 
  • Have you entered your name and email address in the { Help | Install License } dialog EXACTLY as they appear in the email? If for instance you entered an extra space between your first and last names, or extra space characters after your last name, this would cause the key to be invalid. This information is case-sensitive. The safest way is to use cut and paste from the email to the license dialog, or better yet, request the key with the license dialog (in SSChart) and then enter the key when you receive the email without modifying the name and email address in the dialog. If you order the permanent license online, you will need to reenter this information in the order page. 
  • If you are operating behind a firewall, it may be blocking SSChart from contacting our server to validate the key.

Firewall Issues

We have noted in our website logs that some accesses to our site have been blocked by Agnitum Outpost firwall. SSChart contacts our site each time you startup to check if program updates are available. When it does this it also reports the version number that is being run and the number if times it has been run and the number of times it has crashed. We use the run and crash count to help improve the software. Our goal of course is to eliminate all crashes. You can help by sending a bug report if you experience a crash.

During normal operation SSChart contacts the servers you have configured under { Data | Internet sources... } to get stock data. If you configure your firewall to block this the program will not be able to retrieve any data! We do not send any information to these servers other than the ticker symbol and period of time we are making the data request for.

AntiVirus Issues

If you have Norton AntiVirus running on your system with script blocking enabled, it will report "malicious script detected" when SSChart attempts to auto-start TWS (if you have it configured to do this). It has detected the running of the script used by SSChart to start TWS. This script is safe, select action "Authorize this script" to let it run. If you want this feature work unattended you will need to shut off script blocking in Norton Antivirus, unless they provide a means to selectively allow this script to run everytime without complaining.

Upon investigation we find that if you have script blocking enabled in Norton AntiVirus it will give this report for EVERY SCRIPT IT DOES NOT KNOW ABOUT. Their alert would better be worded "script detected" rather than "malicious script detected" as they are not reporting from specific knowledge that the script is actually malicious, rather they are presuming all scripts are. The installation contains two scripts to add or remove the program icons to the desktop during installation (after you are prompted if you want to). If you choose to block the script, program icons will not be added to the desktop even if you choose yes.

Slow program response

If the program seems slow to respond you may be low on available RAM. If the systems starts swapping programs out of RAM response slows way down. Start the Windows Task Manager (under NT, 2000, or XP) and check the available physical memory under the performance tab. if it shows 0 or the mem usage is greater than the total physical memory, then you need to close unneeded application to free some memory or get more memory.

If the CPU usage is %100 or nearly that, then some task is hogging the CPU (probably stuck in a loop). On the processes tab the system idle process should be getting the majority of the CPU time, if not identify what process is using the most CPU time. If SSChart is stuck and using all the CPU time, let us know.

Updating the symbol index file

Only one if the configured data sources (telescan) includes company name in the data returned. In order to display this information in the chart banner when the data comes from other sources, we use an index file to look it up by the stock symbol. Since new issues (IPOs) are added to the exchange every week, the symbol file will not have a company name listed when viewing this. If this is affecting you (and you care about it) you can do one of two things to get the company to display in the chart title.

  1. Set the data source to telescan with { Data | Data sources } -or- 
  2. Use the makesyms.exe utility to create a new symbol file. See the file makesysm.txt for instructions. Both files should be in the SSChart installation directory after installing version 2.08 or later.

How to load data for stocks on foreign exchanges

Yahoo has historic data for stocks on some foreign exchanges. All you need to do to get them is set the daily data source under { Data | Internet Sources } to yahoo. Then you just need to enter a symbol for one of the stocks on the exchanges they supply data for. So far we have found data available for stocks on the Canadian and the Australian and New Zealand exchanges. Yahoo uses a dot-suffix to denote the exchange which becomes part of the symbol.

Try these: NT.TO TEL.NZ CCL.AX
Check these sites to look up more symbols on these exchanges:
http://ca.finance.yahoo.com   Canada
http://au.finance.yahoo.com    Australia/New Zealand
http://sg.finance.yahoo.com    Singapore

You can actually get data from the yahoo servers in any country, but it will be most effcient the access the sites closest to you.

If you are using IB, intraday and daily data is available for any exchange you subscribe to. See the IBSymbols page for details on how to specify stocks and other instruments on any exchange.

Finding alpha symbols of German and French stocks that trade by numeric symbols:

To get data for German and French stocks from the yahoo sites, you must use the alphabetic symbol used by yahoo not the (insane) numbers of the German and French exchanges. To find these symbols you can go to any of the yahoo finance sites, and get a quote for the symbol, for example DT TELEKOM N which has a numeric symbol of 555750.DE. Then look at the URL line shown in the browser address display, which will be something like:

http://de.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=DTEGn.DE&d=t

This will reveal the alpha symbol of DTEGn.DE (between the s= and the &d).

Reporting Problems

First check the known issues list for the SSChart version you are using, if the problem you are experience is listed there, we will be working on resolving it and there is no need to report it again. If the problem is already listed, there may be a work-around described. (Also check the faq page to see if anything is posted about the problem). 
If you are reporting a new problem, keep in mind that until we can reproduce it, we can not fix it. We therefore need adequate information to be able to reproduce the problem, or at least understand what you are seeing.
You can report a problem by using this form or by contacting us at the address below.

Contacting Us

   We can be reached via email to:

   Wir sprechen Deutsch und sie koennen uns durch email erreichen:

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Last Revised Monday, 28-Mar-2011 02:13:49 EDT
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