Twist to Quip
Last night I was down in my office and saw that someone was having at the quip solver. I also realized that there was a problem when the quip solver would take too long to return it's answers. So this morning I decided to fix it. What I did was allow for an optional time limit argument to the program and then check with the solver routine after each word. It's not precise, but it is very reasonable. I then put the default of 15 sec. into the PHP3 code and tested it.
Great! It works fine on the example because it takes only a second or so to run that quip, and on simpler quips the code runs and returns a ton of responses. In either case it doesn't hang the browser, and the user will always get a response. There's also the point that I won't have a run-away process anymore - which is good news for me.
It was fun... that's enough.
Interesting thing happened this morning - GAIM/Oscar started working again. I saw that the TOC connection had been paused by AOL and at that time I decided to try the Oscar connection again. It worked. What can you say? When it works, I'll use it, when it doesn't, I'll use TOC. Goofy stuff... AOL. Really goofy.
I was looking at a finite element modeling package today and realized that I didn't like the fact that sparky didn't properly view PNG files. So I spent most of the rest of the day digging into Plugger and it's associated configuration and helper apps. Plugger is really just a configurable plug-in stub. I still need the programs to view the PNG files, but Plugger allows me to put what that program is in it's configuration file and handle all the communication with Netscape for me. Nice, but not terribly wow because almost all apps can be put in directly on the Netscape Helpers page, but this is nice in that it handles it for me.
Anyway, I got xli because I had not xloadimage and I got several viewers, a few movie viewers, and even a MIDI player. All very nice, all work fine with Plugger and now I have not only working PNG viewing, but also Quicktime movies and MIDI files. Very nice.