What's it all about, Alfie?

Seems Google Chrome dev 10.0.612.3, out today, fixes a regression test with the RegEx in the engine, but that last part is an assumption that wasn't explicitly stated in the release notes. In any case, it seems that we have two regression test related fixes in just a few weeks. The engineers at Google are slipping... maybe they've had to lower their standards to get employees?

OK... maybe just sloppy - but which one is the worse explanation, really?

This morning Google Chrome dev 10.0.612.1 was released and represents a big jump in the browser, specifically, the new V8 engine (3.0.2.1) is in there, and the new WebKit (534.15) is in there in addition to a mess of other new stuff. I'm interested in seeing how this guy tests out as it should be a significant improvement to what I've had for a while. Exciting times...

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 9.0.597.16 was out with the fix for the botched release they had last week. Basically, you could scroll down with the mouse wheel (or two-finger swipe on the Mac), but you couldn't scroll up. Kind of frustrating to go one way and not the other.

But true to their word, they released a new version with the fix for the scrolling in just a few days. For that, I'm grateful. I hope they have this in their test suite now for subsequent releases.

This morning I've done a bit of coding as well as waiting on the IRC server. The admins have decided to switch to InspIRCd as it has user-logging which is going to be critical for compliance purposes - and The Shop always has to be aware of that. So that's a significant change.

The biggest issue I've seen so far is that the response from InspIRCd is a lot more like the RFC for IRC. It's got the numeric codes in the responses that can be used to determine what is the nature of the message. I was missing that in the previous server, and I'm glad it's back.

Still... I need to get a stable server up and then I can start to test my changes.

Well, this is a first for me... Google Chrome dev 9.0.597.15 is out and it's broken. Specifically, I can scroll down with the two-finger swipe, but I cannot scroll up. The release notes even say that this is a problem, and that a fix should be released in short order.

Hmmm... I can see a lot of things missing the testing, but scrolling? Really?

I saw this morning that WordPress 3.0.3 was out with security fixes:

This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts.

Sounds kind of ominous. Gee. So I went to HostMonster and upgraded my installs.

Done. Whew.

Yesterday, Martin has looking at the patch I submitted for the Recovery Interval in Milliseconds feature, and he was talking with the OpenPGM guru of the project - Steven, about the correct default setting on the ZMQ_RECOVERY_IVL_MSEC value. Should it be 0 (as I had it), or should it be -1?

Honestly, I don't care, and when Martin came back with the answer of "make it -1", I went into the code... again... and got the master branch and applied the changes I had, and then updated the options to allow for an int32_t as opposed to an uint32_t. Then I changed the default from 0 to -1 in the options class constructor. Done.

I then built it, verified it. Then repackaged the changes into a new tarball for building the RPMs, and built them. Installed them, and then build the jzmq Java client libraries and deployed them on my boxes.

It's not hard, but there's a lot of little things to do. Someday I may actually automate this.

I have to admit, Google Chrome is a fantastic browser. It has been really good since the 4.x series, but it wasn't horrible in the 1.x series, which is where I started using it for Javascript-heavy AJAX web systems I was working on. I've seen it get better and better, and while at any one time it might not have been the fastest or cleanest, I can say that the engineers at Google have gone at this with a passion. They have consistently made this better, faster than virtually anything else out there.

It simply passed up Firefox without so much as a word. It's close to Safari, but Safari's integration with the OS is better and the focus on rendering is greater. But it's close.

Yesterday, Google announced that the engineers had once again made significant enhancements to the V8 JavaScript engine that is the engine for Chrome. Amazing stuff... a continuously monitoring optimizer to see what sections of code are getting hit a lot and then to re-optimize them to make them faster. The longer a big page is in the browser, the faster it will get. Amazing.

I'm tempted to get back into AJAX development. It was a blast.

They say I should see it in the Mac versions of Chrome dev soon. Very interesting.

I saw a tweet today from the guys at github and they have created a fantastic bit of JavaScript that "slides" the contents of folders right and left as opposed to fetching a new page on each "drill down" into a folder. It's amazingly neat in that they also made the browser's "back button" work. Pretty amazing stuff.

This morning I finished patching ZeroMQ for the Recovery Interval in Milliseconds option that I was looking to have in order to control the memory usage. I was able to build the code into the shared library, and then by carefully placing it in the project's lib directory, I was able to get the loader to pick it up as opposed to the RPM-installed older version. With this, I was able to verify that the option worked and the savings in memory was, once again, quite substantial. Most excellent!

I then followed the submission guidelines and sent a nice patch to the mailing list. One thing I noted was the Signed-Off-By tag and it's usage in the project. I can see why they have it in git - being generated from the kernel group, but also for a project like this. I really like this kind of stuff - to have the SCM tool understand the needs of it's users and anticipate them.

After I got the one patch submitted, I got a message on IRC from Martin saying I needed to subscribe to the mailing list. Oddly enough, I mentioned to him, that I was subscribed. He then asked me what email? I responded with my general incoming drop box, and then he pointed out that the email was coming from my Comcast account. Ah! Got it.

Rather than use my Comcast account for anything more, I decided to subscribe on my GMail account as it's not going to change, and then send in emails to the list on that same account. It's far easier to use that and then not worry about it than to worry about Comcast going away because of some better ISP in Naperville. I spent a little time trying to get outgoing email at EasyDNS, my DNS service, but that turned out to be a bit dodgey, and realized it's probably better to just stick with GMail and let that be it.

OK... one patch down, one to go - the Java client needs to have the same capabilities to set the Recovery Interval in Milliseconds, and while it used JNI to get to the C library under the covers, it needed to have a few things added to make it really work. Not nearly as difficult as the C library, but still, I followed the same guidelines and submitted a patch for that - now on my GMail address.

I saw a few minutes later that my patch was in the mailing list digest, which confirms that I got everything right with the GMail switch-over... nice. We're running with the changes on our boxes, but if they happen to make changes in the near future we'll just have to deal with it as that's the cost of being a submitter.

Neat stuff. Fun.

[3:30pm] UPDATE: I have to say... just when you think you have it all under control, life pops up and shows you you aren't as put-together as you think. Case in point: today I thought I had a good set of patches to ZeroMQ and it's Java client, but then I tried to receive the data and it was all a mess. I then had to send something to the mailing list that said "I'm a dufus", and then back out all the changes and verify that my code worked.

It didn't, and so I spent a good 30 mins finding out why not - only to see that one of the options on ZMQ was really not all that well documented - the Ignore Loopback option. They didn't mean the loopback interface, they meant any other client on the same box. So I had to drop that option and then things started working.

Well, at that point, it made sense to try and see if I could get the fixes in ZMQ back in and working. It didn't take long, and sure enough, it's working. So I sent in another patch with a few additional changes, and that should be good to go.

Nothing like being shown to be a dufus in front of people you'd like to impress. Yeah... class act all the way.