Since it's post-Google I/O days for Chrome, the boys at Google Chrome have released an update to the dev channel - 13.0.761.0, and this morning I picked it up. It seems to handle remembering page passwords better than the previous cut - maybe that's a fix, or just a different fork of the code. There's no release notes up (yet), but I'm guessing this is just the next in the series. Good enough for me.
We have made some amazing progress in the past few days with the greek engine we're building. For the first time in this project, I feel like it's really coming together. So much so that I was willing to do a little extra for a group that's trying to use our erlang-based Broker to replace the previous version written in Java. The problem revolve around the fact that they needed to be able to look up the user's authentication data based on the 128-bit auth token that the login service generated. Kind of like a "reverse-login".
The problem was that they were going directly to the mongoDB database where this data was stored, and when they tried to look things up by the 128-bit token, it was byte-ordered differently than expected. This was a problem, but not a horrible one. Still... if I had the time, and it seemed I did, it sure would be a nice thing to write them a service that did this for them so they didn't have to hit the database directly, and didn't have to worry about the byte ordering.
So I did.
Interestingly, it was only about 10 lines of erlang to add to the login service. Where the problems arose was in the encoding/decoding of the data to make it "fit" in with the rest of the serialized data. Times, it seems, weren't really being handled well, and that's understandable, so I had to fix that up before I was getting useful values out.
Then I had to mess with the offset. Originally, we used milliseconds since epoch, as it's pretty universal. But when the high-frequency guys wanted to get in on the act, they wanted microseconds since epoch as their stuff happened a little faster than that. So I had to make sure we had the offset right. Once fixed, we were ready to go.
Almost.
Seems the decoded data on the Java side is not giving us the right date. It's a date, but it's not the right date. I've handed this off to a guy in the group, as I'm convinced that we're sending the correct data - it's just not being delt with my the java client. We'll see what he comes back with.
But it was nice to do a little extra, and help out the adoption of the Broker. It's pretty nice stuff.
I thought I had this particular problem with The Broker solved - saving and loading lists to and from mongoDB using the emongo client - but I was wrong. Turns out, I can do it with lists of strings, but not with lists of integers. Something to do with the pattern matching in the erlang code.
What I did was to put in the more overt conversions and then both types of saves and loads worked. I'm just hoping that as my test cases get more complete, it really starts to equate to fewer bugs... but I have my doubts. This is just so frustrating. But it has to be done.
I finally have a successful test of the system - including the JSON interface over websockets. It's a long time in coming, but it's here. I can hardly believe it. There are still a lot of things to work out, but we have something that the GUI guys can play with, and that's very important to move forward. I can push the guys to get the rest of the pieces done - or take them back and finish them myself.
Either way... I feel I can rest for 15 min and catch my breath. It's certainly put a smile on my face!
Today has been a real kick in the pants, and not necessarily in a good way. I was getting ever closer to have something to test with the GUI team, and it seems that at every turn I was finding things that didn't quite fit. I know some of this is expected, but it's really a little more than I expected. A few of the components were really just "done enough" for the testing at hand. There's a world of difference between "good enough for limited testing" and "ready for applications", and I'm paying for it today.
Still, the end is in sight, I just have to slug through a ton of erlang code and JSON conversions. It's all there, I can see it, but getting the bloody matches to work is brutal.
Another long day... Man, I'm tired.
For the last several days I've been working harder than I can remember in a very long time. It's thankfully just starting to pay off. We are getting close - very close, and still we're plenty far from where we need to be on Friday. But it's getting closer. It's paying off.
I have a feeling we'll make it, but it'll be close. Long days... short nights... but I'm really hoping it'll pay off.
This morning I saw another very interesting graphical equation editor for the Mac from chocomoko. I had used something like this back in my days at Auburn, and it was very nice, but Brisk seems to really be a step above what I had used. To be fair, that was 20 years ago, and on Mac OS System 7, but at the time it was awesome. I looked up the package a few months ago to see if they had been keeping up, and in a sense they were - but not in the UI - just the platform.
Brisk is a different way of doing it, and I have to say, it's an interesting take on the same problem. It's using LaTeX (I believe), but it's also completely drag-n-drop for the graphical editing, so it's possible to get into this easily and then use the LaTeX out of it for papers, etc. Not a bad idea. But it retains the complete Mac GUI with pasteboard access, etc. Nice touches.
If I have to write papers again, this is something I'm going to look into to be sure.
This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 12.0.742.30 was out and the release notes say the only difference in this release is that they updated to the latest version of Flash. I'd forgotten that Chrome was using an embedded Flash, and dropping the embedded H.264 decoder. Two sad points, but it's their choice to include it or not. I wonder if there's a plugin that does the H.264? Anyway, still polishing up the product.
For the second day in a row I'm leaving on the last express out of the city. Man... these are long hours. I can't remember working this hard, but it's the weekend, and I can't work at home because I can't take it with me, and I have no remote access (yet). So it works out that I have a little 2-day vacation.
I need to get some sleep...
This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 12.0.742.12 is out and it's still basically a polish release, but there's one rendering bug in the Mac version that's fixed as well. That's nice to see, but I hadn't hit that issue - yet. I'm guessing they are only a week or so away from releasing 13.0, and calling 12.0 the 'beta' release.
Progress.