Month: April 2007

Today’s Annoyances

Today has been a buggy day at work.

First, I tried again to get Java Web Start working on an application. It launches JWS, but then my application hangs leaving a javaw.exe process in the background. From some searching on the forum, it seems that other people are having the same problem. In fact, it may be due to a bug in Java Web Start, which means there’s nothing I can do about it.

Next, I’m having a problem with Selenium tests on a PHP application which uses sessions. It took me a while to figure out why my test user would get logged out immediately without any error messages when running tests with the Test Runner instead of the Selenium IDE. I have ini_set(‘session.referer_check’, ‘stuffhere’); set to improve security a bit, but when I run the test suite through the Test Runner, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] is set to the Selenium Test Runner’s URL, which obviously fails the referrer check. And since errors were being pushed to a session that was immediately lost when the referrer check failed, I wasn’t seeing any errors. So what’s my solution? Well, for now I’ll have to disable the referrer check. It can be spoofed anyway… That means changing a fair amount of apps though… bleh.

XML as data interchange format

This article by James Clark, the Technical Lead of the original XML Working Group, puts into words exactly what I was thinking when XML first came out and was being touted as the be-all end-all of data interchange formats. For years I haven’t been confident in my knowledge of XML to vocalize my disenchantment with it, so hearing a similar opinion from the horse’s mouth is rather comforting!

Found via ongoing

Coming soon: Embattle

New articles, Collaborative editors

There are a couple of new articles on the Tech section of my web site. I’m slowly porting over things which have just been sitting around. The articles are about my FuseboxXF project, and my Physics simulation program. I still need to redesign the site and decide how to make it all dynamic, but at least there is more content!

I also added a placeholder for my newest idea: a web-based concurrent file editor (multiuser/multiplayer text editing). I came up with the idea while thinking about the next project I’ll start at work. Since the projects we do are (relatively) small, I can use Circuitmaker (another project I’ll be posting about soon) to create a framework for most of the application. After that though, it’s a free-for-all on the entire project, using Dreamweaver’s annoying file check in/check out functionality to avoid problems with multiple people editing the same file (clobbering). It’s annoying because you have to constantly ask someone if they are done with a file so you can edit it, and if they aren’t or they aren’t there, you could be out of luck and it is very disruptive. If three of us could all edit files at the same time, this problem would be virtually eliminated.

So, I searched and downloaded MoonEdit which doesn’t work the way I though it would. It’s fairly slick and it works, but it doesn’t give you a list of all the files in the directory you run it from. Instead, you can only edit files you create from within MoonEdit, and those files always end in “.me”.

In any case, there are some others out there now that I look at Wikipedia. Collaborative_real-time_editors and Collaborative_editor are good reference pages. Mine would be different from these in that users wouldn’t be able to edit the same line at the same time, and it would be optimized for LAN usage. Another feature which might be cool is to allow users to hold a lock on the entire XML element your cursor is in (if it’s an XML-compliant document).