Launched, but Still Tweaking
February 23, 2006 by Eric Richardson
So our new app is launched. It's an interactive map of Downtown Los Angeles that we developed for the Downtown Center BID and linked to their data. You can find it via the BID's website or via this direct URL. It requires Flash 8, so if you don't have that you'll be asked to upgrade (though the sidebar will still work unless you're running Firefox on Linux).
The sidebar is Javascript over Rails over MySQL. The map application is Flash, and it does a lot of back-and-forth communication with the javascript.
Now that the app is up, I discovered that the biggest perceived-lag on load was the javascript. I'm using prototype.js and the scriptaculous libraries, and those are pretty hefty. All told my JS was roughly eight files and 140K. That's not huge these days, but because the JS loaded up front nothing was displaying until those files had gotten down. — Continue Reading...
Two Times Would Be the Charm
February 22, 2006 by Eric Richardson
When I was first learning how to program for modperl I remember hitting the weirdest errors and thinking the application was out to get me. I mentioned that here many times. Usually the problem ended up having to do with me failing to account for persistence. When things stay in memory between runs, you have to be super-thorough to not make a mess with global variables and such cruft like that.
Today I'm having the same sort of issues, but with Flash. When using our app on IE it would appear that it works perfectly the first time, but if you reload it hangs up and eventually you get a message saying that the script is taking too long, would you like to kill it?
Update (1:45am): Found the cause and a solution, so I'm happy. — Continue Reading...
Apple Can't Do New Intel Math
February 22, 2006 by Eric Richardson
I'm less than impressed by Apple's software quality control lately. I got an iPod recently, and one of the first things I had to do was install the November firmware (which I had to download... mine shipped with a newer one on the CD) to get away from a bug that caused most mp4 videos to quit working a minute or so in.
Now iTunes is dying on me, and the error message from the report is interesting:
Exception: EXC_ARITHMETIC (0x0003)
Codes: EXC_I386_DIV (divide by zero)
Thread 0 Crashed:
0 <<00000000>> 0xffff0329 __gettimeofday + 73
(cpu_capabilities.h:177)
Divide by zero, every time. Odd.
Some Much Nicer Numbers
February 22, 2006 by Eric Richardson
It feels funny to go from a post about getting engaged to a post about benchmarking, but oh well.
We're preparing to launch our first Rails app at work today, and so in prep I had mentioned previously that I was looking into performance setups. With WEBBrick, the all-Ruby simple server, I could do about 7 requests / sec to a reasonably intensive search function.
I've now done much better.
My Weekend
February 21, 2006 by Eric Richardson
So yesterday I asked Kathy to marry me.
And she said yes.
I would assume that makes my President's day weekend more eventful than yours, but perhaps not.
I'm not someone to have rehearsed what I was going to say ahead of time or anything like that, but I couldn't have been happier with the way things turned out. We went up to Franklin Canyon Park, hiked twenty minutes or so up the Hastain Trail and then just sat on a bluff (approximately here) with a view of the Pacific and even Catalina. We talked for a while and somehow I managed to ask the question without sounding as nervous as I was. Not that I was particularly nervous about what she would say, but as the moment came near I had no clue how I was going to do it.
The where and when will come sometime soon, but not yet. One thing at a time.