Alex Pooley's Blog

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The msgpad beta has been running for two weeks now and so far I’m happy. My biggest problem though is that the system sometime seizes up. There are complications hosting a fastcgi application at Dreamhost. There have been reported work arounds, none of which have worked for me so far. I’m going to try one more thing and if it doesn’t work I’ll have to find hosting somewhere else. “PlanetArgon”:http://planetargon.com or “Textdrive”:http://textdrive.com are most likely so far.

Also, I keep coming up against the same architectural problems on the view side of my application. I get the distinct impression that web applications are still very young and that better tools are required. The biggest issue I have with web application development is that you need to not only think about the problem domain, but also how to orchestrate the technologies. This needs to be fixed.

I’m making fast progress with msgpad now. I have two bugs to sort out and I should be ready to bring in many more beta testers.

One of the bugs is an issue with Internet Explorer 6 not displaying msgpad correctly. It’s pretty annoying seeing as Opera 8.5 and FireFox 1.5 render the pages fine. The pages are also XHTML strict valid.

The other bug is boring and is related to timezone offsets on the server.

I was able to improve the speed of a common call today by simply pre-loading data rather than lazy loading. I suspect there are more of these easy wins laying around the place.

I’ve also taken a peek at msgpad through Opera’s small screen rendering and it’s pretty darn nice. It’s easy to get out of bed each day when you’re working with infrastructure as powerful, and ingenius as the web standards!

Hah! I’ve just come across a bug in msgpad that is a minor annoyance. The problem is that I print the posts in sequence, and weave time interval markers between the posts. So you could have a few posts and then something that says, “2 minutes ago”, and then some more posts and then another marker that says, “5 minutes ago”. Something I hadn’t considered is that everyone’s clock is out of sync, and being out by a few minutes is not unlikely!

The HTTP packets returned to the browsers contain the server’s date so I should be able to calibrate. Even better though, you won’t need to have your time/timezone set correctly for the relative time markers to function. Still, something I never really thought about before now…