ScreditCrunch

We’re happy to announce another of our cool Night of Codes on Thursday starting at 18:00. The idea is for people to get together and talk about techie ideas they have (or pitch, if they want) and then also to work on their own projects. They can present if they want, or just listen. It will take place at the Scred office, at the Cable Factory in Helsinki, Door E, Room 565. Bring your laptop if you fancy working on stuff.

The guys from MahShelf have promised to announce something they call ‘amazing’. We’re definitely looking forwards to that.

I also have some interesting tech ideas I would like to run by my peers.

Some beer & refreshments will be provided. Do let us know if you’re planning to come (either by commenting here, to @Screditor on Twitter, or by emailing us). Remember: Thursday 18:00.

A week or so ago the last remnants of our old Perl version were banished from Scred. Last year, during summer, we spent quite some time porting Scred completely from Perl to Python and Django. Users did not really notice anything: the new version looked and acted identically to the old one. The reason for this switch was simple: our old self-baked framework was beginning to fray at at the edges and development was slow and painful.

We did evaluate moving Scred to Catalyst. However, Perl is a language which definitely splits opinions, both within Scred and beyond, and we needed to find something everyone would be at least semi-comfortable with. Now, as many know, my own personal favourite language is Tcl, for its wonderful simplicity and ultimate power. In fact it’s probably the most underrated language out there. For that reason we took a look at OpenACS which is reckoned to be extremely mature and scalable, but the learning curve at the time also felt very severe. It would also require running AOLWebServer. This has been built to be an extremely scalable web server, with Tcl at its scripting core, but everyone in the team had had at least some experience with Apache. Moving away from that did not feel appealing at all. There are Apache modules for Tcl on Apache, but nothing in the way of a full web framework (something for a summer project, perhaps?).

So Django it was, despite the pre-1.0 status, and overall it has mostly managed to do the job.

Everything was then ported, except one crucial part: the internal API used by the mobile Scred client. This was working perfectly well as it was so was never high up on the priority list to port. More importantly, Django/WSGI/mod_python have frankly no support for chunked HTTP encoding. This is an utterly inexplicable oversight as the HTTP standard quite clearly says chunked encoding MUST be supported, and one that has still not be satisfactorily remedied. Often browsers do not use chunked encoding but our friends the mobile platforms commonly do (both MIDP and the iPhone). Finally in January it was decided that this port really had to be done, as it was slowing the pace of our development to have to keep checking that the Perl based API would continue to work with new database changes.

After some amount of Googling we found a solution that was based on using Apache’s mod_proxy for dechunking. It was a hack, no doubt about it, but it seemed to be working right up until we tested with the MIDP emulator (ancient 1.0.3 as there’s nothing later for Macs and MIDP 1 was our target platform). API calls would regularly end up in an explicable “Network error” on the client. After some amount of debugging we could not find any reason for this. Once more the update to Python was put on the back burner to make way for several other important features which had to be pushed out.

Finally we dug up some time to continue to solve this issue. The confusing thing was that it worked on an actual device, but we could not be sure if that was just luck without pulling out tcpdump, netcat and similar tools. To cut a long story short we found that mod_proxy was closing the connection right after sending a response to each HTTP request. Now, this is perfectly fine, although usually web servers today keep connections open, at least for a time. Disconnecting after response was the HTTP 1.0 way. Unfortunately it seems like there is a bug in the 1.0.3 MIDP runtime. It did not react to this disconnect by then reconnecting with the next request. Instead it would just cause an IOException once a new request was sent (the details of the actual underlying socket are somewhat hidden in J2ME). That means that every other request works fine, every other one not.

At the end of the day we decided to push the update out. We tested on some phones and did not detect any problems so, with any luck, it’s only the emulator environment which does not handle this correctly. If you stumble across problems, do let us know!

Moral of the story: if you want to handle chunked encoding with Django, set up mod_proxy and be aware that the 1.0.3 MIDP environment has a potential bug in it!

In honour of our upcoming release of Scred v2 (dubbed ‘Babylon Squared’), we’re planning to watch some sci-fi at the office. So if you like sci-fi, and anyone smart does, drop by at the Cable Factory (door E, 5th floor, room 565).

Some beer and beverages will be available.

Episodes planned (approx): Babylon Squared (B5), Amok Time (Star Trek), Time’s Arrow (Star Trek TNG), Army of Ghosts (Dr Who) or The Awakening (Dr Who) if found in non-VHS format.

We’ve been coding all night at our Cable Factory office, in preparation for our trip to London to pitch for Seedcamp and some other instances. We’ve been broadcasting a live stream of our sweat, tears, frustration, debates, jokes, music and laughter. Made possible by Floobs!

You can see the stream and short comment on ArcticStartup

This is your last chance. Teemu has already left to get at least a couple of winks and Tuoppi and me will soon have to call it a night as well. Hey, I haven’t even packed yet! This is real reality TV and a real Night of Code. No BS.

We’re happy to announce to be hosting this year’s second Night of Code on Thursday, August 21st, 2008. Doors open at 5pm and we’ll probably there’s time to hack until 11pm. The location is Kaapelitehdas (The Cable Factory), Section E, 5th Floor.

As before, we’ll start with a couple of unconference sessions after which there’s time to listen to good music and write some code. So, bring your laptop if you’ll be staying the whole evening.

We’ll have some snacks and drinks available.

If you’re planning on attending the event, we’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment on this post. Alternatively, we also have a Facebook event that you can register to.

P.S. We’ve traditionally held a Night of Code every year when there’s the Night of the Arts event here in Helsinki. Unfortunately we’ll have to hold the event a day early this year, but if you’re around Kaapelitehdas on the following day, do check out the action there. Lots of interesting stuff by the resident artists.

Next Friday (25th April, 2008) Scred will be offering the use of our office to coders and designers who would like to spend some time together working on cool new stuff, whatever that might be. There will be no marketingpitches, blaring advertisements or anything else that will distract from the most important: creativity.

If you want to share an idea, feel free to do so.

If you want to ask advice, talk to your peers.

If all you want to do is sit by your computer, that is fine too.

We would like to invite all interested participants to join in, whatever it is they are working on. Share as much as you like, or nothing at all. Soak in what is going on around you. This is a relatively new concept and if it works out well, we’ll probably do more, or have other companies organising their own Night of Code.

We will start the night with an unconference. That is we will have 30 minute blocks when people can present and talk about topics they’re keen on, whatever those topics might be. That will continue for as long as there aretopics, followed by the real work. Announce a topic at the Night of Code, or beforehand on our blog.

Some refreshments will be on offer.

Schedule:

15:00-   Unconference
??:??    Coding
00:00    Goodbye  (or, “time to go home”)

The location:

The Cable Factory (Kaapelitehdas)
Door E, 5th Floor, Room 565
Helsinki, Finland

For more information, see http://night-of-code.com/

If you want to join, add a comment on our blog. You can also contact Kristoffer Lawson at setok@scred.com or by phone at +358-40-7312273.

Update: If you’re planning to attend the event, you can also add yourself to the attendee lists on Facebook or Upcoming.

Tonight we arranged a real night for geeks. Today is actually Helsinki’s Night of Arts and we decided to do something a bit different. To get everyone together in one place to be the nerds we are, each person working on their own favourite project as long as they like. Beer, crisps, Coke, cake, good company and all manner of things on offer.

Well, as you can guess, people soon forgot about the coding and instead began to enjoy everything else instead.

OK, so our purpose was not quite fulfilled. We became tired. We had other things to do. Several of the guys were picked up by their respective ladies, and what man can deny that? So the question is, can a geek remain a geek when in a relationship? Must we now say goodbye to our all-nighters, perhaps forever? How do we fit these two seemingly conflicting parts of our lives together?

Not only that, but work. Yes. The greatest of all evils. Work. People had to go to… work. It is so sad somehow. I speak for them and for myself too. Instead of creating something new, something revolutionary, something inspiring, we get hooked by the continuous drudgery that is employment-slavery. Day after day after day. We talk about how our wonderful plans but in the end, someone else does them. Someone who is wiling to make that sacrifice and to risk a small portion of their lives, and I doubt they ever look back.

The rest. At 80, they realise something went wrong. Their life flew by and quite suddenly they find none of their dreams happened. My only wish is that when thaat day comes I will not be one of them.