ScreditCrunch

Scred has submitted its new group feature (announcement coming shortly) to the PayPal Developer Challenge competition, and we have been accepted to compete with around 50 other ideas. The finalists will be selected based on a community vote process, so we need your help! Please show your support and vote for us.

Here’s how (see pics below):

• Go to the PayPal X site and register. You can use your existing PayPal account. When asked to log in, the process will happen on paypal.com.
• Go back to http://www.x.com/ if not there already. Apparently you might not be put there after registering!
• Select Vote Now in the PayPal X Developer Challenge section.
• Click the Vote Now text on the next page. It looks like a title or heading, but it’s not!
• At this point you might be redirected a few times. Wait a bit.
• Search for scred in the search box (in the upper right hand corner).
• Click title for the details on Scred
• Hit Click to Vote. The checkmark should change from gray to blue.
• You can only vote for one entry in the competition.

The PayPal vote site is a bit, hm, funny. So you might need to try again from the start, after registering. Let us know if you’re having problems.

Your support is much appreciated. If we manage to win, we’ll celebrate in good style at our next Night of Code!

Common Problems:

• “It’s still asking me to register after I registered and clicked Vote Now” — The next page following the “Vote Now” button is quite misleading. There’s a text that says you need to be registered to vote. However that’s not an error! Above it there’s what looks like a title saying “Vote Now”. However, it’s not a title! It should be a link to get forwards.
• “I searched for Scred but didn’t find anything to vote on”. If you use the normal x.com search you will not find anything. You must press the Vote Now button in the Developer Challenge section on the front page. Then again click “Vote Now”. Only then can you search.
• “I get an error when trying to log in”. These pop up now and then. We don’t know why it happens and the only solution seems to be to try again later, or from the x.com frontpage. We’re sorry about this, but it is outside our control…
• Get in touch with us if you have other problems. We’ll try our best to help.

This is one of those ideas that just needed to be implemented. There’s a special smoke sauna in the yard of the Cable Factory which is going to be available until this Friday. We we are organising a special Night of Code on short notice which starts with a sauna in the yard at 18:00, followed by traditional NoC activities: coding at the Scred office, and any presentations, if people want to talk about something.

Bring your own towel if you want to try the sauna. Scred will provide some beer and refreshments.

Nights of Code are a chance to get together and exchange ideas, thoughts and enthusiasm for technology.

Sign up on Facebook, or add a comment to this thread.

Sorry for the short notice but Scred is organising a another Night of Code at the Cable Factory this Thursday 17:00->. Across the Ruoholahti bay Madonna will be playing a mega concert, so chances are we might see, or at least hear something from the Cable Factory roof.

If you are not familiar with our Nights of Code, they are small events where people can get together and code on their own projects, talk about new tech ideas, give presentations on things they are working on, or are interested in. They take place at our office in the Cable Factory (door E, 5th floor), Helsinki. We’ve had some fantastic presentations before, including a startup which was launched at the event!

If you are thinking about presenting on something you can decide at the event, or leave us a comment here. If you’re planning to come, comment here or mark attendance at the Facebook event.

So why is Madonna cool for startup entrepreneurs? Here’s a quote from Wikipedia:

An analysis of Madonna’s business acumen by academics at the London Business School presents her as a “dynamic entrepreneur” worth copying, identifying her vision of success, her understanding of the music industry, her ability to recognise her performance limits (and thus bring in help), her “sheer hard work” and her ability to change as key to why she has been a striking commercial success.

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.