Jaanus: September 2006 Archives

We now show YouTube videos extracted from mood messages on the front page. Just scroll down. If you want to get your own video here, just put the YouTube “watch” link in the mood, and we do the rest.

The only sad part is that the embed YouTube code is not XHTML compliant and thus our frontpage no longer validates :(

We upgraded the site view engine backend from Django 0.91 to 0.95 and there was a downtime of about 30 minutes. We still received pings but viewing was not available. All looks to have gone fine and we’re now back up and running with the latest and greatest.

New version of Pinger has been out for a few days and it appears to work fine. Plus the code is correctly versioned now so I can go back to any change if needed.

I documented the new Pinger birth and so let’s look also at what’s changed in this version and how the changes came about. Here are the changelog entries with comments.

bugfix: no longer ping the mood of SkypeOut contacts (as they don’t have any)

This one’s easy, when pinging just verify if it is a SkypeOut contact or not and branch accordingly.

bugfix: “Run Pinger at Windows startup” option works now

This was a tough one. Everything seemed fine — I inserted the right information in registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, but nothing got run at login. Even though the other entries ran.

So finally I found the culprit. How I insert the registry key is that I just take the value of System.Environment.CommandLine, supposedly the full path to the executable program, and put it in the registry. As it turns out, this got a space appended to its end out of nowhere, and Mister Computer and Missis Windows decide they’re too picky to run the registry entries in the Run branch if the values have an extra space in the end. So a simple trim() call fixed that.

bugfix: smarter handling of “refused” and startup situations when starting Pinger, Skype and many other things at the same time (translation: it works now)

Yeah… just some more logic to wait until Skype initialization is complete until trying to connect to the contact list.

change: in addition to periodic “full pings”, listening to the “mood changed” event also works. When an incoming mood change event arrives, Pinger pings it instantly, so no moods are lost.

I got some strange COM library versioning bug a while ago so the mood change event just didn’t seem to exist in the Pinger project in Visual Basic, even though it existed elsewhere. After going to the new version of the COM, looks fixed and the mood events are happily flowing.

We finally have server code versioning here so we can make changes again. How cool is that.

So we fixed the layout bug that drove the pages nuts if someone was putting long URL-s in their moods. All URL-s are truncated now, but still go to the right place, and it all looks nice.