and then there was chat..

it's been a mad week, but I still found time, mostly in the mornings, to throw together a real-time chat system for the site. When I got more time, yesterday, I transformed it into something pretty damned good.

But don't take my word for it, click the link! it's under my (subtle) smiley in the top-right of most of these here pages, next to the printer icon. There's no fancy pop-up info, but there is a cool pop-up chat window!

Login with a nickname and away you go! If you do that in the early evenings (BST) you might just find me hanging around (I can do that you see, other users "drop-off" after three minutes (at least, I think I set that pref to three minutes, it may still be 30 seconds from my testing at home). If you drop in, do say hi! Of course I'll answer your tech questions! *sigh*

it's still full of bugs, of course, but does mostly everything I needed, and much more, even has flood-protection, just try it! You'll need javascript enbled to use it (to even load it), so if you are one of those paraoid sorts with javascript disabled, great! means I won't have to have long conversations with you about "the establishment" *phew*. The rest of us can enjoy real live chat! Once I clear the logs and what-not, I'll zip it up, and drop it into the beta folder so you guys can play with it at home/on your site/wherever.

I like it! it's just like IRC, except without the "R". Get this, you can even use bbcode in it! Aye! Gotta make cbparser work for its living, though note; the css for the chat is still in the early stages.

Feel free to mess about, and, of course, report your findings back to me! okay, that's it, maybe see you in the chat!

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

download troubles

If you use the distro machine, or indeed develop with PHP, then this matters. If you've had any problems downloading files from corz.org, this will explain why.

I thought I was clever, well, I mean, I am, but I thought my wee line of code was clever. inside the distro machine, at the point where it catches and sends the download to the user, it switches off zlib compression. I figured this might interfere with the download process.

For those that don't know, zlib compression compresses everything the server sends to the browser. all browsers understand this and decompress the page at the other end. the page you are reading now was sent across the wire as a gzip file.

But I was still getting erratic downloads. Sometimes they would be fine, the next, not. very weird. Tonight, as I tested the newly uploaded, slightly improved textview.php script, and its corresponding zip archive, it reached a new level of wonkiness, it plain wouldn't work.

the download was okay, it happened, but the resultant file was a mess, and wouldn't decompress nomatter which browser I grabbed it with or which decompressor I used. hmmm.

Then, for some reason, I decided to disable zlib compression in my .htaccess for the machine's folder..
simple .htaccess directive:
php_value zlib.output_compression Off
and TADA!

this has serious implications. either that or my web host has something weird going on in their server configs. I noted previously, with interest, that it was possible to enable zlib compression AND a zlib output handler simultaneously, a thing usually guaranteed to bring your website to a halt. it didn't, strangely. I left it like that for a couple of weeks even, just to see what would happen; nothing.

In short, at last, your server may simply ignore the setting inside the script smiley for :aargh: In this case, I recommend you add a line to the .htaccess file for that folder, which I have thoughtfully done for the distribution.

All ßeta testers, please upgrade to 0.7b3 a.s.a.p.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

2004: part two

And a happy un-birthday to me!

The second half of years always seem to be better than the first, don't you think? Not that the first half was bad, far from it. Well anyway, here we are, part two of 2004, and already I'm getting excited about it.

July, August, September, October, November, December, luv 'em! Even though my birthday is in the first haf of the year, I still find it difficult to dredge up significant memories with any of the early months' names' attached. October, on the other hand, fairly leaps out at me, like December does to most folk. I'm ramblng, yes.

Some of you have spotted that I'm been devoting all my spare time (if ever there was such a thing) to getting the distro machine into shape. it's coming along beautifully too. For your entertainment, here's the current version.info updates..

corz distro machine v 0.7 ßeta

v0.7b2
expanded the editing functions in the stats page. as well as nudging things up and down, you can just edit scores straight in. this will assist while I track down why one of my onsite score file reset itself. fortunately I had a backup from the previous day, but you might not!

.. either it was something nefarious, in which case I have a hole in the security somewhere, or more likely; there was a real busy spell and the server tried to do too many things with the one flat-file all-at-once.

by the way, if it was something nefarious, and it was *you* that did it, could you please do it again, say, every day for a week, so I can get to the bottom of it!

anyway, the machine now puts an exclusive lock on the file for the duration of the write operation, all three microsecods of it, or thereabouts. we'll see how it goes. if you get a wiped score file, please report it to me!

completed the title customisation. if you specify "info" as the title for your source area, for instance, that will be used throughout, mostly.

you can now specify an alternative css file for your "clean" embedded menus. see the distro machine download page, which includes two embedded menus from two separate distro machines, each using a different native css file, yet on the page, both using the same, as specified by that page.

removed the "download which file?.." message from embedded menus. I reckon your own titles are better for these.

improved the downloading still further, and almost by accident. it's all snapped into focus. I figured it might be better to get all the score-file stuff out of the way before sending the file to the user. I was right!


v0.7b1
switched the default colour scheme to blue. I use this more myself, and this is purely to save me having to edit the three separate distromachines onsite that use the blue scheme. I upgrade my machines more than anyone, of course.


v0.7b
new: secure area. I wanted this for my "friends" folder. it's neater, and a wee bit more secure than the old http authorisation methods, which apparently, some browsers aren't doing any more; seems like a smart idea. We are using POST variables to send our password, which is held as a 32 byte md5, in a temporary session cookie. even the worst case browser scenario should only have the md5 flying around the wires. In other words, it's fairly secure.

users are presented with a simple (and quite cute) password dialog. once logged in they can access all your menu systems, files, whatever.

don't use your password-protected machine to deliver back-end menu services; it won't. (it's so easy to just chuck another one somewhere for this)

new: the name of the sections is now displayed in the menu itself. you can also now (optionally) have your custom text displayed inside the menu, too, which fills that space on the right!

new: expanded list of downloadables. we now check for, and send mime-types, so mp3's, ogg's, excell spreadsheets, and such things can be delivered easily with the machine. I'll expand this list as I go along, no doubt. so far..

doc, xls, htm, html, jpg, png, pdf, txt, ogg, mp3,m3u, zip, rar, sit, sitx, tgz, gzip, bz2, arc, bzip, pict, mpg, mov, and others.

if you use the machine to distribute, say, mp3's, this should cause whatever the user's operating system is set to do with these filetypes, i.e. open the mp3 player.

new: made a few more things customisable. stuff like the main titles. you can have a "foo viewer" menu now, or whatever.

I also improved the overall download handling, there should be less browser stalling, and associated weirdness. we DO send size headers now, too.

I dropped in the code for all this pretty quick, so it's into the beta folder for a bit, until it's had some field testing, any feedback on the new secure area features are especially welcome.

have fun!

so there you have it, features galore. I've spotted a few downloads of the new betas, so please do let me know if anything wonky happens, particularly with the downloading functions or security features.

I'm thinking about ways to deal with modern download managers. My logs are a mess with idiots who think it's perfectly cool to download a 5k file in three separate parts, and just grab-em-all like that while they're at it. *sigh*. "site-suckers" are just about as bad. it's like having a pack of msn-bots round for lunch; no fun.

What will happen, most likely, is that I'll have the machine block multiple connexions from the same IP, or something like that. Perhaps display a wee message along the lines of "Are you fucking mental? This file is FIVE KILOBYTES! Why on Earth would you need to download it in three parts?"

I could, of course, just have the machine block all known download managers completely, easy, but I can imagine my subsequent inbox, so probably not.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org


ps.. okay okay, I'm considering a separate blog for the dev updates.


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