Slightly Less Bad

Far be it from me to claim to have anything but distain for Internet Explorer, but I have to say that the IE Developer Toolbar is really cool. It's certainly made cross-browser developer quite a lot easier.

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Tracking User Interactions

One of the more interesting things (to me at least) that I did in the process of launching the new map application was add tracker calls in the database to reflect usage that normally wouldn't get reflected in the stats. I'm using Google Analytics for this, and I hadn't realized just how easy it was.

In the map application it's important for us to know about user interactions. How are people using the map? Are they doing searches? Are they clicking the map links to find buildings on the map? Are they clicking on the map to find info about buildings?

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If Only I Didn't Keep Coming Back

Every time I go to install qmail I cringe (the Rick Moen rant I linked to back then has moved here). I've run qmail for a long time, probably since the late 90s. I like the fact that I usually end up installing it and then pretty much forgetting about it.

But, well, I sort of have to forget about it because I can never understand how to stop it. Inevitably I end up letting the server just run, and when I finally do have to kill it for some reason that involves me tearing my hair out while trying to kill svcscan processes that keep restarting everything I stop.

Yet somehow I keep ending up with qmail. I can't escape it.

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Launched, but Still Tweaking

So our new app is launched. It's an interactive map of Downtown Los Angeles that we developed for the Downtown Center BID and linked to their data. You can find it via the BID's website or via this direct URL. It requires Flash 8, so if you don't have that you'll be asked to upgrade (though the sidebar will still work unless you're running Firefox on Linux).

The sidebar is Javascript over Rails over MySQL. The map application is Flash, and it does a lot of back-and-forth communication with the javascript.

Now that the app is up, I discovered that the biggest perceived-lag on load was the javascript. I'm using prototype.js and the scriptaculous libraries, and those are pretty hefty. All told my JS was roughly eight files and 140K. That's not huge these days, but because the JS loaded up front nothing was displaying until those files had gotten down.

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Two Times Would Be the Charm

When I was first learning how to program for modperl I remember hitting the weirdest errors and thinking the application was out to get me. I mentioned that here many times. Usually the problem ended up having to do with me failing to account for persistence. When things stay in memory between runs, you have to be super-thorough to not make a mess with global variables and such cruft like that.

Today I'm having the same sort of issues, but with Flash. When using our app on IE it would appear that it works perfectly the first time, but if you reload it hangs up and eventually you get a message saying that the script is taking too long, would you like to kill it?

Update (1:45am): Found the cause and a solution, so I'm happy.

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