chrishowie.com

I’ve been getting back into chess recently, and my favorite online community is the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). There are a wealth of free and open interfaces available for download, but they all have one thing in common: you have to download them. At my workplace this is a no-no, but over my lunch break it would be nice to get in a few games. If I forget my laptop then I have no way to play.

Enter Gazebo. I started this project last Friday night, so it’s only been about two days. Still, what I have right now is rather impressive for that amount of time. At face value, the current version is not very representative of the time that’s gone into the project so far, and for a very good reason.

The HTTP protocol used by web servers was not engineered around the idea that you’d establish a long-lasting connection with the server. It’s better suited for quick request-response cycles. Because of this, the PHP web service has no good way to maintain a connection to FICS.

The solution I came up with for this problem is simple, yet very involved. A daemon script (yes, written in PHP…) listens on a UNIX socket for connections from the PHP web service script. If a new FICS session is requested, it creates a new session and returns some authentication parameters to the web service. On every request to the service, another connection to the daemon is made over the UNIX socket, the session attached to with the authentication parameters, and some action taken, like “write this to the network socket” or “tell me when you get new data from the network socket” or even “close the network socket and destroy the session.” The daemon essentially acts as a super-proxy that persists the network sockets and enables access to all of them from one UNIX socket.

Yes, it’s kinda ugly. But it also works incredibly well. There is still some tuning to be done, but behold the awesomeness of what is essentially in-browser, color-coded telnet:

I’ve been reading up on Douglas Crockford’s Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language and I agree with most of them, but I definitely have a bone to pick with one of them: “All variables/functions should be declared before they are used.”

This sounds good in theory, and is probably a good programming practice. However, in JavaScript we frequently use callbacks to implement asynchronous calls, due to the fact that JavaScript is single-threaded. Code like this is common:

function BeginProcess(data) {
    // process data
    DoDataProcess({
        'data': data,
        'onComplete': EndProcess
    });
}

function EndProcess() {
    alert('The process is done');
}

Think AJAX in particular. This kind of thing is commonplace. However, declaring things before we use them means we have two options. We can either swap the functions around, or we can declare var EndProcess; at the top of the script. The latter reminds me too much of C, where you have to declare function prototypes ahead of time if you want to write them in any order you want. The former is just incredibly confusing. Consider how that would look:

function EndProcess() {
    alert('The process is done');
}

function BeginProcess(data) {
    // process data
    DoDataProcess({
        'data': data,
        'onComplete': EndProcess
    });
}

This is horrible. The natural code flow is broken. You now have to start at the last function and read it, then go up to read the next part. This is the same reason that top-posting sucks and bottom-posting makes sense. If those functions were both longer than a screen, you have to scroll to the bottom of the script, then up to the function header. Then read down to find “EndProcess” and say “what’s that?” Then scroll up to find EndHeader, then back down to read it. The human mind has not been conditioned to read this way.

Consider this quote from the linked article on top-posting:

Top-posting makes posts incomprehensible. Firstly: In normal conversations, one does not answer to something that has not yet been said. So it is unclear to reply to the top, whilst the original message is at the bottom. Secondly: In western society a book is normally read from top to bottom. Top-posting forces one to stray from this convention: Reading some at the top, skipping to the bottom to read the question, and going back to the top to continue. This annoyance increases even more than linear with the number of top-posts in the message. If someone replies to a thread and you forgot what the thread was all about, or that thread was incomplete for some reasons, it will be quite tiresome to rapidly understand what the thread was all about, due to bad posting and irrelevant text which has not been removed.

Given a suitably large enough application (like the one I am working on right now) this means that I either need about 200 var statements at the top of my program to indicate every class I am defining, and the same within each class to indicate each private function, or I have to reorder them. Both are unwieldy. One is unnecessarily verbose, while the other is horrible to read and breaks the natural flow of the code. Your initialization function winds up at the very bottom of the script, then you have to work your way up to see what is going on.

Crockford seems like a pretty intelligent guy, but I’ve yet to see any extensive code samples that show how he gets around this problem. Thoughts?

I’ve been up to a lot of little things recently but haven’t undertaken any projects big enough to warrant a whole fancy blog post. I figured I might as well summarize what I’ve been up to.

I’m doing a project at school that improves the experience of on-campus tutors and their clients. They’d been using Moodle workshops to allow clients to submit content to tutors, and recording hours manually on timecards. Moodle will still be involved, but the tutors will now interact primarily with a web application I’ve been coding that will track their hours for them, as well as fulfill some clerical roles, such as preventing two tutors from working on the same paper. (Previously this was done more or less manually by updating the workshop submission title. Not a terribly fun way to track that kind of stuff.)

This project has me up to my neck in JavaScript, a language I’ve long held in contempt. However, after reading up on some patterns and watching a talk or two my mind has been completely changed. In fact, I enjoy coding in JavaScript now. I enjoy it a lot. When you know what you are doing (and what to avoid) all the frustration and general icky feelings associated with working in the language disappear. What’s left is an incredibly pure, lightning-fast web application. A maintainable one too. Who knew JavaScript could do that?

Some other semi-random facts:

• I’m getting married in 91 days. (See that counter in the right column? Yup, that one. If you’ve been wondering what that’s counting down to, now you know.)
• I’ve recently revived the RTS gaming genre on my system by reinstalling Age of Empires 3. I don’t recall why I stopped playing, but I shouldn’t have.
• In case anyone wonders why I haven’t been on WoW for a while, it’s because I let my subscription expire. That was over six months ago, I think. Honestly I have not missed it. There are more fun games out there, and they don’t require a monthly fee. Team Fortress 2 is an especially good option if you like class-based games and first-person shooters.

That’s all for now, I guess. Stay tuned for some more developments on Banshee.OpenVP in the coming weeks.