Alex Le’s Blog

It’s a mouthful for the title, but it is true.  I just installed IE8 Beta 2 to try out the new features and see if IE’s javascipt engine gets any speed bump.  So far IE8 is running only as fast as IE7 in my tests, while Firefox 3 runs screamingly fast (read 500% faster, seriously).

I’m impressed with IE8b2’s new Developer tool, a Firebug-like tool.  Surprisingly, the JavaScript debugger actually WORKS!  And it feels much smoother to debug JavaScript than Firebug (Firebug still suffers from some reading/refreshing glitches and doesn’t feel as responsive).

I was able to step into an object created using prototype’s Class.create() with no problem using F10 step over, F11 step-in keys work as expected.  Nice!  There is also a Profiler which would be totally awesome and for sure I’ll be using it extensively to optimize the JavaScript for my upcoming application.   Finally there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, which Microsoft actually give us developers what we’ve been dreaming for:  making IE sucks less.

I also managed to crash IE8b2.

I was actually running the debugger and stepping in my code.  Then I noticed and clicked clicked on “Browser Mode IE7″.  The entire application froze up.  My explanation is that the main browser process or thread is attached to the debugger, which is running in line-debugging.  Switching “Browser Mode” to a different setting requires the main browser to switch to a different view.  However, since the main process is stuck with the debugger, and the debugger is waiting for the main process to switch browsing mode, we have a deadlock situation.

I had to end-task the sucker.

And suddenly, my Firefox 3.1 started to constantly crash, even in safe-mode (running Firefox.exe using -safe-mode flag).  I chose to permanently disable all add-ons and Firefox managed to get to my favorite homepage, the about:blank page.   However, whenever I went to Yahoo Mail, the browser just crashed without even a trace in the Windows Event Application log.  All I got is the Mozilla Crash Reporter to play with.   With all my add-ons disabled, I was determined to find out what was killing Firefox, in safemode.  Apparently, something was almost as determined as I to come get Firefox, even when it’s waving the “-safe-mode” flag.

First, I went to Firefox Options, trying to find out what happened.  Clicking on the “Applications” tab would automatically crashed Firefox, weird. I went into Options, then Managed Add-ons.  I disabled all plugins, then restarted Firefox and try Yahoo Mail.  It worked.

Since IE8 was the only application I installed before Firefox started to crash, I proceed to enable all plugins but Microsoft’s.  Yahoo Mail worked still.  I then enabled the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) plugin and, bam, Firefox crashed again.  The culprit is the new WPF plugin that IE8 beta 2 secretly installed into Firefox.  It’s very nice of you, IE8 installer.  Should I call you mal-ware now since you just make one of my main application mal-functioned?  You just make me almost lose anything trust (left) that I have for installing Microsoft’s stuff.  Good thing trying out the new IE8 (which proves IE7 is that horrible for developer still!) is compelling enough so I let you go easy this time.

So IE8 Beta 2 testers, disable Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in for Firefox will help you stop IE8 from sabotaging your Firefox browsing experience with blazingly fast javascript execution, which IE can only cry foul by crashing itself.

I wanted to give mechanize a shot for a small prototype I was building.  It’s been a while since I last ran the gem command so of course the first thing it would do was to update itself.  For some reason, it got stuck forever.  It turned out that the latest hpricot gem was trying to build itself from source (! - very strange!) and gem updater got stuck looking for a compatible compiler.

So I downloaded the mechanize gem from Rubyforge instead and ran

gem install mechanize-0.7.7.gem

However, the gem still tried to access the gem index and eventually got stuck somewhere.  The ruby runtime ballooned up to more than 600MB as showed in Task Manager.  I dug up the gem install command and it turns out the gem install can be forced to install without checking the dependencies and without updaing the local index.   So the final gem command is

gem install mechanize-0.7.7.gem –no-ri –no-rdoc -f –no-update-sources

With the –no-update-sources flag, the gem won’t try to go off to http://gems.rubyforge.org and get the latest repository info but expecting there is already a local gem file.

Hope this help someone

I just checked out the 280Slides.com, a YCombinator’s funded company. They are developing an online Slideshow/Powerpoint site (yes, another one). The application is pretty slick and it has the Apple’s look and feel to it (both the 2 founds were from Apple). Paul Graham used their app to create his slide at StartupSchool 2008, which at the time, took him 10 minutes to start his slides due to “technical issues”.

What really got me amazed is that they developed a JavaScript UI framework called Objective-J. Apple do a lot of their apps and gadgets in Objective-C (iPhone for one), and since the guys behind 280Slides were from Apple, probably they took the concepts from Objective C and bring it over to JavaScript. Having coded TubeCaption’s caption editor, the Captionizer, from scratch, I understand how much work it takes to do something non-trivial in JavaScript. Programming an online application is totally different than programming a simple “Ajaxy, Web2.0″ page because the amount of work involved. We have hundreds of objects potentially interact with one another and trying to compete for CPU. Without a solid foundation, the application won’t be able to bear the performance and complexity weight.

I’m pretty excited to hear that 280Slides is planning to open-source their framework (probably the Objective J) in the near future. It will be a fresh idea besides the currently established frameworks such as YUI, Ext, Prototype.

Increasingly I see the trend of JavaScript being used as the underlining cross-platform language to build other frameworks and programming languages on top of it. John Resig (from jQuery) recently ported the processing visualizing language to JavaScript. His JS implementation looks AMAZING (check out the parser’s code, what a work of art) and performance-wise the library kicks major ass. Then somebody wrote a Ruby VM in JavaScript (HotRuby) and Ruby code can get executed natively in the browser. A VM written in JavaScript? WOW! Just the thought of Rails *may* work in the browser (hopefully not IE6) makes me feel dreamy. These stuffs are truly innovative and that’s what really push the web technologies forward. And with the new JavaScript engines that promise excellent performance (Webkit’s Squirrelfish, Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey), for sure we will even see MORE of the creative innovations.

PS: don’t forget to check out www.tubecaption.com’s Captionizer, the first timeline-based caption editor.

Recently I had to configure my VPS at Slicehost.com to send out emails for my TubeCaption application. Due to the time constraint of the launch, we decided to outsource the mail delivery to Gmail SMTP server.

Using Gmail SMTP server with ActionMailer

When I first deployed the application, I didn’t configure sendmail correctly (I’m a total stranger to sendmail or postfix) and went ahead with Google’s SMPT server.  Since I am using Google Apps to host the mailboxes, I created an extra account specifically to use for mail delivery. In my development.rb and production.rb file, I have ActionMailer configured as follow:

ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:tls => true,
:address => “smtp.gmail.com”,
:port => 587,
:domain => “tubecaption.com”,
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => “sample-mailer-account@tubecaption.com”,
:password => “the-very-secured-password”
}

Within my ActionMailer handler, I have a function to setup the default params as follow

class Postoffice < ActionMailer::Base
def setup_default_params
@from = “my-email@tubecaption.com”
@headers = “Reply-to my-email@tubecaption.com”
@subject = “TubeCaption.com”
@sent_on = Time.now
@content_type = “text/html”
end
end

Then for each email, before sending, I invoke setup_default_params() to have all the params setup. The site could now sending out emails, albeit slow. ActionMailer had to open a connection to GMail, authenticated, and then started writing the content as a stream of text. The whole process took from 1 to 3, or even 4 seconds some time on my machines, which means the mongrel process was also stuck there waiting.  But the mailing piece worked. However, I came to know the real issue:  all the emails were marked as SPAM or JUNK if they are sent to GMail or Yahoo.

I talked to a friend of mine, who has more knowledge in the emailing world. He suggested the cause of this is because emails sent from my VPS failed the reversed DNS lookup verification. Yahoo mail servers perform a reverse DNS look up to check my domain’s DNS records, while the SMTP server I used was from Gmail. Hence the emails were marked as spam in Yahoo and junk in Gmail due to the DNS check mis-match.

So I decided that it was about time for me to configure sendmail for the box and switch ActionMailer to use sendmail instead.

ActionMailer with local sendmail

Truthfully speaking, I would love to get away as far as I can from configuring sendmail. The 4th edition O’Reilly book on Sendmail is more than 1,000 pages! I only want something that can send out emails… Luckily, there is yum.

# sudo yum install sendmail

Now I switch my ActionMailer config back to use sendmail. Since my sendmail is installed in the default folder, I don’t need to configure ActionMailer any further. In production.rb, I have

ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :sendmail

ActionMailer now delivered mails using the local sendmail program.

Using the console, I sent out a test email to my yahoo acount.   Everything works.  Then, I received a notice from my server, telling me I have new mails at /var/spool/mail. Great! I checked the mail log, and saw …

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
<nworld3d@yahoo.com>
(reason: 553 Mail from XX.XXX.XXX.XXX not allowed - 5.7.1 [BL23] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus XBL; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/550-bl23.html [550])

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to b.mx.mail.yahoo.com.:
<<< 553 Mail from XX.XXX.XXX.XXX not allowed - 5.7.1 [BL23] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus XBL; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/550-bl23.html [550]
… while talking to d.mx.mail.yahoo.com.:
<<< 553 Mail from XX.XXX.XXX.XXXnot allowed - 5.7.1 [BL23] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus XBL; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/550-bl23.html [550]
…….
<<< 553 Mail from XX.XXX.XXX.XXX not allowed - 5.7.1 [BL23] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus XBL; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/550-bl23.html [550]
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable

…….

Final-Recipient: RFC822; nworld3d@yahoo.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.5.0
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 553 Mail from XX.XXX.XXX.XXX not allowed - 5.7.1 [BL23] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus XBL; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/550-bl23.html [550]
Last-Attempt-Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 14:02:54 -0400

OUCH! My VPS got black-listed! Somehow the Spamhaus XBL list decided to black list the IP address of the server. Probably because I had port 25 opened in the firewall and somebody has taken advantage of my lack-of-linux-sysadmin-skills to start relaying spams.  CRAP! Yahoo outrightly refused any SMTP connection from my server because it was marked as a spammer-wannabe .  Good thing Yahoo included the  link to their help page and references to Spamhaus XBL.

I went to Spamhaus website and looked up my server’s IP:

The CBL (composite blocking list) was blocking my server.  I went ahead and request a removal from the list.  Afterwards, the CBL list showed

A few minutes later, I checked Spamhaus and it’s not showing the IP listed anymore.  Phew!

It would take a while before this list is propagated through out the internet.  At the moment, I still can’t connect to Yahoo’s SMTP server and my mails is still delivered right into Google’s Junk mailbox.  Hopefully a few hours more and my server would be good to go.

I don’t know if Spamhaus is my friend or foe.  I have a hard time deciding it.  I don’t know what people’s experiences with emailing services in general, but I can tell it’s a pain in the butt, and everything will only get worse from here.  I wonder what it will be like when ipv6 is used…