Day: February 8, 2009

Categories
iphone programming

High Score Server for iPhone (free)

I’ve made a highscore system for iPhone, complete with registrations, email confirmations, global highscore board, and iPhone client-side rendering.

I’d like to make it available as a free service (it’s live already, and included in a game I’m about to publish). I’m looking for volunteers who want to try integrating it into their games.

If you are such a person, or know someone, drop me an email (adam.m.s.martin at gmail).

A couple of very basic screenshots to give you an idea of what it does at the moment:

Admin features

In-game UI

(I’m not sure how much of this I’ll put in the download, but I’ll at least give you working sourcecode for it all and you can customize the UIView instances to display whatever you prefer)

Categories
maintenance

Question for RSS readers: replacement for Feedburner?

Hey, guys, I need some help!

Feedburner will be removed from the internet in 20 days time, which means I will no longer have an RSS feed.

Because of the way Google works (they do not allow multiple Google accounts to be simultaneously signed-in on the same computer), it will be physically impossible for me to use the “replacement” service from Google (I believe google thought this out very carefully indeed, and is very well aware of the consequences, but I won’t hit you with the conspiracy theory today :) ).

(and, in case you hadn’t noticed, Google has forcibly removed some of the features from Feedburner in the process, including the single most valuable one – the count of how many people are accessing your site through RSS)

Worst case scenario, I’ll go back to wordpress-managed feed, but someone with a misconfigured feed reader killed wordpress the last time I had that on, so I’m not sure how long it will stay up. I could install a cache server purely to cover the RSS feed, but that’s going to be a bunch of hassle I could do without (and I might well get it wrong, it’s been a while since I’ve configured Squid). I’ve looked at the WordPress Cache plugins, but they all have major incompatibilities / conflicts with other common plugins.

So … if I can’t find a replacement before 28 February 2009, the RSS feed may well magically disappear. Suggestions greatly appreciated!

Categories
bitching iphone Web 0.1 web 2.0

Web 0.1: Apple: please hire some web developers

I can no longer develop iPhone Apps. I am on my eighth attempt to download the 1.75Gb 2.2.1 SDK – without which, XCode refuses to even talk to my iPhone any more, because I allowed the iPhone to upgrade.

EDIT: I have it! I HAVE IT! YES! NO MORE PRAYING TO THE GODS OF ****ING APPLE’S CRAPPY WEB SERVER! (it’s probably a corrupted download)

The problem?

Sheer mind-numbing incompetence by Apple’s web team, it would seem (NB: I may be wrong; I haven’t tried packet-sniffing the HTTP traffic to prove this beyond all doubt, but my experiments with different browsers and different ISP’s strongly indicate it is the case). They’ve (mis)configured the webserver over at developer.apple.com to kill partial downloads of this monstrous file.

If you cannot download the whole thing before Apple automatically logs you out of their website (which they do every half an hour or so if you don’t actively surf the site), then your download is cancelled, server-side. You cannot resume from where you left off (their web server refuses to honour the HTTP command that tells it to resume a partial download).

What did they do wrong?

It’s a session-management problem – you CAN pause and resume a minute or two later. Just not half an hour later.

The other major bugs in the Apple websites (including that force logout!) suggest that some novice web programmer made a half-assed Session-management system that, well, sucks. (am I sounding angry? Hell yes; Apple’s website is behaving like some naive bricks-and-mortar company from 1999, not 2009). Or maybe they picked up a 3rd party one … that sucked. Whatever. It seems the session-manager is overriding Apache’s built-in support for this core element of HTTP, and saying “no”. For no reason other than bad web coding.

In passing, I noticed that they are *still* (allegedly – it’s easy to fake) running the same version of the Apache webserver that they’ve been shipping by default with OS X Server for some years now – a version that is more than 4 years old, 8 versions behind the current “maintenance” release, and 1 major version behind the “mainstream” release. Personally, I wouldn’t run Apache 1.x if you paid me, not with 2.x out there and running a “proper” webserver arch (apache 1.x is not a real webserver, it’s a hack using forks that makes it unnecessarily slow under heavy load).

</rant>