Hackmeetup notes

Just came home from this week’s Hackmeetup. Here is the short report.

Fredrik struggled onwards with Lua and C++ game hacking. Ola mentioned the Lua/C++ bridge Luabind, which was originally envisioned as a Boost::Python-like project, but generic, to hook up all C-like languages to C++. (The focus was later narrowed to being a Lua-only binding.) “But, it’s probably deep black templating magic.” Not everyone’s bag.

David hacked some XUL, to make a Mozilla Firefox extension, and got angry with the WebProgress property, which seemed to stall when the user was uploading items. In fact, that seems to be the original meaning of the whole thing: just for measuring page load times, not the time/progress of file uploads. But it seems he had the extension programming environment up and running smoothly.

Ola and I had a microproject for the night: “Make a file upload interface for huge file sizes, that does not look horrible.” For a backend, we wanted to use Python. We used Pylons and the Paster server, and started looking at ways of not performing so very many string copies in there. Ola guided the way through the innards. After that we studied the Twisted asynch webserver examples, and found that they were lacking… in completeness and freshness. Probably they only left their docs out to rot. The software’s probably OK.

After that, we did some CSS-and-DOM trickery to get the ugly regular file browsing element looking a bit better. Fail. It looked très backwater ugly. So, Ola exclaims: “Flex. We redo it in Flex.” And, we did, and got it finished on the same night.