Friday, November 24, 2006

Prototype.js crashes IE6 on some computers

On a very big site I'm working with some users started contacting us about crashes when they were just entering the page! The Error message said:
AppName: iexplore.exe AppVer: 6.0.2900.2180 ModName: kernel32.dll 
ModVer: 5.1.2600.2945 Offset: 00012a5b

The KERNEL32.DLL file is a 32-bit dynamic link library file that is found in Windows. The KERNEL32.DLL file handles memory management, input/output operations, and interrupts.

I was unable to recreate the error on any test machine but with som help from visitors I managed to narrow it down to the prototype.js library. We directed them to some others sites using the library and shure enough, those sites were chrashing as well!

I really need to keep prototype or else I have to refactor massive ammounts of code! But it's really hard trying to find what part of prototype causes these crashes when I cant recreate it myself! And I cant find any information about this problem when googling for it!

Note: The site have had more than 2 million unique visitors sense we implemented the Prototype JavaScript Framework and only 6 visitors have reprted problems!

If someone has heard of this before. Please leave a comment!!!

My lead right now: [Rails-spinoffs] Re: IE 6 SP1 crashes on pages with Scriptaculous - SOLVED

OK. It is a Browser Helper Object BHO found in some Dictionary software that triggers the crash! Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Oxford Advanced Genie have this plugin (that translates words on the page) made by the Danish company textWare (that don't seem to exist anymore). Removing the BHO or simply disabling third-party browser extenstions does the trick.

But I'm not satisfied with this, I really don't want to build sites on top of a framework that can crash the entire browser, even though that only happens with some perhaps very badly written BHOs. I still have a hard time reproducing the error myself, hopefully I can contact some visitor that experieced it again and find out exactly at what line i prototype it occurs!

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Amazon Web Services

"Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that." - Business Week: Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet

Actually Quite fantastic services to use for small projects and companies that need reliable solutions that can scale to the infinite! I only have used Amazon Simple Storage Service (s3) so far. And tested one of the Alexa Web Services so far... works well!

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Adobe Kuler

New from Adobe Labs! A color blender / swatch generator in Flash! It's pretty good but it Lacks an Undo function... it's pretty easy to fuck everything up having to start over... I still prefer colorblender.com. The Ajax interfax actually feels more solid than the Flash one on Kuler.

Also check out The color palette generator - That takes an uploaded image and creates a palette from it!
Color Jack is pretty nice too!

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I like like.com

Alpha released Like.com offers visual fashion search. It seems to work quite well! The company behind the Site, Riya, had a search product for face recognition... not quite as profitable as this shopping search tool has the potential to be!

The real interesting bit is when you can search for products that look LIKE products worn by celebrities! On the site right now there's just a few examples but the word is that in the future you will be able to upload your own pictures.
Celebrities will get even more sponsored clothes and jewellry in the future!!!

Who will buy the company?
Yahoo really ought to! They need an edge over Google and they already own flickr! So why not connect Like.com search to Flickr.com? That would be really sweet!!!


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