ctshryock

After the initial release of Showtimes I got buried in work as well as started digesting the view programming guide. A new app idea caught my attention and it required me to learn a lot more about custom views.

Last friday I had lunch with a friend, and after lunch I had the notion to fire up Showtimes again. I fired it up when I got back to my laptop and was shocked to see... well nothing really. the app launched, I entered my zip as I had thousands of time before, and it went to work. The problem was it never stopped working. It had never taken that long.

I fired up xcode and opened up the project, made a clean build, and examined the logs as it ran.

zero movies found

yeah that would be a problem. i checked the url that was generated, and there are plenty of movies...

so i started logging the parse errors and checked out the first one.

error at line 112

line 112:

...><\/script>

wtf is that "\" doing there? crashing my parsing that's what.

with some tweaking, i've written some safety code that bandages this problem. I don't like writing band-aids, but it was necessary to fix the immediate problem. Showtimes has been tested to run better now, and upgrade to 0.7.2b is fatally crashing and dead to me for now.

I don't know much about Google internals, seeing how I don't work for them or personally know any one who does, but I do know they use a lot of python. How do I know? I don't know really... just seems to be common knowledge or something.

This morning I did some brief reading on Google App Engine which sounds really promising, especially for people who have great ideas but don't really have the infrastructure to support them if they grew, or just don't have the knowledge of what infrastructure they would need if it grew.

the best part would be it's all python (for now). and apparently, allows you to use other pure-python frameworks like my favorite django

so why aren't i using it right now? writing new hot code for google app engine? well besides the fact that it's a limited sign up right now, i'm really busy. insert other worthless excuse here. i am on the waiting list though...