Quite a varied week this week, though as the title suggests, it did involve some nightmares, and as the map should suggest it involved a bit of travel.

Supposedly my main focus was to get the web based admin interfaces for the revision apps sorted out. As I mentioned last week I found I was using the wrong version of a plugin so I tried using the right one and it worked better. As it happened I still wasn’t entirely happy with the interface offered so I’ve kept using my own form fields for some parts and used the defaults elsewhere. By the end of Monday I’d got enough of the admin interfaces done to declare them “finished” and then moved onto the next task. That task is to allow uploading of three large blocks of text and have the code parse the text to work out what the questions should be. This is to allow the teacher I’m working with to use his existing word documents to upload questions without having to make any changes. I got that nearly finished this week but got a bit sidetracked on a few other issues. I’m hoping to have that finished today and get a few other bits done so that I can have the whole first milestone finished this weekend.

On Tuesday I took a trip down to London. The main reason I was going was to meet the people at 7digital. The iPhone app I was working on earlier this year was for them so we decided that I should go to visit them and finally meet them in person. The meeting was fairly short but went well and we discussed a few of the features they’d like to get into the next version. The first version of the app is actually still in the review process for the app store (as far as I know) but hopefully it’ll get through soon.

While in London I also met up with the guy that I’ve been working on a chess app with. We discussed some of the features in the current version of the app and highlighted a few hopefully fairly simple steps that we can take to get the app to version 1.0 and ideally get me paid!

While on the trip to London I also had a play with Twitter’s OAuth support. Twitter have decided that Basic Auth is too insecure and leads to leakage of password and so everyone needs to use OAuth in the future. This is definitely a good idea but meant that I needed to change the way I was accessing Twitter with mapme.at. I found a fork of the main twitter4r library with OAuth support and managed to get it working quite easily in a small standalone script. When it came to incorporating this into mapme.at though I came across some issues. The first, very basic, script I modified worked fine but the next one gave me errors. After trying to find the problem over the course of a few days (while trying to do other work) I finally found the issue. The fireeagle library that I was using was “monkey patching” the OAuth library. Basically all it was doing was wrapping one method call so that it could change a few properties on the object that was returned. Unfortunately the fireeagle changes were based on an old version of the OAuth library and so ended up breaking the main OAuth library. Once I’d fixed that I had a few more issues as I remembered I had in the past made a few changes of my own to the twitter library, both by modifying the library in place and by monkey patching it in my own code. I ended up creating my own branch on github that has fixes in for broken friendship methods, an extra friendship method and a few other small fixes.