andrewlucking.com

I stumbled across a bit of a performance problem with FDTracer last week. While working in FlashDevelop I noticed that things were beginning to respond a little slowly. The problem gradually grew worse and my system resources manager clearly showed that some part of FD was the culprit. After a bit of digging around it was obvious that FDTracer was at the root of it all.

I happened to be listening to a Flash video stream in the browser while I was working and the video’s swf player was tracing out debug data every 10 milliseconds or so. After about a 1/2 hour of this my debug Flash Player’s log file had grown to many thousand lines and FDTracer was chugging to parse the contents.

Upon replacing a String concatenation or two with a StringBuilder routine FDTracer was once again humming along. The performance gains were pretty astounding and definitely taught me a lesson I won’t forget anytime soon.

Download FDTracer 0.3.1:
http://www.andrewlucking.com/code/fdtracer/

A patch was recently checked into the Mozilla codebase that marks bug 327181 “Improve error reporting for invalid-certificate errors” as Resolved Fixed. This bug significantly changes the way Mozilla will handle invalid certificates and as a result will hopefully make RMD redundant so earlier today I played around with a nightly build of Firefox 3.0 alpha (Minefield). My impression? I think the changes, while still rough around the edges, do a pretty good job of appeasing the various sides in the bad certificate handling saga.

The first thing you’ll notice when browsing to a website that presents an invalid security certificate is that the familiar mismatched domain error dialog is no more. Instead an in page Secure Connection Failed error is presented. Note that there is no way to temporarily accept the mismatch and visit the website:

Before websites that present invalid certificates can be visited the certificate must first be added to the new security exceptions list. The dialog for this list is intentionally buried in the Preferences / Options dialog:
Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Encryption > View Certificates > Servers -> Add Exception…

For current users of RMD I think it would be helpful to get your impressions of the changes and so I put together a little screencast of the new functionality in action. I encourage you to take a look and provide Mozilla with your feedback. Even better would be to download a recent build of Minefield and try it out for yourself.

Watch the overriding invalid certs screencast.

Version 0.2 of The FDTracer plugin for FlashDevelop 3 adds a couple of setting options:

Open Panel On Compile is the result of an improvement suggestion. When this option is selected the FDTracer panel will always be displayed after a compile completes.

Colour Warnings and Errors adds some colour to the trace statements. Warnings and errors generated by the Flash Player appear in orange and red fonts respectively.

Download FDTracer 0.2:
Download FDTracer 0.3:
http://www.andrewlucking.com/code/fdtracer/

Update:
Argh. I used version 0.2 all week before posting it last night and then this afternoon I came across a bug that was dropping digits that begin a trace statement (eg, trace(”1,2,3″); would display as “,2,3“). Version 0.3 should fix that silliness.