Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I wrote a Chrome extension for loading revelation password files in a browser action popup. It’s called revelation helper and is probably of no interest to anyone other than me.

I ended up using lots of new web technologies including:

• A content script with cross-origin XHR to load my password file from Dropbox.
• XHR with an arraybuffer response to get the binary password file.
• localStorage holds a copy of the password file.
• A native client module decrypts and unzips the password file. tomcrypt and zlib were found in naclports.
• New flexbox is used for the UI layout.

Aside from a couple small NaCl related hiccups that I was able to resolve with some web searches, everything worked pretty easily and the documentation was pretty good.

Elliot just landed support for buttons on the top left corner. If you’re running Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid with a gnome theme with buttons on the left, you should see this the next time Chromium updates.

Over the winter break, my brother and step-sister were playing a the iPhone game Drop7[1] a lot. Since I own an Android phone, I wasn’t able to play the game on my phone.

So I decided to write the game myself. It’s just a webpage, so you can play if from Safari, Mobile Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or the Android browser. I call it Drop Factor. The game play is based on the hardcore mode of Drop 7.

It’s build using Javascript and canvas (the platform of the future, I’m told). You can grab the source on github.

[1] I think it’s based on the flash game chain factor.

Here are the slides from my talk. I gave the presentation in Chrome, so the slides may not work in all browsers (the svg syntax may be webkit only).

I think a video will be posted in a few days.

I had a good time at the conference. Thanks to the UIUC ACM chapter for inviting me to talk!

I’ll be at my alma mater to speak at the ACM Reflections|Projections Conference.

I’m going to be telling some stories about Google Chome and how the multiprocess architecture and sandbox lead to some interesting technical problems.

The schedule hasn’t been posted yet, but the conference runs from the evening of Oct 16 to Oct 18. If you’re around, swing by and say hi.

As Darin mentioned on chromium-dev, Chromium no longer uses a forked copy of WebKit. We now pull directly from svn.webkit.org and all changes to WebCore will be upstreamed before being pulled into Chromium.

This is great news because

• It forces Chromium developers to contribute more to the WebKit project and write better cross platform patches.
• Cross platform code in WebCore will get reviewed by WebKit folks.
• Updating the version of WebKit that Chromium uses will be easier.