Chrome 21 Fail

Web devs beware: the just-released Chrome 21 now blocks mixed content. If you're serving a https page that loads anything over http, that insecure load is now blocked silently (a warning message appears in the console but the user sees nothing).

I'm pretty sure this change was the culprit.

And I'm not seeing a setting that can modify this behavior either.

Wasted a couple hours today trying to figure out why all our pages were broken. Yes, yes, it would be nice if we could serve everything over https, but there are a few resources we rely on that we just can't.

Update: this only happens for javascript files, not images.

Luke + Lucene 3.4.0

Ugh. It seems like every time Lucene gets updated lately something breaks. They've been making lots of API changes lately and if it's not a backward compatibility issue within Lucene itself, it's something else that depends on Lucene.

After rebuilding our indexes with Lucene 3.4.0 we discovered that we could no longer open them with Luke. All we'd get was a super helpful "unknown format version -3". This happens even when the index is built on 3.4.0 with an older Version flag.

And we're not the only ones: Issue 46 and Issue 47.

So... Yay for open source. Here's a working version of Luke for Lucene 3.4.0: lukeall-3.4.0.jar.

Here's a patch for the Luke 3.3.0 branch if you wish to build it yourself: lucene-3.4.0-support.patch. You'll need to replace all the lucene 3.3.0 libraries with matching ones from lucene 3.4.0.

On a side note, after using github it feels so... archaic to be using something else. It would have been so much simpler for me to share this if I could've just forked it.

Undocumented YUI TabView Feature

We've been using dojo at work for a while now but bugs in its UI components have really prevented us from doing everything that we wanted with it. Lately, I've started switching our code over to use YUI instead and have been surprised at how easy it's been.

One of the most critical components for us is the TabView component. While the docs for YUI are generally pretty good, I couldn't figure out how to display a "Loading..." image when dynamically pulling in data for a tab until I stumbled over this undocumented gem. Suppose you declare your tabs like so:

<div id="myTabs" class="yui-navset">
  <ul class="yui-nav">
    ...
  </ul>
  <div class="yui-content">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

Then adding the following CSS rules will automatically do the trick:

#myTabs .loading {
  background-image: url(/images/loading.gif);
  background-position: center center;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
#myTabs .loading * {
  display:none;
}

I stumbled over this while checking out the examples for the Bubbling Library's Dispatcher YUI plug-in, which in turn solves the problem of executing JavaScript in the dynamically loaded content.