Week #805
We wrote about the Old Icelandic Month (kinda) of Aukanætur. This is a short 4 to 10 day week (depending if it is a leap week year) to keep the 12 months of 30 days each starting on the same weekday.
It was a busy week, we touched on 9 different projects, sometimes all on the same day. It can be very exhausting, especially when we assumed a few of these were finishing. We’re really hoping that it is a transition period where some will be ending, others ramping-up, because we can’t have them overlap for too long!
On the PETALS project, we found a bug that’s been plaguing us for a while. It was not code related, but DNS. To setup the CNAMEs on Heroku we use Cloudflare, but somewhere deep in their settings we also had something checked that would drop our x-headers when referring http to https causing some infinite redirects. For the longest time we had that auto-forwarding turned off. It works on the dev server and we were chasing ghosts for a long time on production. This week we finally pushed some Single Sign-On code for Google and Microsoft. Those required https and it worked on dev. When we pushed to production, it failed over and over. For days we reset API keys for the services, but it was never a code problem. Once we finally stumbled on the x-headers being striped, that lead us to Cloudflare. One checkbox later it was all working again as intended!
For other projects this week we had to create a Hubspot syncing script, flash some custom camera firmware to get GPS working, looked into Gaussian splats, had another secret meeting to discuss JSON and rendering that output in XR, fixing bugs in a WebRTC client – which will probably come down to noise cancelling, and cleaned-up some SPSS and CSV exports to better match real survey data instead of database columns.
In between all that, we managed to watch some of the World Cup games.
Week #806
This week we managed to only spread ourselves over 7 projects, down two from last week.
We’re really trying to wrap-up two projects. With one, we need to debug some WebRTC echos. The issue is that we use the phone as your camera and mic and the TV as the playback speakers. Of course we always tested with headphones, but now without we’re getting some echoing feedback. That needs to get fixed before the customer will test it all. Then we can get the last round of bugs, fix them, then re-evaluate our roll in the project.
The other we’re just trying to get some basic API stuff working with some hardware cameras. Somehow we got in the middle between the manufacturer and the team building the backend portal. We’re trying to get ourselves out, but first we need this API working to add one last small GPS map position to the app. Then we need to re-evaluate our roll in that project.
Internally, we managed to get a few things done. We continue to work on our Newsletter badges (more on that later), we created a script to create a random forest of trees based on the Isny designs by Oti Aicher and continued to update our suite of camera apps in preparation for iOS27. We added the ability to make them shortcuts on the Lock Screen. We’re still tweaking some icons, but expect an update soon.
We also continued with our LED experiments for a client project (more on that later). Our end is going well, but we’re coördinating with another company and it is hard to get a straight answer out of them! The only responses we get are things like “When it’s all wired-up, we’ll know how many LEDs and lines we used”. Which makes it hard to plan for the power supply or software!