Well good news first..

The AES library i found worked…after adding a few custom functions to turn a string to and from a byte array. AND working out the format of each parameter. reading code, ugh!

So then I rush on to logging in. Catastrophic fail! Could not get a response from the server what so ever! I read that it  was possibly COMET…however surely this would have returned at least some headers. But no, either i get 404 or the request just ticks over and over. The ticking over is a symptom of COMET so maybe it is working? but i receive no data.

Sadly unless this gets resolved my MXit client is going to get handed in VERY unfinished. And this to me is a shame as I worked so hard in a month to get virtually nowhere.

Sad times.

Yes I’m miles behind, given that I’m only just on to the logon stage.

Sadly this gets harder becuase the password is encrypted using AES and ISO10126 padding, not to much of an issue for you C programmers. However in javascript its a whole differnet ball game.

After looking at the few dozon implimentations there is for javascript develpers, I picked one that produced a result that “looked” right. I will clearly test it with the example on the forum later on today to make sure. If it doesn’t then I really AM screwed

Oh well, it was ambitious but I shall not give in, I’ll just have to impliment the algorythm myself. Only issue with that is that I definatly wont finish the competition.

Sadly I’ve not been able to get much progress made in the last couple of weeks.

Pressures of getting a UI and back end tied together threw a spanner in the works. Distractions aswell didn’t help.

Also debugging javscript isn’t always easy. “Undefined” this and that is really not helpful. Although Air’s Introspector goes soem way to easing this. However it’s still difficult to realise in one hit, what function called the failing function and why it is failing. Take last night for example, My Cyclone.system.events object was undefined. Eventually I traced through and realised that the Cyclone object wasn’t fully compiled in memory before a reference was made to a property of it.

School boy error, perhaps but take this example.


Class Cyclone
{
public $events = new Events();
public $activation = new Activation();
}


if activation’s constructor references Cyclone’s events property, it will return undefined. Yes its a school boy error, but when your working in a mass of code that has no real concept of structure these things can happen

Will persist tonight I hope.

I really expected to get a lot done this weekend as it was a public holiday.

Sadly this wasn’t the case. I got a little done on the Saturday but I went paintballing on the Sunday, which was good fun, but the last thing I wanted to do when I got back battered and bruised was to work on the PC Client. Shame.
Monday was just as bad, still aching, I opted to watch a few movies whilst R&D some GUI stuff but ended up getting distracted by trying to get JQuery and ExtJs working in air. I did decided that JQuery is better though

…or should that be log on log off?

yes you guessed it, valid PID returned and now I can get to the login stage.

I feel oddly pleased after the hassle and issues I had the otherday. Looking like AIR might be a viable platform to write this.

I’m still concerned about the fact that javascript is single threaded, but I can use the HTTP protocol right? Thats also single threaded. Might be slow but do-able.

Wow, only started a few days ago and I get a mention in the competition round up! How cool.

I managed to populate my drop-downs with the language and country options and default them to the defaults returned from MXit.

Now to capture the user input for the captcha and send it to MXit. Seems things are starting to process in a single thread, meaning that I need to wait for one thing to finish before I can move on to the next. Implement a callback system somehow or event handler? Who knows. And in Javascript? Crikey!

Horaaah!

AIR + base64 images solved!

After some well earned sleep and some food, I woke this morning remembering that if i itterate over each character in the decoded string then use the charCodeAt() function i’d get the decimal value. This can then be written as one byte to a temporary file.

Bingo bango – one captcha image

Seems after stonking along writing my AIR application, I got to displaying the captcha on the screen.

Only problem is, AIR removed the Data:image/png URI mechanism all modern web browsers use. Writing the decoded binary to a file also seems to be a problem. I’ve spent the last two hours getting no where.

Me + Captcha = Sad