10:10am Unbelievable, already March. I just counted how many days I worked on this project since November 23rd and it has only been 15 full days of work, but working only on Mondays it feels like an eternity. The last few Mondays I did spend only a few hours as I was working on a side project that now has been released: http://vault.ncaa.com. And next week I’ll be off to two conferences in a row, first 360Flex followed by MountainWest RubyConf. Hopefully I will be able to put in quite some hours to move the project forward.
1:36pm I’m investigating opening and hosting my own online store. I did play around with the potionstore but of course there are a few challenges specific to my setup. I want to to create a license generator in Ruby that generates a license that can be validated in Flex/Actionscript. And for this to work I have a few technical issues to solve notably around private/public key encryption. First I need a Base32 encoding and decoding library and I didn’t find any so I went to adapt one I found for .Net. Note it’s not standard compliant which is not an issue, but I also found out that it doesn’t support non-us characters which will be an issue. But I still have a few larger technical aspects to validate, so I move on.
4:14pm So I moved on but got bit again by my Base32 implementation, so I moved on to a Base64 implementation which results in longer license keys which can not be entered by typing but must be cut/pasted.
Now I need to wrap that license generator in Ruby code, so that it can be used by the potionstore.
5:55pm Got a wrapped version now, will move to Panera then will test how it works.
7:14pm While testing the new license generator it seem that it now fails to submit order to Google checkout. So back to the drawing board.
7:34pm By looking at the PotionStore source code I found a way to work around the license key issue. Yea! Seems to work pretty nicely. Now I will see how to integrate with Paypal.
8:45pm That’s effectively more involved as I expected. And I cannot seem to pass step 4 of the sandbox signup, I get the message “NOTE: If the form shows no fields in error, a processing error may have occurred that cannot be corrected at this time. Please return later, and then try again to sign up or upgrade.”. Arrggg! All right, I’ll head home. Then I’ll play with setup one of the Rails server to serve the licenses or maybe I’ll go back to the app and add some more details.
9:41pm Home! I just realized that the potionstore has some clear instruction to setup a test account for the Paypal sandbox…and that of course worked. Well payment still don’t work, I’m getting a ’This transaction cannot be processed due to an invalid merchant configuration’ error. I’m using one of the default business accounts, but they don’t seem to have enabled Website Payments Pro feature…
10:34pm That’s it for today.
