NDT-DEV email list created

[Nathan Kinkade <>]

Hi everyone,

This is my first message to this list.  I just started working with
the Measurement Lab team at OTI a couple months ago.  One thing we're
working on is to put together a javascript wrapper around the Flash
NDT client to make it a bit easier and more flexible for people to
integrate the Flash client into various sites (originally written by
Collin Anderson [1]).  The code can be found here:

https://github.com/opentechinstitute/ndt_js/

And a working example can be found here:

http://files.opentechinstitute.org/~kinkade/ndt_js/

As most of you are probably already aware, the Flash plugin in Firefox
and Safari on Linux and MacOS is woefully old and apparently cannot
reliably measure throughput at higher speeds.  The current Flash NDT
client already includes code to detect these bad Flash environments,
however there is currently no way to communicate that (effectively) to
javascript.  I've made a couple small changes to the flash-client
ActionScript which just set two new variables that are then exposed to
javascript.  One variable is simply a true/false flag to the
javascript that the Flash client detected (or not) a bad Flash
runtime.  The second variable is simply the prescribed message to
display to the user when a bad runtime is detected.  If you load the
above working example in Firefox on Linux, you should see the error.
The patch to the flash-client ActionScript can be found here:

http://files.opentechinstitute.org/~kinkade/flash-client.patch

The other tiny change in the patch, which isn't really necessary, but
perhaps useful, is to enable debugging by default, which allows
javascript to access and possibly display, debug messages,
facilitating development.

I apologize in advance if this isn't the proper way/channel/method to
submit patches for proposed features or bugs.  If not, then let me
know and I'll be happy to go through the preferred process.

Thanks,

Nathan

[1] https://github.com/collina/ndt_js