As an Atlassian community developer, do you have some valuable hints for other developers? Have you been frustrated because you could dramatically improve a page in the Atlassian documentation with one quick change or addition? Have you contributed copious comments to the documentation, and wondered when the technical writers will ever get round to incorporating them into the page?

Now's your chance! We're inviting community developers to contribute to the Atlassian documentation. Details are on the Atlassian News blog.

As you may recall, in March this year, Atlassian publically announced the commencement of the 20% Time Experiment. Since then, we have been keeping you up to date how it works, and what people have been doing.

Dmitry Baranovskiy, a Developer on the Confluence team, has been spending his 20% time on a JavaScript library for creating vector graphics. In August, Dmitry released Raphaël -- the first 20% project unrelated to an Atlassian product to be released to the public. At the 2008 Web Directions South conference held last week in Sydney, Dmitry delivered a presentation, related to his work, and was interviewed by SitePoint's Andrew Tetlaw on the beginnings and details of the library.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

SitePoint: Right, I thought my first question should be: why did you write Raphaël? What inspired you to write it?

I was doing a FedEx project. Internally at Atlassian, we have FedEx Days when you are given the time to present a project you've been working on. [...] So I thought I'd do something the programmers might not know anything about, and because I've had experience with SVG before, it made sense to work with SVG. But, as a front end developer, I'm concerned about creating something that only works in Firefox, so I wanted to create a bridge for VML on IE. My original project was to create a charting application, like a simple line chart. I quickly knocked it up in a day and a half from scratch, showed it, but it didn't win anything. It didn't impress people.

SP: Not even a little bit?

Oh, maybe a little bit, but not in general. So I left it for a while. Then we started our 20% projects (just like Google). I decided to pick up this project and extend it a little bit. I got rid of the charting part and turned it into a generic drawing library. Just a bridge between SVG and VML to enable me to do more cool stuff without worrying about browser compatibility.

So at the next FedEx Day, I used this library to create a Skitch-like application. You could take a picture and add things like arrows and ellipses. It even saved the image, but obviously that's not the hardest part.

Then I started working more on this 20% project. To be honest, I spent more than one day a week: I worked with my laptop on the train -- one hour to work and one hour back -- two days a week in general, for about a month. Then I decided that it was good enough to release, because it's better to do so before another developer releases the same thing. So, I released it in the middle of August.

I was stunned by the feedback. I didn't expect it, to be honest, because I wrote about it on my blog and I usually get about 20 hits per day; but after it was released and made it to the front page of Delicious and Reddit, I got about 8,000 hits per day. It chewed through my bandwidth and I had to create a new domain. It actually started costing me money!

To find out more about technical challenges Dmitry faced, like cross-browser compatibility, you can read the full interview. And if you're super keen, you can also follow Dmitry's personal blog to get the latest on what he's up to.

I expect that as 20% time continues to give our developers an outlet for innovation outside of the realm of Atlassian's existing products, more projects like Raphaël will make their way into the wild. As a relatively young Atlassian, this excites me greatly, as it's yet another reminder of how cool this place is to work at, and gives me instant bragging rights in any tech-related conversations that could occur in a social context (believe me, it happens!). Stay tuned for more updates!

During my latest stint as the JIRA Developer on Support, I came across an issue where a customer reported that the Remember Me functionality of JIRA wasn't working - but only for some users. In his instance, he had two users: wmlalai and lagonil - for now, let's call them B1 and B2. For B1, the Remember Me functionality worked as expected; for B2, not so.

Curious to the cause of this problem, I loaded up the customer's data in a local instance, and sure enough I was able to reproduce it. Monitoring the cookies within the browser to make sure they were being saved correctly, I noticed that upon the first login, the cookie was present in the browser for both users. When I closed the browser and restarted it, the cookie again was still there. But, when I navigated to JIRA, B2's cookie was being deleted. This was accompanied by an exception in JIRA's logs:

2008-03-07 15:46:32,470 http-8090-Processor2 DEBUG [atlassian.seraph.cookie.EncryptedCookieEncoder] Invalid password cookie submitted, trying insecure

java.lang.RuntimeException: javax.crypto.IllegalBlockSizeException: Input length must be multiple of 8 when decrypting with padded cipher

	at com.atlassian.seraph.util.EncryptionUtils.decrypt(EncryptionUtils.java:77)

	at com.atlassian.seraph.cookie.EncryptedCookieEncoder.decodePasswordCookie(EncryptedCookieEncoder.java:43)

	at com.atlassian.seraph.auth.DefaultAuthenticator.decodeCookie(DefaultAuthenticator.java:393)

	at com.atlassian.seraph.auth.DefaultAuthenticator.getUserFromCookie(DefaultAuthenticator.java:245)

	at com.atlassian.seraph.auth.DefaultAuthenticator.getUser(DefaultAuthenticator.java:221)

Why would the cookie be the wrong length? I set a breakpoint in the DefaultAuthenticator.getUserFromCookie() method in Seraph, where the cookie is retrieved and decoded. When attempting to log in with B2, I observed the following value for the seraph.os.cookie:

lLaNPRBsPajwpMtCaoXPpImn

as compared to the actual value stored in the cookie in the browser:

lLaNPRBsPajwpMtCaoXPpImn>Ca7ic