Year: 2002

Clemens Vasters weighs in on the current WSDL is too <…> debate:

Hard or not hard — can we agree on “It’s just not enough” ? 🙂 My main problem with WSDL is that it tries to do 2 things (message contract and transport mapping), while it should do 3 things (message contract, service contract and transport mapping), hnowever at the same time, one thing (WSDL) shouldn’t do all these 3 things altogether but leave them two 3 separate things: A message contract definition language (defines soap:Body content), a service contract definition language (soap:Header) and a “web services binding language” that maps messages combined with services to transports.

I definately would not mind three straightforward description languages (MCDL, SCDL, and WSBL) if they were easy to use (with boilderplates or whizzy programs), solved more problems than WSDL does, and were easy to use.  I think Greg Reinacker’s earlier point that schemas are important is true too.

Welcome to As the Web Services Turn.

Timothy Appnel at O’Reilly Web Services DevCenter ponders the current (poor) state of RSS feed quality.  He covers some basics about RSS as well as things that can be done to improve its effectiveness.

This is classic.  I tried installing OpenMosix on two machines the other day.  I read the docs so I could have done it by hand, but I was lazy, so I .RPM’d it.  I rebooted, selected the OpenMosix kernel.  It did not boot.  I was a little confused because the bootloader seemed to think that my hard drive was ext2fs, but in both cases it’s ext3fs.  The new release solves this problem.  From the change notes:

The most important bug that was fixed in this release is the ext3/initrd problem, which caused machines with ext3 filesystems to not boot. This release compiles and runs with gcc-3.2. The value of HZ was reverted to 100 until the userspace utilities get modified. Makefile changes include openMosix version reporting and minor code cleanups. The /proc interfaces now work with fast machines. Bugs that are still present include a locking problem which occurs when using SMP and /dev/shm, and the reported problem with ln and /mfs.

How cool is that, my problems are solved.  I think it’s time to snag some new .RPMs and see what happens.

ONLamp: The SSH Crypotsystem.  A good intro for newbies. [via OSDir]

I’m in the middle of catching up on overnight news, and I have one news item reported in two completely different ways.  There was a fire at the network operations center at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.  From The Register:

With the fire “about the largest stock of hardcore pornography, illegally downloaded CD’s, movies and hacked / cracked software (applications and games) will also be turned into, er, ‘digital ashes’”, he notes.

Now Slashdot also covered the fire, choosing to focus on the losses suffered by the Debian development team.  UT happend to host several machines for the Debian project.  Here’s a snippet of their coverage:

Around 08.00 CET today the University of Twente Network Operations Center, which amongst other things hosts a SURFnet PoP as well as security.debian.org and non-us.debian.org, caught fire.

Here is the closing paragraph from The Register’s coverage:

This perceived misuse of Internet resources caused former Dutch education minister Loek Hermans to comment: “It would be nice if the students at Twente University would use their fast connections for information and education purposes, instead of downloading huge amounts of porn.”

I think that this was a bit of bad reporting, a chance to take a pot shot at p2p file trading and the RIAA.  A lot was lost in this fire.  Computers, infrastructure, buildings, and The Register is focused on the loss of illegal porn and music.  I’m normally amused by The Register’s tounge-in-cheek coverage, but I don’t think I was amused this morning.  Allow me to close.  I don’t know if you see it in that last quote or not.  He’s wishing that TU’s internet connection could be used for education and information, and Debian is mourning the loss of several boxen hosted at TU.

I wish I could smack the guy and say, “IT WAS!  IT WAS!”

I digress.  Here’s some coverage of the Debian servers involved (from Wichert Akkerman):

At around 8 this morning (local time) a fire started in the
computing facilities of Twente University. This affects Debian, since
on of our servers (satie) is hosted there. At this moment it seems
very likely that the machine can not be recovered from the fire.

The following services are currently down as a result of this:

  security.debian.org
  non-us.debian.org
  nm.debian.org
  qa.debian.org

We are working to restoring these services on another machine and
hope to have things in mostly working order by tomorrow. Security
advisories are still available at http://www.debian.org/security/

Mark Pilgrim:

By looking at the sites I currently read in my homegrown news aggregator, looking them up in the blogging ecosystem and seeing which sites they link to, weighing them slightly by popularity (based on the natural log of their incoming links) but also dividing by the number of other sites they link to (because a midlist site that only links to a handful of people is more relevant than a popular site that links to 100), and filtering out sites that don’t have RSS feeds (plus a few I already know I don’t want to read), I came up with a list of recommended new reading.

You can point his project, NewDoor, to your blog or links page.  His code is GPL’d, and can be found here: newdoor-1.0.tgz.

Simon Fell:

Is WSDL too hard? In response to Greg Reinacker’s comments I didn’t say WSDL is hard, I said its cumbersome and unproductive. Come on, its just angle brackets how hard can it be ??

I was gonna quote Greg’s post directly, but Simon’s got it.

This is a case of some interesting role reversal.  I went ot a friend’s house tonight after work to install a new cd burner.  The burner installed quite easily (Dell’s new desktop tower case is extremely easy to work in), and soon we were off to install the old burner that hadn’t worked correctly at her work so that she could transfer data back and forth over CD’s.  We took the old burner (HP8200 series external USB) over to her work and it preceeded to cause all kinds of problems.  I got a little Win2k bootup BSOD, then uninstalled the drivers/software.  This, of course, also somehow killed the drivers for the NIC, which is a really bad thing because she uses a client/server POS/inventory system.  I did manage to get everything up and running again.

After everything was done, she asked if I wanted the malfunctioning burner.  She used that nasty “if you don’t take it I’m just going to throw it out” line.  Of course I took it with me.  I’m like the Humane Society of random computer parts.  I have more crap floating around here because I can’t bear to throw away a working (or semi-working) piece of equipment.  I took it home, and for personal amusement I powered the burner up and plugged it into my Via Eden motherboard (running Red Hat 8.0), and rebooted.  My thought was that perhaps, as an off chance, Anaconda would pick it up on the reboot and it might possibly work.

I was a little dissapointed when no new hardware was found during the reboot.  After it booted, I did throw in Disk 1 of the Red Hat 8.0 distro just to amuse myself.  Amazingly, the CD-ROM automounted, a window popped up with the contents of the CD, and I was asked if I wanted to run the Autorun script or not.  How freaky is that?  It just worked.  Isn’t that how things are supposed to work under windows?

Linux on the desktop +1

Update: Oh yeah, it burns, too.

I hear from Freshmeat that GCC 3.2.1 is out.  There are a few bugfixes in the release, most significantly to IA-32 and x86-64.  You can look at a list of changes, release criteria, or you can snag it from your local mirror.

Jeremy Zawodny’s coworker Michael Radwin has some great coverage of ApacheCon 2002.

Anthill is the logical progression of the Ant build tool, and could be considered similar to Gump for a single project.  It makes automated building, testing, and deployment, and makes the stats easy to visualize.  Here are the changes to this version:

A build status indicator has been added to the main page. Now you can see whether the last build of any project succeeded or failed right on the main Anthill page. Tagging the source repository can be configured to happen always, only on successful builds, or never. The build email messages can now be customized based on a template. JVM properties can be configured for when Anthill invokes Ant. For example, the initial and max heap sizes can be set. Ant 1.5.1 is now included in the distribution of Anthill. There are also many bugfixes.

This is interesting.  Simple Web Services Framework is an open source project written in Java that is focused on giving you more control over plumbing and stuff like that:

Simple is a Java framework for the development of web services. The API provides a highly concurrent fully featured HTTP server for serving resources such as files and directories and also provides utilitys for compontent loading similar to Java Servlets. The component loading facility provides a similar service model and lifecycle to that of Java Servlets. Components can be loaded and linked to specific URL patterns from remote locations using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI).

Simple differs from the Java Servlet API in that it provides extension to the server and services at a lower level. It introdices the concept of a protocol handler which can be implemented and used for management of services requested.

It looks like something in between RMI and SOAP web services.  Hmm…

Mark Mazzetti at Slate on his experience mingling with the military in order to cover the pending war:

Thus begins media boot camp. For seven days, 58 journalists from 31 news organizations are training for war—or, at least as much of the war as the Pentagon will allow us to see. If the Bush administration actually proceeds with a war against Saddam Hussein, the Defense Department is planning to “embed” journalists with military units before they head into Iraq. So for the first time ever, the military is training reporters en masse for the rigors of life in a combat zone. [via Dan Rosenbaum: Over the Edge]

Russell Beattie is going to see Cirque du Soleil tonight.  I’ve seen Cirque several times over my life, and it’s a wonderful thing.  Enjoy.

DPReview reports that Pretec (an excellent supplier of CompactFlash cards) has upped the ante:

Pretec Electronics Corp. has announced three new high capacity Compact Flash cards. Previously their largest capacity had been 640 MB, these new cards widen their range considerably. The 1.5 GB and 3.0 GB are CF Type II, the 2.0 GB is CF Type I. These new cards are all larger than anything else on the market, the 3.0 GB card will no doubt be of special interest to digital SLR photographers who’s cameras continue to create larger and larger files as the manufacturers increase resolution year on year.

I’m sure that they’ll be expensive in the beginning, but all things come down in price.  This will become a neccesity when 11, 13, and 25 megapixel cameras become commonplace.

Kyle Hasselbacher wrote an article on Kuro5hin that seemed curious at the very least.  He has set up an automatic (pgp/gnupg) key signer:

A Robot CA is an automated key signer. Conceived by Phil Zimmermann, the robot’s signature indicates only that the user’s email address is correct, not that the name on the key correctly identifies the user. Given a key signed by the Robot CA, you can be sure that the email address on it really can read email encrypted with that key. This casual verification can be used as part of a larger scheme to make encryption easier for users who wouldn’t otherwise benefit from it.

I’m writing about the Robot CA because I’ve created one.

If this interests you, I’d suggest reading the article, otherwise it’s an interesting microthought.

I pointed out Simon Fell’s TCPTrace to Rogers Cadenhead (of Workbench fame) last night.  It is a great little utility that allows you to view the XML traveling over the wire if you’re trying to debug XML-RPC or SOAP web services.  It totally saved me from trying to hurl a computer across the room, and hopefully it will save others too.  Simon has also released PocketSOAP, a lightweight win32/pocketpc SOAP implementation, as well as PocketXML-RPC and other great tools.

David Johnson pointed out BasicPortal sometime between when I went to bed and when I woke up:

The goal of this project is to leverage a combination of several of the Apache Foundation’s Jakarta projects into a simple vertical sample application that contains the functionality common to 80% of web projects — we let developers customize the last 20%.

The BasicPortal project should allow high developer productivity (of several modules per day per developer) and be KISS; simple to teach and be comprised accepted of good practices (best practices).

I found this article at #RootPrompt.org, so you can bet it’s *nix-centric.  I particularly like the concept presented under the heading ‘Avoid The Cursed Language:’

It should be a crime to teach people C/C++.

This isn’t an attack on the language itself (although there are plenty). The problem is that people use it to write high level applications. People who barely understand the language are writing millions of lines of code with it. Code that will one day run our electric shavers and lawn mowers and air traffic control systems.

An interesting observation.  I won’t call it right, I won’t call it wrong.

Brent Simmons is implementing a weblog editor to the next version of NetNewsWire Pro:

Here’s a screen shot of the weblog editor that’s going into the pro version of NetNewsWire.