Year: 2002

CNet/Declan McCullagh: “WASHINGTON–A proposal to let copyright owners hack into and disrupt peer-to-peer networks will be revised, a congressional aide said Wednesday. “

Alec French, an aide to bill author Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., defended his boss’ ideas but acknowledged that some critics had made reasonable points about the controversial proposal.

“He plans to significantly redraft the bill to accommodate reasonable concerns before reintroduction in the 108th (Congress),” French said during an afternoon event at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Ahh, Mr. French’s first name is Alec.

I snagged AXIS: Next Generation Java SOAP last night at Border’s.  It looks like a good book that will go into a little more depth than the online stuff.  The only problem that I see with the book is that all of the examples and hints are in a DOS/Windows based format with no mention of running Axis on *nix at all (that I have found).  I have a strange feeling that most production Axis installations would most likely be on a *nix-based system, so I would have at least mentioned it somewhere.

I could be wrong, it could be right there in front of me and I haven’t noticed.

Russell Beattie has discovered BNF.  At times I’d like to forget it, but it has its use.

Linux Today: Red Hat’s takin’ a road trip.  Here’s the tour site, there’s the journal (though no RSS), and over there you’ll find the planned tour stops.  It looks like I’m scheduled to work during all three of the tour stops in my area, but I might be able to leave work early to hit the November 1 date.  We shall see.

XML-RPC is Not Dead Yet (Part II)

Charles Cook has released a new version of XML-RPC.NET:

I’ve just uploaded version 0.6.0 of XML-RPC.NET. This contains the changes listed below. I’ve not yet updated the docs. This will take another week or two.

• Added XmlRpcProxyGen class to dynamically create a proxy object from an interface, i.e. makes hand-coding of proxies unnecessary in most cases. bettyapp sample changed to illustrate this.
• Can now use an interface to define XML-RPC methods. Can use the same interface to implement both server and client. MathService changed to illustrate use of interface.
• Default for XML-RPC request and response XML documents is now no explicit encoding, i.e. implicitly UTF-8. Previously the encoding was explicitly specified as UTF-8.
• Added Encoding property to XmlRpcClientProtocol to set explicit encoding on XML-RPC request and response XML documents.
• Added Proxy property to XmlRpcClientProtocol.
• Fixed UserAgent property of XmlRpcClientProtocol.
• Fixed parsing of double type to be culture independent.
• Fault response XML document now generated in same way as ordinary response, i.e. will be in same format and encoding.

[Via Brad Wilson, The .NET Guy]

PocketSOAP 1.4 Beta is out.  Slurp it while it’s hot.

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TSClient offers a Gnome2 interface for invoking rdesktop, an RDP (Terminal Services) client for XWindows.  It offers a fairly pretty interface that works a lot like Windows’ Remote Desktop dialog. [via freshmeat]

Clemens Vasters:

After toying around with various RSS/RDF feeds over the past few days (I am doing something in that area, but I am not yet ready to say what), my conclusion was that regular expressions are the only way to parse them. It really seems that RSS != XML. Sad.

Sometimes well formed XML does not exactly mean usable XML.

The Register: Via has ultra small PC mobo – now, where do you put it?

How true.

Will Cox:

I’m worth a million in prizes

It seems that developers everywhere are scrambling to take care of the RSS bandwidth issue.  That’s awesome.

RSS Validator: Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim have teamed up to tame the RSS feeds.  We got a sneak peek of the RSS Validator at Web Services DevCon East, but it’s great to see it live.  My feed validates, how about yours?

Jeremy Zawodny has figured out his problems with threading in MySQL on FreeBSD:

If you compile your own MySQL server on FreeBSD and link with the LinuxThreads library, make sure to compile with the -DHAVE_BROKEN_REALPATH option.

The short version is that FreeBSD’s realpath() isn’t thread-safe. That causes badness with LinuxThreads on FreeBSD, because MySQL uses lots of relative paths and globally shared file descriptors may end up pointing to all the wrong places. I’ll explain in more detail if I get a chance.

XML-RPC is Not Dead Yet

Rogers Cadenhead:

I had a chance this past week to evaluate Apache XML-RPC, an open source Java class library for XML-RPC programming.

It’s a nicely designed library that makes it trivial to create an XML-RPC server or software that makes XML-RPC calls. Remote methods are called in a manner comparable to calling any other method in Java — XML-RPC and networking are handled by the library.

Once you have figured out which Java data types to use in remote method calls and remote methods, described in this table, it’s easy to add XML-RPC support to a Java class.

Keith Devens is working on version 3.0 of his PHP XML-RPC library.  Here’s what he’s thinking about so far:

I’m making it even easier to build servers. You may be able to do it in one line of code, we’ll see

Include SSL support. I’ve gotten this request a few times. I’m planning to include a separate and optional method to make a connection which will use cURL and support SSL. Does it make sense to also support HTTP authentication?

You should never have to call XMLRPC_prepare yourself again.

I’m probably also going to include my “method not found” method, just to save you from having to write your own. Not that it’s hard, but it’s only about 3 additional lines in the library.

And yes, XML-RPC still matters.  Even in a world of SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and buckets of other acronyms and standards.  Sometimes you just want to get something really simple done.

Polar Opposites

Today/this evening I did two things in addition to homework that appear on the surface to be polar opposites.  First, I bought Java Development with Ant by Erik Hatcher and that crazy guy Steve Loughran [blog].  Second, I started playing with WSDL.EXE, which generates stubs for C# code from a WSDL file.

I thought that while I was banging my head against the wall getting Apache Axis to behave, I would learn how to use Ant properly.  At the same time I’ve got some ideas that just can’t wait, so I’m going to be fiddling around in C# for awhile too.  It’s damn near Java anyway. (wink wink, nudge nudge)

Oh yeah, I also snagged a 512MB PC-133 DIMM for $49.  How cool is that?

WebServices.Org points to WSDL Explorer by IBM AlphaWorks.  The WSDL explorer is available online here.  Here’s a blurb from the pointer:

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Explorer is a Web application that displays WSDL files, generates views of operations, allows invocation of operations, and allows viewing of sample message flow. It enables users to compare and contrast Web services without going through the time and trouble of importing them into a heavy development tool. WSDL Explorer provides the ability to browse WSDL files, and it offers immediate access to Web service operations.

Doug Kaye:

Iterative Improvement. In a web-services world it’s often less expensive to modify a service than it is to redesign and reprint a paper form. Does this mean we can relax the usual fanatacism for the top-down design of our business processes? Can we actually plan for a more iterative design approach? In terms of version control, adding an output XML element or attribute is almost always backwards compatible, something that’s been elusive with older technologies. Just something I’ve been thinking about.

Think about that for a minute.

Keith Davens:

Joel Spolsky:

Most of the RSS subscribers are whacking me every hour, which is actually costing me cash money in excess bandwidth charges. How can I set it up so they only visit once a day? Is this an RSS option? I rarely post more than once or twice a day. Maybe I should change the RSS feed to just include headlines with links.

This is why I click “check all feeds” in my own aggregator when I feel like catching up. It runs for about a minute checking my 80+ feeds, and then displays all changes to me. I think it’s rude to be hitting someone’s site every hour automatically for no reason.

I’ve modified the way I do things so that I try to take a few minutes break from whatever I’m doing, if possible, about once an hour to catch up on my RSS feed.  I guess I’m a freak.  I use Radio’s RSS aggregator, so I’m stuck with aggregating once an hour since I’m on the road a lot.

I’m a freak, though I understand about bandwidth issues.

RSS-RPC?  RSS Services?

The thing that bothers me is that I have to download everyone’s entire RSS file in order to parse it and figure out what’s new based on timestamps and stuff.  Wouldn’t an interactive RSS make a lot of sense?  Some way to ping someone’s weblog via XML-RPC or SOAP, pass in a date/time, and get back an array of entries in well-formed RSS of only the new entries.