Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: January 2003

  • Gentile++

    Congrats to Sam and Sue.

  • Blosxom 1.0 and pyRuby?

    Here’s two birds with one stone.  So if you show up at PyCon, Sam, will you still be wearing your Perl shirt?

    Rael Dornfest: I’m thrilled to announce the 1.0 release of my Blosxom weblog app…. With the choice of dynamic or static rendering, Blosxom is at the point I’d hoped it’d be when it went 1.0.

    Now I have my first dillema. I want to do static rendering for scalability, but in accordance with the teachings of REST, I also want my URI to identify resources that can serve both GETs and POSTs.

    Meanwhile, the temptation to ditch Perl for Python is growing…

  • Back

    I’m back from Linux World.  I’m trying to simultaneously catch up on my RSS feeds, organize my notes and thoughts, and get some pictures organized.

  • Here I come…

    I’m out the door.

  • Off To Linux World

    I’m off to New York City in the morning.  I’m going to take a ferry into the city (there’s a ferry stop about a block from the Javits center).  Watch this space for news and updates about and from the show.

  • New Stuff from Apache

    Sam Ruby on new projects at Apache:

    James (from Jakarta), Cocoon and Web Services (both from XML).

    The Web Services project interests me, I’ll have to take a look at that later.

  • RIAA–

    Brad Wilson brings the good news:

    Hilary Rosen quits the RIAA! Could there be any better news today?

  • Parsing RSS At All Costs

    Mark’s second O’Reilly article is up:

    As I said in last month’s article, RSS is an XML-based format for syndicating news and news-like sites. XML was chosen, among other reasons, to make it easier to parse with off-the-shelf XML tools. Unfortunately in the past few years, as RSS has gained popularity, the quality of RSS feeds has dropped. There are now dozens of versions of hundreds of tools producing RSS feeds. Many have bugs. Few build RSS feeds using XML libraries; most treat it as text, by piecing the feed together with string concatenation, maybe (or maybe not) applying a few manually coded escaping rules, and hoping for the best.

  • XML Acronyms

    IASlash:

    My colleague at work just shared this link with me. The site has lots of great content around XML and this really cool top 100 list of XML related acronyms.

  • AMD @ Linux World

    CNet is reporting that AMD is hyping up their Opteron (stupid name for an awesome chip) at Linux World:

    “We’re here to support you, the open-source community,” Ruiz told the audience.

  • NewsForge Linux World Expo Coverage

    Roblimo is posting his thoughts about Linux World Expo over at NewsForge:

    For some reason an awful lot of hardware vendors that push Linux on servers seem to feel it’s just fine to have lots of Windows screens on the computers they use in their booths to run slide shows or demonstrate their products. Personally, I have always thought this was stupid. I actually asked a booth person for a company I will not name, “Does this mean you show Linux desktops at Windows-oriented shows?”

    It should be interesting.

  • Pay No Attention to the TrackBack in the Corner

    Okay.  I put together a really simple trackback implementation in Python last night.  I took a look at the trackback tech specs and have so far implemented the ping method.  The code below illustrates usage of the trackback library.

    import tblib
    tb = tblib.TrackBack("http://mt.develooper.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/17",
    "Python Test",
    "I'm testing my Python TracbBack implementation...",
    "http://postneo.com/2003/01/22.html#a1829",
    "Matt Croydon::Postneo")
    tb.ping()

    Here’s the output for the above code:

    200 OK
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
    <response>
    <error>0</error>

    The implementation does not know anything about auto-discrovery yet.  It also does not deal with error handling, it just prints out the response.  Future versions will handle both.  If you’d like to play, you can download the source: tblib-0.0.4.py.txt.

    In order to run a script similar to the example I provided (which pings a page on Ask’s weblog), you’ll have to rename it to tblib.py and place it in the directory of the calling script.  Once the library is polished, I’ll create a setup script so you can simply run python setup.py –install.

    As soon as I get the chance, I’ll complete the implementation and put together a command line client.  The program is released under the GPL.  Thanks go out to Mark for Dive Into Python and to the Python people for the excellent docs available online.

  • 12 Inch AlBooks In Stock

    MacNN reports:

    A MacNN reader notes that the Apple Store in Tysons Corner has the 12″ PowerBook in stock.

    Hmm.  I’ll have to take a (short) road trip to play with it.

  • My New Python Best Friends

    I’d like to give a quick shout out to a few of my favorite new Python modules:

    • httplib: The httplib example page has some excellent usage examples for both GET and POST methods.
    • urllib: urllib.urlencode is your friend if you need to encode a url for inclusion in a POST request.
    • urlparse: I started to parse and split up urls by hand using regular expressions and string manipulation.  Then I found urlparse.  It will take a url like http://postneo.com/projects/wapblog and turn it into a useful tuple: (‘http’, ‘postneo.com’, ‘/projects/wapblog’).  This improved my quality of life considerably, and makes POST requests via httplib possible.

    P.S. These libraries converge to make working with RESTful interfaces DUH-simple in Python.

  • RSS Feeds as Web Services

    Jeremy Allaire notes that there have been over 10,000 sightings of RSS “web services” spotted in the wild:

    As I’ve been reading and writing today I’ve come to a somewhat obvious conclusion:  there’s been an explosion of ‘web services’ in the past year, and it has nothing to do with SOAP, WSDL and such standards as described in the industry but with the ascending role of RSS and RDF as XML data and syndication formats.

    Jeremy has a point.  Another interesting tidbit from his post:

    Today’s count of RSS feeds from Syndic8.com:  10408 feeds
    Today’s count of SOAP APIs from xMethods.com:  275 APIs

    That’s a huge difference.

  • Programming in Klingon for Fanboys

    Kottke:

    Var’aq is a programming language for those that speak Klingon.

    Too.  Much.  Time.  On.  Hands.

  • Open Source Honeypots

    RootPrompt points to a Security Focus article on creating open source honeypots:

    Honeypots are an exciting new technology. They allow us to turn the tables on the bad guys, we can take the initiative. In the past several years there has been growing interest in exactly what this technology is and how it works. The purpose of this paper is to introduce you to honeypots and demonstrate their capabilities. We will begin by discussing what a honeypot is and how it works, then go into detail using the OpenSource solution Honeyd.

  • GLUE 4.0 beta 2

    Graham Glass:

    GLUE 4.0 beta 2 is due out later this week. it’s by far the most powerful and easy-to-use version so far, which is exciting. meanwhile, GAIA is chugging along nicely.

  • My Fab Facility Runs Linux

    CNet reports that IBM is retrofitting one of their fabrication facilities.  What does the server room of a fab facility like that look like?

    Server room holds over 1,700 1GHz-plus processors, 1.5 terabytes of memory and 110 terabytes of storage. Runs on Linux.

  • Interview With Stephen Wolfram

    O’Reillynet interviewed Stephen [evil genius] Wolfram:

    Stephen Wolfram is the creator of the popular Mathematica program, the author of A New Kind of Science, and a keynote speaker at O’Reilly’s upcoming Bioinformatics Technology Conference. Tim O’Reilly recently conducted a brief interview with Wolfram about his research, his new book, and its connection to bioinformatics. We’re looking forward to a more substantial opportunity for a Q&A with Stephen at the Bioinformatics Conference.