Monkinetic Weblog

Dave on NetNewsWire's recent support for scripting:

For what it's worth, of course, Radio's aggregator has had infinite extendibility with scripts for a long time, on Mac OS X, with AppleScript, etc etc. (link) Yes, Dave, but NetNewsWire is a full Mac OS X app, not a Mac OS X shell on a Mac OS 8 app with a Mac OS 7 interface. It also runs, without crashing, for days on end, and without ever making a bump on the performance meter.

It would seem I'm not mistaken in my reports of problems with active FTP and my Linksys BEFW11S4 router. > Several people report the latest BEFW11S4 firmware is broken for Active mode. Here's a recent post: /forum/remark,411550.. (link)

Details here.

Morbus has updated his entry on iCal, vCalendar, and Moveable Type. If you're an MT hack, he needs a plug-in that strips links in a post and gathers them as footnotes at the bottom of the post.

Morbus has updated his blog entry with information on the linefeed issue, his script, and the fact that Mike at NewsIsFree now has Slashdot posts running into an iCal file.

Dawn Olsen found this site via my post about the Lo Fi Allstars it would seem. Not sure, but Dawn seems a bit enamoured. -)

AKMA blogs Forgiveness, in a deep and touching way:

Forgiving wrongs requires us to take them utterly seriously as injuries to one another and to the relationships of which we form a part. And: I tell myself, "It doesn't matter"--but I am not the one who may make that discernment. I'm not in a position to know how badly Margaret wanted pepper on her eggs, nor even of whether she ought to have wanted pepper that much. David Weinberger follows up with: My religion, Judaism, ... puts particular stress on making whole what one has ruptured through one's bad behavior. Yes, you resolve not to do it again, and yes, you don't let that behavior rend the fabric of the relationship. But you also run out to the store immediately and buy Margaret some more damn pepper. As a married man (going on 4 years now) I find that these lessons are the most valuable, and the hardest to face, and the hardest to learn. Part of marriage to me is letting go of "I want"; every day, every hour, loving the other person more than yourself. You can do this (theoretically) because the other person is doing the same. Of course, we are none of us perfect, which brings us to the essential necessity of forgiveness.

Brad points to this cutie - the Cubik is the world's smallest megapixel digital camera. Neat!

Note to Dave - Mark may have said he does not like outliners; however, he DOES understand the power of an outliner:

I like to edit Python code in an IDE (or in Emacs in python-mode), which autoindents for me and allows me to "fold" code blocks (collapse an outline node) that I'm not currently using. He's already got what you're offering him in Radio's outliner (the one Frontier programmers all love)- but without the ability to easily edit that same script in some other text editor.

Ugh. Jim wanted to report a bug in Userland's Radio Userland, and ask a question. The reward for his trouble?

Dave writes: "We're going to make Web services work for Web developers. That means getting rid of arcane stuff that makes sense only to C programmers. "

Well, I understand where Dave is coming from, but I have to argue that without C and its practitioners of arcana, the "web" in "web services" would not exist. The xml parser in Frontier's web services support would be 100 times slower. Google - don't tell me that's not a web service! ;-) - would not exist.

Dave, you're not being fair to people who use those languages. I totally appreciate what you're doing in the scripting world. Seeing web services brought to the masses through your involvement in XML-RPC is a huge deal. We all talk about web services being about inclusive: don't lock out or insult those developers who choose to use .NET or whatever.

I mean, who cares that there are six extra lines in that script? How many lines is a common web service? 5? 100? 1000? If a developer wants to write those 6 lines (which are probably generated for him) why can't he? Is it just because it offends your aesthetic?

Dave points to my coffee cup radioFeedIcon. It was really easy to do with Conversant's Resources. I just put \radioFeedIcon\ in my template or message.

Conversant offers a LOT of options when it comes to outputting your content. Any page can have it's MIME type set, and templates (cf 1, 2) can be anything, including HTML, XML, I even tried RTF once. (No go on that one. ;-))

In the case of my RSS feed, the feed is a WeblogViewPage. The WeblogViewPage lets me create any number of ways to deliver my weblog content, in the past I've seen RSS, Avantgo, and OPML versions of Conversant weblogs using this technique.

Oh, and Dave, it's Steve, please. ;-)

Hmm. thanks to my referers, I have found that I have the #3 and #4 hits for RSS Sources on Google. Cooool. I need to rewrite my rss feed.

This rssFeedIcon is a test.

Hmm. thanks to my referers, I have found that I have the #3 and #4 hits for RSS Sources on Google. Cooool. I guess I should update that soon.

Dave is making a point on Scripting News regarding IDL (or in this case WSDL) for Frontier, and other non-typed scripting languages. His point is that he cannot generate at runtime the WSDL directly from the code, as can C# or Java developers - b/c their runtimes have information about the types and numbers of parameters to a call.

This means having to handcode the WSDL for a web service in these environments, which can be a PITA if your service is at all large.

I have an idea though. One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example.

In Frontier, scripts are outlines. Frontier already has a rich set of functionality dealing with rendering outlines into other formats, esp. HTML. You can use #directives in your outlines, which get translated into information in the symbol table when rendering the outline (or any other datatype for that matter).

So, I would propose a simple set of #directives that can be inserted into a script outline above the actual script code, as a commented block. That block can be grabbed and processed to generate whatever idl format is desired.

This is just an idea, someone with more Frontier experience could come up with a better design. I also know that Perl has Perldoc and POD (inline support for manpages), so including this information in perl scripts in a long tradition in that community.

Also, at least someone is working on WSDL support in Python (which has an easily introspected runtime). "Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file."

So, I think that lack of explicitly typed data should not be the final reason not to support some sort of IDL for web services. There may be other, better reasons, but I have not seen them yet.

Jim is "urgently in need of work". If you need an awesome coder, a great mentor, or all-around great guy in your company, check him out.

Be aware - Jim needs to work remotely, and he's by far the one I would bet one if I could hire a teleworker. He's motivated, creative, and productive.

On another topic, Dori says "The answer seems to be in Apple support document #14449, [...] No direct link from here, unfortunately, because [...] WebObjects sucks."

Dave writes: "AaronLand is updating. Bravo! I added him to the rotation for my WeblogsComHelper app so his updates will show up on the weblogs.com home page."

Dave says: "Work without coffee? My brain says no."

Matt Goyer says he could not work for U-Haul without going psycho...