Saturday, 11 May 2002

Wow. It's not even released yet, and Wired has a pretty bloody favourable review of Attack of the Clones.. Perhaps they downloaded it off the net? 10:27:08 PM

I've had my month's holiday, and very nice it was too. I went to various bits of California (namely Santa Barbara and various environs of San Francisco), and then up to various bits of Nova Scotia and Ontario. A good time was had by all, mostly. And now it's time to get my head down and finish this damn Radio Community Server thing that's been hanging over my head. Devilfish, a Java implementation of that subset (and superset) of xmlStorageSystem required to host a Radio weblog, now supports all of the API that Radio relies on. There's a lot of stuff that still needs doing, but I hope to have enough of the non-API stuff (comments, streamlined installation, etc) done by the end of the week that I'll be happy to release the source and put up an example server. My goal is to get the server working well enough that I can start implementing one or two things the Userland RCS doesn't have. I've got a little list... 4:46:59 PM

Are you a low-bandwidth user trying to implement xmlStorageSystem for Radio? Perhaps you're (as I was) on a 747 at 30,000ft and without Internet access while you try to debug your community server implementation? Every time you run changeCommunityServer, Radio calls the XML-RPC verb "radioCommunityServer.getInitialResources". One of the things it asks for is the URL of your repository of Radio themes. Of course, not everybody has a repository of Radio themes, so if your server leaves this blank, Radio will continue to poll radio.weblogs.com for themes. Unfortunately, even if you haven't specified such a URL, Radio will still consider downloading these themes to be part of the community-server-changing process, and if the theme download fails, the entire switch will also fail. Which, once again, is bad news if you're at 30,000ft in a 747, or even if you're doing testing while connected to the net with a 56k modem since the themes take quite a while to arrive. The fix, I found was to go into system.verbs.builtins.radio.cloud.getInitialResources, and comment out the code bundle that downloads the themes. Radio survives quite happily without it. 4:05:00 PM

I've made several posts to this blog since I got back from my vacation, I saw them get published and everything, but in the meantime radio seems to have swallowed them. They've vanished without the slightest hint of a trace. Smeg. 9:54:00 AM

© Copyright 2002 Charles Miller. Last update: 3/6/02; 3:12:47 PM.