On the Mark: 1/10/2003

	Friday, January 10, 2003

I plan to post from class next week using AIM and the tcp.im support in Radio. I hope this works. If I leave Radio up over night it's memory consumption can easily exceed 100M. I have no idea what leaving it up for a week might do. My whole cubicle might get sucked in. That, in itself, might be a good thing. Kind of an easy way to make decisions about what stays and what goes when I next move on.
3:30:26 PM

I guess that being on an unfunded project is not quite as scary as I once thought it might be. In the past thoughts of "workforce reduction", "reassignment", or "wastebasket emptying" might have occurred to me. As it turns out, it merely means you get to do lots of training while you wait for potential project sponsors to decide if, and when, they want to proceed with your proposal. Does this only happen at really large companies?

Just before Christmas I got to attend IMG's Programming C#. It was fun; I already knew C# from going to Guerilla.NET earlier in the year (when I was on a funded project) so I got to spend time tinkering with stuff I did not know much about - developing Windows apps in C#, Visual Studio macros, Enterprise templates and so on. But I digress. Next week we are off to IMG's ASP.NET course.
3:25:10 PM Google It!

Using Cook Computing's new XML-RPC.NET library I put together a simple client to grab all of today's email using Zoe's XML-RPC interface. It broke, giving me the same kind of XML parsing error message I got with my Radio-based script this morning. Is anybody else playing around with Zoe's XML-RPC interface? Somebody that is not actually involved in developing Zoe?
1:29:13 PM

I followed up on Raphael's suggestion to launch Zoe in debug mode to determine why my Radio scripts are breaking when exercising Zoe's XML-RPC interface. I tried several different requests and every one of them failed on an XML parsing error within Zoe. Here is a typical error message:

01/10 09:14:44 (Debug) SZRPC$Handler.run: 
org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException:
 expected event END_TAG with name 'value' but got END_DOCUMENT 
(postion: END_DOCUMENT seen ...r\n... @10:1)

OK, something is wrong with the XML according to Zoe. Here is the packet I sent to Zoe:

POST /RPC2 HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Radio UserLand/8.0.8 (WinNT)
Host: localhost:10123
Content-Type: text/xml
Content-length: 166
Authorization: Basic (my eyes only)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
	<methodName>mail.search</methodName>
	<params>
		<param>
			<value>george</value>
			</param>
		</params>
	</methodCall>

Nothing wrong there; this is well-formed XML. I'll post this to the Zoe mail list and see what comes up. I'll also give XML-RPC.NET a try against Zoe.
9:21:08 AM

Google It!

Charles Cook's XML-RPC.NET looks very interesting, well thought-out. I am going to give it a try. I think I will start by trying to hook it up with Zoe.
8:43:48 AM