Saturday, February 09, 2002

Another small peeve regarding .NET. I run Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. I didn't need the encryption options and other stuff from the Professional edition...at least so I thought. Now I see the .NET SDK requires IIS which doesn't run on the Home edition. It's explicitly disabled to not run on my OS. Are home users not expected to run their own web servers or something? 10:19:47 PM

I just installed the Microsoft .NET SDK. It was a 130MB download so I'm hoping it was worth it! Let's see how well it plays with Radio Userland. Once nice thing about the install is I didn't have to reboot afterwards. That makes a change. On the downside it said there was 10 seconds to go before installation was complete for about 10 minutes. Why do installation programs never get estimated time to completion correct? 10:18:02 PM

Scripting News: SCNS for SOAP 1.1: "Earlier this week we released Radio 8.0.4 with support for Simple Cross-Network Scripting. At the time we released a driver for XML-RPC, promising a driver for SOAP 1.1 later in the month. It's ready now." More fun stuff to play with! 9:45:50 PM

[I have temporarily stopped this service. I plan to re-start it in the future some time.] Hopefully the next post is a table generated by a web service call that displays the next races to go at the New Zealand TAB. The table is generated with the following call: <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].nextRaceHTML()%> Which in turn calls the raceday.nextRace XML-RPC method. raceday.nextRace takes a single parameter, the 'raceday' in the same manner as my raceday.meetings method described earlier. I think I need to set up a story describing the web services with examples... 12:18:39 PM

John Robb: "This kind of DIY Web Services offering is very cool.  I suspect that if you combine this with KnowNow's software, the info published below would be live... " That is definitely one of the plans. I've looked at KnowNow and what it has to offer and it certainly looks exactly like the type of thing that I'd like to do. Currently my internal server offers live odds changes but only through a special programming interface. Enter the world of web services... 10:12:21 AM

Roland Tanglao: "I wish the Nokia 9290 Communicator was available in Vancouver! I'd buy it because I believe it runs my friend Simon's Java port to the Symbian OS. Plus it's got a colour screen and a web browser!" I've got the european equivalent, the Nokia 9210 Communicator. It is a nice machine although lacking in memory. There is just enough memory to run a Personal Java application but nothing of great size. I wonder if that's the Java port that Roland was talking about? C++ applications fit nicely into the memory though and ports of Doom, and Mame are available. I'm looking forward to trying out some of the XML-RPC libraries on it and using it as a client to some of the web services I'm creating. Oh, the web browser doesn't support JavaScript and unfortunately I can't post Radio Userland items from it as a result 3:09:44 AM

[This service is no longer active. I plan to re-activate it sometime in the future.] Woohoo! My first webservice works. In fact, my first use of Radio Userland as a development platform! You should see the results of my XML-RPC call below. It was generated by the following macro: <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].currentMeetingsHTML()%> This returns an HTML table containing the current race meetings being handled by the New Zealand TAB. The TAB has to be operating (it runs on New Zealand time) and the data changes after about 10:15am (again NZ time) each day. The above XML-RPC call does its magic by calling two other XML-RPC methods. The first is: <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].master.currentChild()%> This returns a number identifying the current days racing. You use this number to pass to the next rpc call: <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].raceday.meetings(raceday)%> Where 'raceday' is the number returned from master.currentChild. The meetings call returns an array of structures containing the following members: code The meeting code which identifies the location of the races. title The title of the meeting. jetbet The internal TAB identifier used to place bets on the races in that meeting. races The number of races within that meeting. The next step is to provide additional functionality allowing enumerating the races, the runners, historical information, etc. My goal is to see how much of my Odds Viewer functionality I can 'web-ify' using Radio. 2:39:00 AM

[Table removed since the service is no longer active] 2:29:12 AM