Sunday, February 10, 2002

I wanted to access Radio Userland remotely using SSL so I thought I'd try using stunnel. I run RU on port 8010. So the following stunnel invocation did the trick:   stunnel -d 443 -r 8010 I could now connect using https instead of http. Unfortunately when accessing remotely I don't get prompted for authentication. The request goes through stunnel which de-ssl's it and locally talks to RU on port 8010. So RU thinks it's a local connection and the remote access security is ignored. Is there a way to enable this authentication to always be on, even for local requests? This would help me in another way, where I have other people who use my PC and I can prevent them from posting to my weblog accidentally or on purpose. I couldn't find a preference for this. In the meantime I changed system.verbs.builtin.radio.webServer.firewall so that the following line is commented out: if pta^.radioResponder.flSameMachine I realise I'll lose it in a root update sometime so I'd really like it if a way of having always on authentication could be done. 10:21:23 PM

Now that I have all these wonderful services, how best to utilise them? Using Radio Userland, how would I set up a site to display this information that would be useful for users of the NZ TAB? Or is it best just to leave the services there to enable developers of applications to easily interface with the TAB (Something I've always wished the TAB would do themselves) and not do anything further. Maybe I can set up Radio Userland to be some sort of 'My Betting Center' to provide useful information for punters and then RU becomes the tool they use rather than some sort of static web site that RU publishes too. 1:51:03 AM

[This service is no longer active, sorry. I plan to re-activate it sometime in the future. Let me know if you are interested. Another new web service added to enable retrieval of New Zealand TAB information. I did have the results of the service posted here but the tables are getting large and I don't want to fill up people's newsfeeds with junk information. In the future I think I'll pop the example web service results into a story page describing the XML-RPC calls and showing the results. The new services just added are: <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].allOddsFirstRaceHTML()%></p>  Returns an HTML table showing the win dividends paid for the runners in the first race of the day. The table shows snapshots as the dividends change over time so you can see where the punters money is going at any point in the day up to race close. The table is generated from the results of other calls described below. <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].master.currentChild()%> As described before, returns the raceday code required by other calls. <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].raceday.meetings(raceday)%> Returns the list of meetings for the given raceday. Also described before. <%["xmlrpc://no-longer-active/RPC2"].raceday.allOdds(raceday, code, raceNum)%> Returns a struct containing the win and place dividends for each runner in the race for the given meeting code and race number. I actually have services working that submit online bets too but without a New Zealand TAB account there's not much benefit making them available. 1:46:20 AM