Older blog entries for slaught (starting at number 6)

28 Jul 2002 (updated 30 Jul 2002 at 04:39 UTC) »

journal/diary clients

I got to thinking about my two "diary" clients. One for lj and one for here. The code base is almost identical due to the features I want. I wondered more out loud about what I really want out of these projects. I was thinking about a writing notebook tool. A tool to keep all my journal entries, articles, comments, replies and other correspondence in one place. I complex tool with all the different protocols and web sites but the idea is the same. There is either a new entry or a reply to an existing entry. Then there is some option meta data about the entry. For example, subject. This of course makes me think about a email client. Then I am back at lifestreams. hmm. The idea was cool. Always best to steal great ideas then come up with half-ass ideas of your own. So there is something here. Not sure what it is. Does XML-RPC have a discovery feature? My system won't be based around time ordering. Thus I side step lifestreams? Need to check on patents.

Advogato

What is the best way for me to use this site? I got an account here because async's diary got mentioned for his questions on how to do research. I thought if I got an account I might be able to talk to him. I find his question very interesting. I looked into the same think about six-eight months ago. I hope he has better luck than me.

But I wasted about a month trying to reimplement the wheel in scheme. My first try at a advogato client was in scheme. The XML-RPC client library is very nice. Its user interface borders on perfection. Alas I am lacking in skill to debug the scheme code. So after wasting a month of time I sat down and reworked existing code. Should have done that earlier. What was I thinking? It was an excuse to play with scheme. But I actually wanted the tool to do work. Dilemma. Need to develop a testing mechanism for the clients. The current system works somewhat but is lacking. I need a way to reliably run error conditions. iBus had a wonderful tool for this. I think it was iBus? Its not free software so am I allowed to mention it?

So back to the question. What I am going to do here? I write alot of technical design and critiques. Does this have a place here? I don't want to bore people or be outside of the mission statement. I'm also weary of the critiques starting flame wars with the unwashed masses. Being a developer site I think this might be minimized but you can never tell. Also there is the attitude of put up or shutup but that goes to the roots of criticism. Do technical designs belong? Most of my technical writings are future design ideas for future projects or modifications of existing products. I think these fit with the mission statement. While not software they are part of the principle of shared knowledge and ideas.

Meta questions

Where is the FAQ?
How do you change your password for this site?

kbreit: lj does have XML-RPC interface. It doesn't have a direct link from the home page. I think someday someone will, finally, get irritated and fix that but doubtful. But the post interface is easier than the XML-RPC. Advogato's interface is nice and simple. But lj does have more features.
lj's XML-RPC protocol docs

Client
Well it works now. I broke down and wrote it in perl. I retrofitted the lj client. The basic functionality is what I wanted so I just ripped out the lj specific stuff and stuck in XML-RPC with advogato info. Lj has an XML-RPC interface. I am sure I can do something to remove the dependencies. Unfortunately XMLRPC::Lite has a poor error handling interface. When an error occurs its hard to tell what it is, much less recover.

The upside to the reuse is I get my editor, spell checking, postponing and offline all for free. Free meaning 6 hours.

testing

I've been trying to get my client code to work. The previous entries were tests. It worked except the xmlrpc library returned an error to my client. Since scheme is new to me I'm having difficult debuging it. The XML-RPC scheme interface is too cool. I refuse to use the perl library. The ocaml might be interesting. Does modula-3 have one? have to look it up later.

Why can't you delete entries?

18 Jul 2002 (updated 26 Jul 2002 at 04:37 UTC) »
18 Jul 2002 (updated 26 Jul 2002 at 04:29 UTC) »

This is my first entry. Testing the client code. Does it handle & ampersands ok?

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