Unfolded Mind

I have a version of klortho that’s able to parse its PATH_INFO, grab the XML that’s located there, and apply the transformation that’s in the processing instruction, if such exists. That’s cool.

I’ve been using this to work with my python band name generator, and I can get random band names to show, and that’s really great, because I can use the needs I discover while working on this band name program to decide which as yet unimplemented parts of klortho I’ll need to implement, which brings us to my roadblock.

I’m writing the python script (called “Rate”) that will take in POSTed parameters to update the ratings for all the words in the previously displayed band name, and then redirect back to “Show”. klortho needs to do two things that it can’t do yet in order for this to work: it needs to understand POSTed data, and pass it to the sub-request, and it needs to recognize redirect status codes from the sub-request, and pass them back out, along with the appropriate headers.

I started small and modest. “Rate” just issues a redirect to “Show”. If you call the script directly, it works. Nothing I try in klortho will pass that redirect out. I run into a brick wall of of “500 Server Error”. The server error log reliably reports that FasctCGI is complaing that I’m sending incomplete headers. Is it a Dreamhost server config issue? What’s going on? What do I try next to learn more about what’s really happening?

I see two roads, and I may follow them both at the same time. I can create a little dummy FastCGI in c, that does nothing but issue hard-coded redirects. I’d leave out all the other things that klortho is doing, and tweak away at the stripped down version until I get it right, then put what I’ve come up with back into klortho. The other idea I’ve had is to write another version of klortho from scratch, and concentrate on acting as a fully transparent proxy, which will pass all the appropriate headers in and out, handle authentication and POST data and file uploads and any status code the sub-request might throw at it, and then add the XSLT transformations back into it.

• The “Show” script, without klortho
• The “Show” script, with klortho
• The “Rate” script, without klortho
• The “Rate” script, with klortho
• klortho source

Was sick all last week. Didn’t feel like posting, didn’t feel like doing much on my programming projects.
I did fiddle with klortho a little, got rid of the segfault, but still haven’t been able to get it to actually serve up a page on Dreamhost. Environment variables/dynamic linking maybe? that’s my next avanue of investigation.

Bubble-packed pills are proof that Big Pharma hates us, and wants us to die!

That is all.

I don’t get it. How can a language as dangerous and fussy as C have been used to create so much cool stuff? Linux, BSD, Apache, perl… you get the idea. I got spoiled by perl, python, lisp and other langauges where what you type generally does what you mean. C is like you’re stupid friend, who does what you say, literally, whether it makes any sense at all or not.

Must post every day!

Must post every day!

Must post every day!

Must post every day!

Must post every day!

I used to have a cool little program I wrote on the web, called the band name generator. I’d gone through a couple different versions, adding features, and had a lot of fun writing it. Then I lost interest, changed internet service providers, and let it just go away.

It’s coming back. Woo Hoo. I’ve found it’s been a really great way to get myself motivated to learn new ways of doing things. I can take a concept that I’ve thought about in deep detail, and re-imagine it in terms of the latest ideas that happen in web programming.

The next set of “buzzwords du jour” will be “RDF”, “SPARQL”, and “ontology”. That will mean BUPKUS to most of you, but I’m excited.

“FOAF” means “friend of a friend”, for those that don’t know, and if you don’t, just skip this post.

I went on Facebook, and used their FOAF Generator tool, to (what else?) generate some FOAF, which I tweaked a bit by hand, got it to validate at the W3C’s RDF Validator, and the stuck it up at here.

The exciting part, is what others can do with it. See what the FOAF Explorer does.

I tweaked the theme quite a bit today,
and as a bonus, got it all to validate!

Beleive me, it’s the kind of thing that actually excites me. Sad.

Testing to see if an update here will show up through RSS to my facebook wall.

Gah. I hate those guys, those guys that hack. Now I gotta upgrade. Poor me.