Wednesday, September 03, 2003

The Red Sox now have the 3rd (Manny Ramirez), 4th (Trot Nixon), 5th (David Ortiz), and 10th (Bill Mueller) best OPSs in the American League, of players with 100+ ABs. That's damned impressive...
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Clark, Clark, Everywhere... Daily Kos says it's too late for Wesley Clark. I feel like I know the guy now that I've listened to his Lydon interview. He thinks like a blogger for sure, but he doesn't trust the medium enough. Of course it's not too late for Clark, because it's not all about money this time. I bet we'll have a good laugh about his prediction come November next year. [Scripting News] I don't think Clark's cooked either - though, unlike Dave, I don't think that he's still got a chance due to blogs. But then again, Dave's blind spot in terms of blogs' political potential isn't exactly new... =) In fact, I'm kind of falling for Clark now. Dean just provokes so much hatred and disdain within the party - I don't think he can pull off beating Bush if he can't pull the party together. It's not his politics but his...abrasiveness, I guess. Oh, and did you see that Clark has finally officially declared himself a Democrat?

9:25:00 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

WS-Security in SOAP::Lite is hard! Ok, I'm giving up on my Perl SOAP::Lite-based MS Web Service thingie for now - I've got it to the point where it's failing the authentication. I'm probably screwing something up in my nonce or digest values - the code I'm basing this on (Philip Pearson's from below and Sam Ruby's are both in python, which I don't know diddly about. But hey, that's enough for one day...

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Well, after an hour of wading through documentation, books, mailing lists, and source code, I've almost got the WS-Security headers working properly in SOAP::Lite...just trying to figure out how to do <wsse:Username> and <wsu:Expires> (for example) in the same <wsse:USernameToken> header element...and how to have both the wsse and wsu prefixes in the namespace. That last part shouldn't be too hard, but I'm just flailing. Time to take a break...

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SOAP::Lite and WS-Security? Phillip Pearson gets a Python script to talk to the service Microsoft put up yesterday. I thought perhaps I'd get Radio talking to it via SOAP, but it seems that Microsoft's SOAP is very different from UserLand's. I could be wrong about that. [Scripting News] Ow. I made a run at writing a Perl client for MS's Microsoft.com Web Service but the authentication, using WS-Security, gave me a massive headache. The rest is cake, but I haven't been able to figure out how WS-Security and SOAP::Lite play with each other. Ah well - it's not like I don't have my own real work with web services these days...I'm implementing a couple new tools to use with our ClearCase MultiSite setup - admin tools for creating branchs and managing triggers, and a nifty new way to handle check-out/check-in permission in a trigger. Both will use web services - the branch and trigger creation data is in a central database, and servers in each site will use a SOAP web service in Perl to find what branches/triggers/etc they need to create (I found that web services with Apache are a lot faster than trying to do an ODBC connection from Bangalore to Boxborough, MA), while the permissions trigger will be doing real-time queries to the same database to determine whether the check-out/check-in operation can proceed, based on the results of a web service query. Again, I'm going for speed and slimness - dumping a DBI call into a trigger that runs on the client desktop (not to mention requiring they set up an ODBC connection to the DB) just seemed painful. Now I just need ccperl, the Perl install included with a ClearCase install, to include SOAP::Lite and I'd be in heaven. =) This whole project has also gotten me infatuated with flowcharts. I've got a lot of admin interfaces in this suite (using Template Toolkit and a nifty javascript pretty-table rendering tool that a co-worker wrote to build the pages - at least THAT's out of the way) and I want to make sure I actually know what needs to happen whenever someone tries to create a new branch, etc...it's fun. I just feel guilty - I'm on a Windows box, so I'm using Visio rather than the very, very nifty Dia, which (I think) is X Windows only. I first used Dia a few years back in my Compilers class at school. We had to do finite-state automata diagrams, and everyone was doing them by hand (or using a paint program of some sort). I've got the handwriting of a crippled gibbon, so I spent like 6 hours finding Dia and getting it working on the computer science server. Worked great, and I got my stuff done sooner than everyone else, too. =) EDIT: Turns out Dia does run on Windows after all - grab the Win32 installer here. I'll have to play with it now...

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Bush administration admits it: After 9/11, US allowed bin Laden family's exit [The Smirking Chimp] Honestly, this doesn't bother me. The bin Laden family members in the States at the time weren't exactly close to Osama and were not likely to be front-men for terrorist fundraising or something like that. If they'd stayed, they'd've been the targets of some pretty nasty hate, I'm betting.
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RvB Episode 17. Points of Origin is now available for download. We recently added an option for Windows Media Player 9. We have... [Red vs Blue] Red vs Blue is what's called machinma - animation made using gameplay from a video game. In this case, it's using Halo (which, as mentioned earlier, is the most addictive crack I've run into in a long, long time). Check 'em out - RvB is hilarious stuff.
7:02:17 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

No, not "Pearl"... "Perl" Added to Oxford Dictionary of English [use Perl] Rock! My programming language of choice is now a REAL WORD! I'm legitimate!
6:38:54 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Shia mourners demand end to US occupation. World: Tens of thousands of mourners turned a funeral service into a powerful show of defiance against the US-led military occupation. [Guardian Unlimited] See, this could be a problem. The dead cleric's brother attacked the US occupation at the funeral, for example. There were, what, 300,000 mourners in the streets? Bush might be able to get the Sunni triangle under control, so long as they don't really have to worry about the Kurds or the Shia. If the Shia rise up as well, then everything's just well and properly fucked.

6:31:17 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Every once in a while, I read about some guy who's trained himself to need only 3 hours of sleep a night. I want that capability. I've gotten myself down to 6 hours most of the time - I sleep late on weekends and am prone to oversleeping weekday mornings if I don't make an effort to get up. But I can *function* without much sleep, it's just the waking up that's a problem. How do people set their so-called internal alarm clocks?

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