Installed Erlang on OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard

I bought 'Seven Languages in Seven Weeks' and one of those languages is Erlang. The version on Fink is v.12, but the latest is version 13, so I decided to install it myself from source. I discovered the directory path for installation is not allowed to have a space in it, so I made a path with no spaces and downloaded there. First the download and unpack; OS X doesnt have wget by default, but curl is there:

curl 'http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz' -o 'otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz'

tar -xzvf otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz

curl 'http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_doc_man_R13B04.tar.gz' -o 'otp_doc_man_R13B04.tar.gz'

Create the directory for installation:

sudo mkdir -p /sw/erlang

Now configure, make and install:

cd otp_src_R13B04

./configure --prefix=/sw/erlang --enable-threads -enable-smp-support --enable-kernel-poll

make

sudo make install

Copy the documentation into place and extract it there:

cp ../otp_doc_man_R13B04.tar.gz /sw/erlang/

cd /sw/erlang

sudo tar -xzvf otp_doc_man_R13B04.tar.gz

sudo rm otp_doc_man_R13B04.tar.gz

Edit your ~/.bashrc to include the documentation and the new erlang binary in the appropriate paths; I use the 'pico' editor, but the lines you add are:

export PATH=$PATH:/sw/erlang/bin

export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/sw/erlang/man

...and source that script to get the new paths with . ~/.bashrc.

Now type 'erl' to get in the Erlang repl, and 'ctrl-C a' to exit.

W3C schema for the RFC 1123 date format

Here's a quickie I didn't find anywhere: XSD for the RFC 1123 date format, as used in http headers; note its only for GMT and years 2000 -2099 (my particular case):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<xs:annotation><xs:documentation>Schema for RFC 1123 date format type</xs:documentation></xs:annotation>

<xs:simpleType name="RFC1123_date">
<xs:annotation><xs:documentation>RFC 1123 date format.</xs:documentation></xs:annotation>

<xs:restriction base="xs:string">
<xs:pattern value="(Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat|Sun), [0-3][0-9] (Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) 20[0-9][0-9] [0-2][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]:[0-5][0-9] GMT">
</xs:restriction>
</xs:simpleType>
</xs:schema>

Python http PUT request

I have a CherryPy service which accepts 'PUT' requests with a named payload parameter (it's name is , surprisingly, 'payload'). From cURL, this is easy to specify with the -F option, but I couldn't find anywhere how to do this with Python. I discovered something a bit odd, which seems to be that the payload needs to be specified twice:

import urllib, httplib

import time, calendar

import base64

if __name__=='__main__':

timenow=time.gmtime()

t=time.asctime(timenow)

iov1=str(calendar.timegm(timenow))+'000000000'

iov2=str(calendar.timegm(timenow) + 1) +'000000000'

p=''+t+''

px=urllib.quote_plus(p)

pe=urllib.urlencode({"payload":p})

urlbase='putserver.cern.ch:8081'

testPut='DEVDB10/ATLAS_SCT_COMMCOND_DEV/PUTS200/TEST/PUT/Multi/timespan/'+iov1+''+iov2+"?payload="+px

test='/cooldb'

testMerge='/cooldb/merge'

print px

print urlbase

authHeader={"Authorization": "Basic "+base64.encodestring('name:pwd'), "Content-Length":str(len(px))}

#payload=px

h=httplib.HTTPConnection(urlbase)

h.request('PUT',testPut,px,authHeader)

r=h.getresponse()

print r.status, r.reason

print r.read()

h.close()

I wanted an iomanipulator to escape XML

...and so began a steep learning curve. I had some strings to insert into XML being output on the cout stream, and ideally I would simply like to do something like this:

string myXml("xml&<>");

cout<<escapexml<<myXml;

..and the output should be 'escaped'.

Of course I could have made a function and simply transformed one string into another, but I was also keen to learn about the iostream framework. Here are a few ways which iterate towards the final goal

1. 'Adapt' the string

Custom inserters can be made for a given class, so by wrapping the string in a class, I cold simply make an inserter for that class:

Here is the header:

class Wrapper{

std::string &m_data;

public:

typedef std::string::value_type value_type;

Wrapper(std::string & data):m_data(data){ }

std::string &str(){

return m_data;

}

};

std::ostream &

operator << (std::ostream & os, Wrapper & s);

...and the definition for that inserter:

std::ostream &

operator<< (std::ostream & os, Wrapper & s){

XmlEscape x(os);

for_each(s.str().begin(),s.str().end(),x);

return os;

}

where XmlEscape is a functor:

class XmlEscape{

static const char * m_chars;

static const char * m_replacements[];

static const unsigned int m_nchars=5;

std::ostream & m_os;

public:

XmlEscape(std::ostream & os);

void operator()(char c);

std::ostream & ostream();

};

with implementation:

const char * XmlEscape::m_chars ="&\'\"><";

const char * XmlEscape::m_replacements[]={"&amp;", "&apos;", "&quot;", "&gt;", "&lt;"};

XmlEscape::XmlEscape(std::ostream & os):m_os(os){

//nop

}

void

XmlEscape::operator()(char c){

unsigned int i(m_nchars);

while(i--){

if (c==m_chars[i]) {

m_os<<m_replacements[i];

return;

}

}

m_os<<c;

}

2. Adapt the stream

WSDL 2.0 and all that

I'm trying to make a directory of my web services to make them more visible (findable) and started with this:
Keith Chapman's Blog: RESTfull Mashup with WSDL 2.0 - WSO2 Mashup Server
and the referenced WSDL file he uses. I think he in turn uses the useful IBM page on this subject, and the WSDL primer, core definition and adjunct pages. Apart from that, there's not much out there on using WSDL for RESTful services.

In theory this could all also be done in RDF, or even a mixture of the two... this might provide both the functional definition in WSDL and the ontological framework ('find me all the atlas web services which give run information') in RDF. I'll start with WSDL, progress to UDDI and then try to backtrack and insert some RDF.

Sweetxml: My first WSDL 2.0 - generating Axis2 client code for a REST API

Sweetxml: My first WSDL 2.0 - generating Axis2 client code for a REST API

Safari 4: Does Acid pass the Acid test?

OK, so I updated to Safari 4 and yes, sure enough it passes the Acid3 test with flying colours. Must be good, then. So I tested it against my two outstanding bugs which I stumbled across:
Corrupt screen memory: Go to that link after visting another page and you'll see the new page just billboarded on top of the one you were looking at.



Try resizing the window to see ugly stuttering visual history as the window moves...



...and then there's simple (but big number) arithmetic inside XSLT. Safari just gets it wrong. Come on guys, where are those 64 bits you promised us? Heres an example of hex conversion, where the large integer here simply gets converted to zero inside safari, but the correct answer is given in Firefox.

So Acid 3 is all very well at testing the fancy new features, but I would have thought that CSS styling of Plain Old Xml would be even more fundamental than testing the new selectors.. so Acid 3 is failing my acid test, at least.