Halogen Labs Weblog

Docs are back. It seems I managed to trigger a flurry of activity with my [RT] about the Cocoon docs, which makes me happy :) Now we just gotta make them not suck.

Bureaucracy even sucks online. I’m trying to change the address listed with my Amateur Radio License, but you have to go through a braindead registration system in order to access the system. You type in your info, social security number, etc, and submit. Oh, what’s that? It looks like the FCC already has a record for me, so in theory I can already access everything online and not have to register. The problem is that I have no way of knowing what the password is, so I request a password change, and now I wait.

I had also registered for a “new” registration number, and then when I was done with that, I had to associate my callsign with that number. So I go through the other system to associate the callsign with it, and when I finish it, it says it worked, but when I go back to the main system, it still thinks there isn’t a callsign associated with it.

Sigh.

At this rate, it would be faster if I just filled out the physical paperwork and sent it in.

Daniel Hinojosa asks, “… what the hell happened to doGet() and doPost()?”

Well, Cocoon handles this nicely. If you want to limit a pipeline to GET/POST/PUT/DELETE, all you need to do is wrap the pipeline in a nice little RequestMethodSelector. You can even use the same pipeline and have different outcomes based on POST or GET, e.g. a GET on a pipeline will display something, but a POST to the same pipeline will result in a Flowscript function being called.

Bob Bunge of the National Weather Service dropped a note on the RSS Weather QuickTopic about some new services the NWS has released. The first, most notably, is the Digital Forecast Webservice which uses SOAP.

The NWS also has experimental weather observation feeds in XML and RSS formats.

A lot of this work pretty much duplicates what I was going to do with openWeather, given that I had more time available to work on it. It’s nice seeing this come to life. Now I just need to think of a way to keep ahead of all this with openWX :)

I decided to indefinitely shut off openWeather. The JVM on the machine is not stable running in Linux Emulation mode, causing Jetty to always crash. As a result, I can’t provide reliable feeds for the time being. Sorry. The system will probably be upgraded on the server sooner or later, and then I can spend 3 hours compiling a Native FreeBSD JVM to run things on. Until then, nothing will be running over on openWeather

Last night, when I was closing a manual garage door, my left index finger was right where the panels come together. The resulting force was enough to shave off a couple layers of skin on the bottom of my finger, and make my nail turn different colors… not to mention the excruciating pain.

So I spent last night with my hand in a bowl of ice and taking some Ibuprofen. I can flex it, and I am starting to type with it today, so I’m pretty sure it’s not broken.