David Davies' Radio Weblog

www.scripting.com: We're going to get bruised for sure, remember when you were a kid and learned how to ride a bicycle.

Dave's right. I got up out of my rut and am gearing up for a busy weekend!

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya?

[Macro error: Can't convert name because TCP/IP error code -3170 - Host not found (DNS error).]

Chris Double's new web service lists the current horse racing meetings being handled by the New Zealand TAB. Maybe I'll make my fortune yet!

The jury's still out on this web services timeout problem. Those splendid fellows at Userland are looking into it so hopefully there will be an official word over the next few days.

David Davies is not down, not yet. More services and interoperability over the weekend! Web services have a big future. The trick will be to find the killer applications.

An admission. I've been bitten by Radio's web services and am licking my wounds somewhat. All was going so well until I ran up against a wall, the wall being Radio's handling of TCP connections on the Mac. If a connection is broken for some reason, there's a chance it'll permanently tie up a connection in Radio. This connection won't be freed up until radio restarts. There are only a finite number of connections Radio will accept at any one time, 10 as it happens. If/when all 10 are tied up, that's it, Radio will refuse any further incoming connections. The only way around this is to restart. If you don't happen to be watching your copy of Radio when this happens then you'll have a dead duck on your desktop and anyone trying to connect to you via, say, a web service will get a timeout error. This will likely result in a very publicly visible error message on a weblog page. Not good.

This has been happening to my copy of Radio since about Tuesday. Consequently just about everyone who used one of my services have now removed them from their weblog. The excitement of Tuesday now seems a long time ago. I don't blame you, I'd do the same. I've even been linked, albeit indirectly, to one user's unrecoverable root corruption. This hurts. There are no bugs in my code, my server hardware is rock solid, my services work just fine. I'm feeling a bit let down by circumstances outside of my control.

I'm concentrating on using web services in Manila now. I've been using XML-RPC for a long time in Manila and so far so good. I'll stick with what I know and can control. Thanks for listening.