Mike Cohen

Clean SOAP

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I gave up on using AppleScript Studio for my Installer front-end application. AppleScript’s SOAP implementation seems to be broken. I ended up writing it in Objective C instead, using Web Services Core. It isn’t that much more difficult than writing it in AppleScript, and I’m able to use the window layout I already created for the AppleScript version. By encapsulating all of the web service method calls into a single class, I’m able to keep the code fairly simple.

Wii Sports is a hit

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Last night I had a cookout with 3 of my friends and neighbors. After dinner we played Wii Bowling and everyone loved it. In fact we’re planning more “Bowling Nights”. This morning one of my friends told me she had a sore arm from bowling.

These are people who never play video games and have no interest in traditional game consoles. This shows how the Wii is different. By bringing you into the game with physical activity rather than sitting on the couch with a gamepad, the Wii appeals to everyone.

links for 2007-04-27

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Spontaneous Theme Switching

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For a while I’ve been having a problem with this site where the theme would spontaneously switch to the default theme at random times. Since it started happening around the same time I switched to DreamHost’s one-click install, I attributed it to some monitoring process they were using or the WP-Cache plugin, which was also installed. I worked around it by replacing the theme folder named ‘default’ with a symbolic theme to the actual theme I use. Today Aaron mentioned having the same problem and he doesn’t use DreamHost.

Searching the WordPress support forums turned up this article, attributing it to Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin being installed incorrectly. However, I don’t use that plugin but I do use David Harper’s Ultimate Gamers’ Pack, which reformats the page for viewing on a Wii, PSP, or DS-Lite.

It’s basically the same problem – I didn’t install it correctly. Each plugin includes a theme folder, which needs to go in the themes folder rather than the plugins folder where I placed them. As soon as someone accesses the site with one of those devices, it will fail to access the theme, which will cause WordPress to revert to the default theme.

Mail screw-up

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I just discovered that I messed up my .procmailrc file, so much of the email sent to mcdevzone.com, worldbeatplanet.com, or macmegasite.com ended up in a file sitting on my server rather than my mailbox. I fixed it and I’m now importing that old email into mail.app.

How not to run a blog

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wiisee.net is one of the news feeds I subscribe to for Wii news. It usually has interesting items, but they only post excerpts with no link to the original article and no information about where the articles came from. If I want to read the full article, there’s no way to find it from their site.

AppleScript and dirty SOAP

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I’m writing an AppleScript Studio application which needs to call some SOAP web services before running an installer. Somehow AppleScript seems to be adding a bogus namespace to the SOAP call.

The method I want to call should look something like this (actual names changed):

<RegisterUser>
<UserData>xyzzy</UserData>
</RegisterUser>

Instead, the request looks like this:

<m:RegisterUser xmlns:m="http://myserver/mynamespace">
<UserData>xyzzy</UserData>
</m:RegisterUser>

The AppleScript code looks pretty standard:

	tell application "http://myserver/endpoint" to¬
		call soap {method name:"RegisterUser", ¬
			parameters:{|UserData|:"xyzzy"},¬
			SOAPAction:"http://myserver/namespace/RegisterUser", ¬
			method namespace:"http://myserver/namespace"}

I have no idea where the bogus ‘m’ prefix came from. This same method is being called successfully from .NET under Windows.