* * * * *
                                        
                                  Naming names
                                        
Well that was certainly painful. 

I wrote the previous entry [1] only to have some of it show up. Odd, I
thought. It's never done that before. Of course, I had just updated the
codebase to support more more <META> tags (DC.Date.Updated (Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative) [2] and WMDI.LastUpdateType (Web MetaData Initiative)
[3] if you're curious) so the code did change just prior to the previous
entry, even though I did a test and it shouldn't have affected the addition
of new entries (shouldn't). 

Throw the code under the debugger and place a stopping point jusr prior to
the program exiting, then run. 

It's exiting normally. Only it's getting a partial entry. 

Now, when I cut-n-paste the excerpt, it did pick up a few characters that
gave my editor fits but I thought I had gotten fixed that. Check the contents
of the entry (as I sent it) and it's all ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange)—no funny characters at all. I even retype the lines
around where it's failing and still it's not getting everything. 

And that's when I see the problem: 

<class="…" href="…"> 

It should have read: 

<a class="…" href="…"> 

My HTML (HyperText Markup Language) parser was bailing out on bad input.
Sigh. 

Fix the text (which is easier than fixing the code) and try again. Test goes
fine. When I go resubmit the entry for real it crashes. 

Insert primal scream. 

Think think think think think 

Okay, I submit entries via email. The email system feeds the email (in RFC-
822 format [4] to the submission program. When testing, I fed the entry the
same was as the email system. When mailing, I was sendind my test file, which
included a duplicate set of email headers! Which my program couldn't deal
with—or rather, it dealt with it by crashing. 

Sigh. 

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/10/29.2
[2] http://purl.org/DC/elements/1.1/
[3] http://www.wmdi.org/HTML%20Meta%20Spec.htm
[4] http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc0822.html

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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