bedeviled mojo slop

Early this morning I finished up Ratchet & Clank. Again, it was fun, fun, fun. I can't imagine that there was any way to beat the last boss without dredging around and shelling out the 150,000 bolts for the R.Y.N.O. (Rip Ya a New One) weapon. I didn't use a cheat to get the 150,000 bolts, but I did have to employ some scotch tape and the following sly technique because damned if I was going around for hours killing idiot enemies to get all those bolts.

From one of the Ratchet & Clank FAQs:

This will ONLY work if you have that disguise gadget thingy that makes you
turn into a robot, the taunter, and a hoverboard. Go to planet Rilgar and go
to the hoverboarding place. Use the disguise and turn into a robot and go to
the lady and play the hoverboard race. Now when it starts, instead of racing,
you are standing there in the hoverboard racetrack. (It's kinda hard to
explain. Try it out yourself and you'll see what I mean.) Take out your
taunter and go to some boxes on the racetrack. Now make Ratchet face the
boxes and use your taunter on the boxes and the money will flow to you.
ALTHOUGH it will only continuosly flow to you if none of the boxes appear on
your screen. So ratchet has to face the boxes, but the boxes cannot appear on
your TV screen or else it wont work. Now put something on the O button of
your PS2 controller so Ratchet will keep using the taunter. Then do whatever
you want. Take a nap, go to the movies, go to school, eat a PB & J, enjoy the
great outdoors, whatever. And while your doing this, ratchet will be using
his taunter getting you more and more bolts. In about four hours, I got about
110,000 bolts. I'm not so good at explaining things, so I hope you
understood! Good luck!

Worked like a champ and in the morning when I woke up I had 260,000 bolts. I am such a nerd. But not as big a nerd as that FAQ maintainer. He's rockin' the ASCII art ... ASCII art!

Technorati Tags: ratchet & clank

I was poking around the Flock bugzilla instance to see if anyone else had reported not being able to post to their blog from Flock. newPost xml-rpc not quite right (my emphasis in italicized bold).

recent versions of drupal (http://drupal.org/) use an XML-RPC that does strict
type checking against method signatures. as such, newPost (metaweblog or
blogger) fails on drupal because Flock sends the "publish" paramater as an "int"
rather than a "boolean" as the spec calls for.

So, let's see, what happens if I now add the following method to blojsom's MetaWeblog API handler.

public String newPost(String blogid, String userid, String password, Hashtable struct, int publish) throws Exception {
return newPost(blogid, userid, password, struct, (publish == 0) ? false : true);
}

Let's try posting to a local blog and see what messages we have on the console. Are we happy yet?

Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - newPost() Called ===========[ SUPPORTED ]=====
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - BlogId: testing/
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - UserId: david
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Password: *********
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Publish: true
Oct 24 15:30:40 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Created blog entry file: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.html
Oct 24 15:30:41 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Saved meta-data to: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:30:41 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor25] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Loaded meta-data from: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:30:41 DEBUG [Thread-35] weblogsping.WeblogsPingPlugin - Pinged notification URLs based on blog entry event

So, the question is, who needs to change? Do I need to change blojsom's handlers to support software that is sending an int when it should be sending a boolean as per the specification? There isn't a specification I've looked at (1, 2, 3) where anyone is calling for an int in place of a boolean. It's easy enough to add and this isn't meant to be that much of a bitch, but come on here

And yes, as noted in the comments, an XML-RPC console panel would help to debug. But, a little localhost action goes a long way.

P.S. Also needed to update the editPost function as well.

public boolean editPost(String postid, String userid, String password, Hashtable struct, int publish) throws Exception {
return editPost(postid, userid, password, struct, (publish == 0) ? false : true);
}

Which yields entry editing happiness.

Oct 24 15:50:01 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - editPost() Called ========[ SUPPORTED ]=====
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - PostId: testing/?permalink=Test-post-from-Flock.html
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - UserId: david
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Password: *********
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] handlers.MetaWeblogAPIHandler - Publish: true
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Loaded meta-data from: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor22] blog.FileBackedBlogEntry - Saved meta-data to: /Users/czarnecki/weblogs/testing/Test-post-from-Flock.meta
Oct 24 15:50:02 DEBUG [Thread-38] weblogsping.WeblogsPingPlugin - Pinged notification URLs based on blog entry event

And with that, we're done.

Technorati Tags: flock xml-rpc blojsom