Update: NATURALLY, after doing all of this I learned that I was given the wrong information. Turns out Mailman is more than happy to take a huge mbox file as input for the arch script. I did learn that running clean_arch on the mbox first is a good idea…

Are you like me? Do you get upset when you have to deal with an almost decade old problem that you had nothing to do with? Well then I’ve got a story for you…

So we’ve got these archives…

Our organization was using Lyris ListServ for about the past 10 years to handle all of our discussion list. Like most MLM’s, ListServ does have the ability to keep list archives…but naturally we opted to not use them for all of our lists. Big mistake.

Instead of list archives we have a user on our webserver called ‘archive’. Archive is subscribed to each and every list and gets copies of all the messages. When the messages come in, Archive processes them with a procmail script and separates them into mbox mailboxes for each of the lists.

Each of the mails are then piped to a program called mhonarc which converts them into html and provides an index, etc – which can be displayed on our current(old) website. But now we’ve got a new website coming up…

Enter GNU Mailman

Me:

Thank you for coming Mailman. I’m really glad to have you because you do a really good job, not to mention you’re free and uber-powerful… One thing though… We’ve got these uh, gulp “archives”. We, uh, need to keep them and everything but you know, they’re like, not in the greatest shape. See, there actually in mbox format…

Mailman:

Oh yeah, that’s not a problem at all. I’ve got a built in script to to do that. Just take all of the monthly mailbox files for each of your lists and drop them in my folder – I’ll knock them out in no time!

Me:

SWEET! But what did you say about monthly whatevers?

Mailman:

The mailbox files that you create every month for each list… You are using your procmail script to start a new mailbox file every month aren’t you? Putting 10 years worth of emails into a single monolithic file would be retarded…

Me:

Oh yeah yeah… Of course we did that. I thought you were talking about something else. Silly me. Anyway, so uh, yeah, I’ll get those file to you real soon.

Breaking up the monolith

So clearly I needed to edit the procmail script a little bit and reprocess all the mail – but WTH?

Last month I had a help desk ticket come my way about a list which was not appearing on the website, and hadn’t been for a number of months. After digging around, I realized that someone (almost certainly me) had made a mistake in the .procmailrc file which had kept it from processing mail for that list. This was embarrasing, but I discovered how to reprocess mail with formail.

I knew I could probably reprocess all of the mail (many thousands) but had absolutely no clue how to do it. I had only this one clue from my procmail recipe:

LOGFILE=$PMDIR/list_archive-`date +%Y-%m`.log

They had written it to rotate the logs, but not the mailbox names! Uncool! But at least I had my answer – `date +%Y-%m` can get the date into the names…But wait!

When I rewrote my procmail file like so:

#this is just one of many
:0 E
     * ^Sender:.*LIST-L
     {
       :0 c
       LIST-L.`date +%Y%m` #to match mailmans archive format...
     }

Totally not working! It created only one file, and the date was this month and this year.

I’ll fast-forward for the benefit of the reader at this point and just share an insight with you: date is a *nix command and has nothing to do with procmail and cannot get any data out of the emails themselves – like dates! Yes that’s right, you can put anything you want in between those little ticks, but because the date command only returns the system date, we’ve got to do two things:

1. Get the date the email was sent out of the email header (Magic)
2. Process the date field to have only the 4 digit year and 2 digit month (More Magic)

It gets easier from here…

Getting the date field

The first thing we need to do is nab the Date: header from the emails. This part is fairly straight forward. Procmail uses a variable $MATCH to hold the matched string for the rule that it’s matching on. We can use this to hold our Date header and then just pipe it to a script for processing.

Here’s the recipe magic!

# NOTE: I later found that this rule only seems to work
# when used as an ELSE rule (:0 E). I'm not sure why, but
# it was only matching the 'Date:' portion, and not the entire
# line. If you can help me understand why, please leave a comment.
# ANOTHER NOTE: The ticks in `echo $MATCH.... are ticks(the
# un-shifted tilde) and not single quotes.

:0 E
     * ^Sender:.*LIST-L
     {
       :0 c
       * ^\/Date:.*
       LIST-L.`echo $MATCH | php /path/to/dateconvert.php`
     }

Transforming the date into Mailman’s monthly format

Here’s the php code more magic to get your date cut down and switched around to a format Mailman will love. It uses php’s built in functions fairy dust to put the Date header into an array, and drop the empty elements. It was also necessary to create an array that maps the three letter month names used in the email header to their numerical equivalents.

< ?php
 $date = trim(fgets(STDIN));
 
 $datearray = array_values(array_filter(explode(" ", $date)));
 
 $month = $datearray[3];
 $year = $datearray[4];
 
 $montharray = array(
 "Jan" => "01",
 "Feb" => "02",
 "Mar" => "03",
 "Apr" => "04",
 "May" => "05",
 "Jun" => "06",
 "Jul" => "07",
 "Aug" => "08",
 "Sep" => "09",
 "Oct" => "10",
 "Nov" => "11",
 "Dec" => "12"
 );
 
 echo $year . $montharray[$datearray[3]];
?>

At this point you’re probably thinking one of two things:

1. “ZOMG you’re such a hack. You could have done that with so much less code! You have no style!”
2. “ZOMG you can totally do that with a sed/awk one liner!”

Sorry for wasting everyone’s time yet again.

After you’ve got the recipe in place and the php file all ready to go, just give it one of these:

Final product

Anyway, you should, after a few hours or days end up with a grip of mailbox files like this:

               LIST-L.200306  LIST-L.200502  LIST-L.200701
 	        LIST-L.200307  LIST-L.200503  LIST-L.200702
LIST-L.200112  LIST-L.200308  LIST-L.200504  LIST-L.200703
LIST-L.200201  LIST-L.200309  LIST-L.200505  LIST-L.200704
LIST-L.200202  LIST-L.200310  LIST-L.200506  LIST-L.200705
LIST-L.200203  LIST-L.200311  LIST-L.200507  LIST-L.200707
LIST-L.200204  LIST-L.200312  LIST-L.200509  LIST-L.200708
LIST-L.200205  LIST-L.200401  LIST-L.200511  LIST-L.200709
LIST-L.200206  LIST-L.200402  LIST-L.200512  LIST-L.200710
LIST-L.200207  LIST-L.200403  LIST-L.200601  LIST-L.200711
LIST-L.200208  LIST-L.200404  LIST-L.200602  LIST-L.200712
LIST-L.200209  LIST-L.200405  LIST-L.200603  LIST-L.200801
LIST-L.200210  LIST-L.200406  LIST-L.200604  LIST-L.200802
LIST-L.200211  LIST-L.200407  LIST-L.200605  LIST-L.200803
LIST-L.200212  LIST-L.200408  LIST-L.200606  LIST-L.200804
LIST-L.200301  LIST-L.200409  LIST-L.200607  LIST-L.200805
LIST-L.200302  LIST-L.200410  LIST-L.200608  LIST-L.200806
LIST-L.200303  LIST-L.200411  LIST-L.200610  LIST-L.200807
LIST-L.200304  LIST-L.200412  LIST-L.200611
LIST-L.200305  LIST-L.200501  LIST-L.200612

So there ya go. Now make with the comments.

Typo is blog software written in Ruby, and available as a gem for Rails. It’s what is currently running this website. It’ has it’s pluses but over time it’s grown aggravating to me. I’ve decided to move on to another platform, but I’m not sure which at this point.

If by the time you are done reading this post you feel like Typo would be a good fit for you, you can download Typo and try it yourself. I’m by no means the expert in these matters, and what might not work for me might be right up your alley.

Why I picked Typo in the first place

When I was originally looking for a blog software to use I had these basic requirements:

• Not what everyone else was using(Wordpress, Blogger)
• Not written in PHP

I didn’t want to use what everyone else was using because in most things – I like to be different. The fact is that I am different from most people, and I tend to make that known.

I wanted to use a product that was not written in PHP because as an aspiring programmer, I’d rather be using a more cutting edge language like Ruby or Python. Not only is the code of Ruby/Python easier to write and the languages more interesting, but the jobs you get when you know them pay very much more than with PHP, whose programmers are a dime a dozen. I’m not saying that it’s not worth knowing – indeed PHP may be the most useful language to know due to it’s ubiquity. Also, I don’t want to offend any of the PHP programmers who may be reading – I’m envious of your skills(read: skillz).

Ok, so why Typo? Well looking back I didn’t look into things all that well. I ended up turning all the negatives into positives which isn’t a very smart thing to do. At some point, mostly for very shallow reasons I decided that Ruby was a little cooler than Python, so having eliminated all of the Python blog software(there aren’t many) I had a very very short list to choose from. When I tried the demo of Typo I was fairly impressed by the admin interface. Also even though there were very few themes available, I really liked the one I have applied here(scribbish).

What I don’t like about Typo

Lack of community

One thing about open-source software is that it really needs a large and active community. This is extremely evident when you start using projects like Drupal, Ubuntu, Eclipse, and so on. Typo is not like that at all. It’s basically just one person developing with a few other making commits. This really leads to nowhere fast.

If you read the first blog post I wrote on this website you’ll see the difficulty I encountered just getting up and running. This was due almost entirely because of Typo development that wasn’t keeping pace with the development of it’s fundaments – Ruby/Rails. Even after working around the issues I was having, an entire section of my admin area is broken. Looking in the svn repo for Typo I’ve found that there is an experimental branch for Ruby 1.8.7, but it’s pretty clear that it’s not going to be finished before Ruby increments again.

Lack of features

Obviously since this is an open-source project, this is intimately tied to the lack of community – but there are things that should have been available at the outset. For example: users(myself included) cannot log into the public side of the website. This makes it very annoying for commenters – having to retype their info each time, and not being able to edit their comments – but also for me If I want to edit anything I have to do it from the admin side.

Another feature missing that is somewhat related to front-side logging in is a feature that I first saw in WP – private posts. The ability to make a post that only permitted users can see is essential for the entire concept of weblog. The idea that everything I publish should be public is ludicrous.

Plug-ins. Again, because plug-ins are almost by definition community contributed I wouldn’t expect to see too many of them – but the number available is really pathetic. Less than 20 are available, and almost all are totally useless to 99.9% of people on the internet.

This brings me to my next point:

Why I’m dumb

I managed to turn every one of the things I’ve identified as negative about Typo into a positive.

Q: Don’t you want to use a product with a huge community? A: No, I want to be different!

Q: Don’t you want to have thousands of plug-ins available? A: I’ll just write whatever I need!

Q: Don’t you want blogging to be easy? A: …

So yeah, now I realize that if you want to actually, say, write blogs then you have to have the time to do that. I want to learn Ruby – of course – but I want to write quick blogs about my accomplishments too. Starting a blog as a learning project means you have neither a blog or a project – just a bunch of stagnation. In my case I opted to write blog after blog and never have the features I wanted, feeling pissed off all the while. not good.

So, what to use now?

Honestly I’m leaning towards WordPress. It’s the obvious choice for obvious reasons, but until I have a couple hours to look again at all of the(free, open-source) options – I can’t make a final decision.

I’d still like to look at Ruby/Python blog softwares, and this time not because I want a pet project. I’ll look at performance issues – I know that Ruby, but especially Python will outperform PHP, but after caching is taken into account the difference may be negligible.

I don’t think WordPress is inherently insecure – as some assert it is due to it’s open-source nature(unlike windoze, which is SO secure!), but it might be vulnerable due to it’s high usage and therefore high rate of attack(just like windoze!). But that’s all anecdotal – I don’t know security in general much less the minute details of the WP code.

Mephisto is another Ruby blog, but it looks like it suffers from the same problems as does Typo. I’d love to do either one of these if I could get paid to work on them.

Anyway…I’ll just keep looking around for now. Post a comment if you want to make a suggestion! (Sorry it won’t remember your user info and I won’t be notified of new comments)

Since attending HighEdWeb 2008 and going to Jason Woodward’s Workshop on XML/XSLT, I’ve been really interested in the possibilities of using XSL to tranform a well-formed XML file into almost anything – especially another type of file, such as XHTML.

This topic is totally new to me, and I’ve never had the chance to use it in a real life scenario. I have played around a little bit with a hypothetical exercise though, and wanted to post my solution for others to use, and hopefully, offer some criticism on. Please do comment if you can think of a better or more elegant solution.

The business need

Develop a single web page that shows Henry’s current inventory. Develop a single page using XHTML standards that shows the inventory using XSL. CSS will be in the head of the XSL page and will be used to style the page. The page will show the widgets grouped by the type of metal in alphabetical order, and then the widgets in order of price with the lowest price item shown first (the list of widgets is only shown once in the page). Lastly, the out of stock widgets should be formatted differently than the ones that are in stock. Tables will be used to layout the web page.

The XML

I developed this XML a few weeks ago, and even wrote another post patting myself on the back for having authored a schema defining my widgets, but here is a snippet:

< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="inventory.xsl"?>
<inventory xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
  xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="inventory.xsd">
  <widget>
    <material>Aluminium</material>
    <length units="ft">1</length>
    <width units="in">2</width>
    <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
    <price units="USD">15.00</price>
    <stockqty>25</stockqty>
  </widget>
...
</inventory>

The good stuff – XSLT

I think learning XSLT was equal parts learning to understand XSL and then learning the intricacies of Xpath – especially as it relates to <xsl:apply-templates /> and matching/selecting the elements. Anyway here’s what I came up with:

<xsl :stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  </xsl><xsl :template match="/">
    <html>
      <head>
        <title>Henry's Widget Shoppe</title>
        
      </head>
      <body>
        <h2>Here's my available widgets!</h2>
        <table id="Inventory">
          <tr class="tableHead">
            <td>Material Type</td>
            <td>Length</td>
            <td>Width</td>
            <td>Thickness</td>
            <td>Price</td>
            <td>Stock Qty</td>
          </tr>
          <xsl :apply-templates />
        </table>
      </body>
    </html>
    </xsl>

    <xsl :template match="inventory">
      </xsl><xsl :for-each select="widget">
        <xsl :sort select="material" order="ascending"/>
        <xsl :sort select="price" data-type="number" order="ascending"/>
        </xsl><xsl :choose>
          </xsl><xsl :when test="stockQty>0">
            <tr class="widget">
              <xsl :apply-templates select="." />
            </tr>
          </xsl>
          <xsl :otherwise>
            <tr class="widget outOfStock">
              <xsl :apply-templates select="." />
            </tr>
          </xsl>
          
                    
    

    <xsl :template match="widget">
            <td class="material">
              <xsl :value-of select="material"/>
            </td>
            <td class="length">
              <xsl :value-of select="length"/>
              <xsl :value-of select="length/@units"/>
            </td>
            <td class="width">
              <xsl :value-of select="width"/>
              <xsl :value-of select="width/@units"/>
            </td>
            <td class="thickness">
              <xsl :value-of select="thickness"/>
              <xsl :value-of select="thickness/@units"/>
            </td>
            <td class="price">
              <xsl :if test="price[@units] != 'USD'">$</xsl>
              <xsl :value-of select="price"/>
            </td>
            <td class="stockQty">
              <xsl :value-of select="stockQty"/>
            </td>
    </xsl>

Conclusion

I did make several improvements and tried alternate strategies over the weekend, so this isn’t exactly what I first puked out. All in all, I’m very pleased with it. This was probably one of the most valuable self learning exercises I’ve yet had.

Download the source here and/or View the transformed XML here

Having only been really introduced to XML a week ago, I’m proud to announce my first go at authoring an XML Schema. I can’t say it was really fun, but it was very interesting to be sure. I think XML in general is neat, but creating a schema really gave new insights into how XML files can and should be designed.

Please, if you can propose improvements – leave me a comment!

The sample XML file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<inventory
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="inventory.xsd">
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">5.00</price>
        <stockQty>25</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">10.00</price>
        <stockQty>15</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">12.50</price>
        <stockQty>16</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">15.00</price>
        <stockQty>8</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">15.00</price>
        <stockQty>25</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">30.00</price>
        <stockQty>13</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">35.00</price>
        <stockQty>11</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Aluminium</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">40.00</price>
        <stockQty>4</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">5.50</price>
        <stockQty>19</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">11.00</price>
        <stockQty>17</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">15.00</price>
        <stockQty>3</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">1</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">16.50</price>
        <stockQty>8</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">16.00</price>
        <stockQty>21</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">2</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">30.00</price>
        <stockQty>13</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.25</thickness>
        <price units="USD">35.00</price>
        <stockQty>18</stockQty>
    </widget>
    <widget>
        <material>Copper</material>
        <length units="ft">10</length>
        <width units="in">4</width>
        <thickness units="in">.5</thickness>
        <price units="USD">44.00</price>
        <stockQty>2</stockQty>
    </widget>
</inventory>

The Schema

<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <xsd:annotation>
        <xsd:documentation xml:lang="en">
            Widget Schema for Henry's Widgets.
            Copyright 2008 Henry's Widgets Inc.
        </xsd:documentation>
    </xsd:annotation>

    <xsd:element name="inventory" type="inventoryType"/> 

    <xsd:complexType name="inventoryType">
      <xsd:annotation>
        <xsd:documentation>
          The inventory contains a number of widget elements of 
          which are defined by the complexType 'widgetType'
        </xsd:documentation>
      </xsd:annotation>
        <xsd:sequence>
            <xsd:element name="widget" type="widgetType"  minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
        </xsd:sequence>
    </xsd:complexType>

  <xsd:simpleType name="materialType">
    <xsd:annotation>
      <xsd:documentation>
        This type defines the possible valid materials for widgets.
        This could be easily extended, but currently only includes 
        Aluminium and Copper.
      </xsd:documentation>
    </xsd:annotation>
    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
      <xsd:enumeration value="Aluminium"/>
      <xsd:enumeration value="Copper"/>
    </xsd:restriction>
  </xsd:simpleType>

    <xsd:complexType name="widgetType">
      <xsd:annotation>
        <xsd:documentation>
          This type defines widgets. Some of the elements have 'unit' attributes that have fixed values. These could be extended.
        </xsd:documentation>
      </xsd:annotation>
        <xsd:sequence>
            <xsd:element name="material"  type="materialType"/>
            <xsd:element name="length">
                <xsd:complexType>
                    <xsd:simpleContent>
                        <xsd:extension base="xsd:decimal">
                            <xsd:attribute name="units" type="xsd:string" fixed="ft" use="required"/>
                        </xsd:extension>
                    </xsd:simpleContent>
                </xsd:complexType>
            </xsd:element>
            <xsd:element name="width">
                <xsd:complexType>
                    <xsd:simpleContent>
                        <xsd:extension base="xsd:decimal">
                            <xsd:attribute name="units" type="xsd:string" fixed="in" use="required"/>
                        </xsd:extension>
                    </xsd:simpleContent>
                </xsd:complexType>
            </xsd:element>
            <xsd:element name="thickness">
                <xsd:complexType>
                    <xsd:simpleContent>
                        <xsd:extension base="xsd:decimal">
                            <xsd:attribute name="units" type="xsd:string" fixed="in" use="required"/>
                        </xsd:extension>
                    </xsd:simpleContent>
                </xsd:complexType>
            </xsd:element>
            <xsd:element name="price">
                <xsd:complexType>
                    <xsd:simpleContent>
                        <xsd:extension base="xsd:decimal">
                            <xsd:attribute name="units" type="xsd:string" fixed="USD" use="required"/>
                        </xsd:extension>
                    </xsd:simpleContent>
                </xsd:complexType>
            </xsd:element>
            <xsd:element name="stockQty"     type="xsd:nonNegativeInteger"/>
        </xsd:sequence>
    </xsd:complexType>
</xsd:schema>

Again, this is just my first try at this. I hope to improve my skills. Next, XSLT!

Zipped source: inventory.zip