Don’t call me DOM

When developing a CGI script and before putting on the production server, you need to test it; to catch runtime errors, but more generally, to check if you get the expected result depending on the parameters.

To emulate a GET request without setting up a Web server, the easiest method is probably to set the QUERY_STRING and REQUEST_METHOD environment variables and run the script through its interpreter, e.g. REQUEST_METHOD="GET" QUERY_STRING="foo=bar" php4 filename.php.

Well, this used to work till recently – I assumed it broke with PHP 4.3 release; nowadays, the php4 executable comes in two flavours: the CLI and the CGI SAPI; the former is designed to be use out of Web context, so isn’t much relevant to this case.  Read more... (271 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

Today, I finally found the time and the motivation to update the W3C Glossary system to make it use the SKOS schema that was developed as part of the W3C SWAD Europe Thesaurus activity; as I said in the related announcemen, this was mostly changing a few namespaces declarations and element names, since the custom RDF Schema that we had developed for the project was so close to SKOS’ one.

Well, of course, it wasn’t as easy as it should have been, since there was always something I had forgot to check in my regexp, but really, it didn’t take more than a couple of hours.  Read more... (193 words, estimated 46 secs reading time)

Having discovered the RDF Vocabulary to describe countries one has visited that Morten had developed and integrated in a WordPress plug-in, and seeing the nice results it gives in the FOAF explorer, I decided I wanted to use it, too.

But I was kind of reluctant to use the WordPress plug-in for this: I don’t want to put too much in my wordpress set up, and generally speaking, I’d rather avoid using too much of the database infrastructure that comes with it. Plus, I already had a list of countries I visited in XHTML on my personal web site, and it didn’t look like a good practice to duplicate that.  Read more... (468 words, estimated 1:52 mins reading time)