As I wrote a while ago I’ve been using Linux 100% now, no more Windows for work. Things have been going well since the switch and even though Wine won’t run a few apps I need Windows for work provides terminal services for access.

Every week their seems to be something new when it comes to supporting applications at work. That is not suppose to be my main job these days but when the phone rings it’s hard to say “sorry call Support”. So when the question came yesterday, “what does this cryptic error message mean other than the xml data is bad”, I turned again to open source software to provide an answer.

At first I thought it was odd being asked to trouble shoot an issue this way but I’m always up for a challenge. So to answer the question I needed to validate the data against the xml schema. The schema I did not have, those who were asking the question did … which is why I thought it was odd. So I asked for the schema and set off to find a tool to do the validation. Most browsers today will parse xml which is very helpful to identify illeal characters and tags that aren’t closed. However validating against schema is another story.

After some googling and checking both Screem and Geany, as I use both, I came across MLView. A simple little gui that can create, modify and validate xml documents. It installed in 30 seconds and a minute after that I had my answer. BTW -Their was nothing wrong with the data it was the transport.

It’s refreshing to know that solutions to problems are but a click away where in many instances others have already created something to meet the same challenge. The web is a wonderful tool, open source makes it that much better.