Month: January 2009

I’ve been looking for a spreadsheet widget for dashboard for along time, something to quickly blot without loading up a full spreadsheet like open office, excel or numbers. I was thinking of writing my own, but I’ve been trying not to program so much “pointless” stuff and focus on what really matters. This lead me to the idea of using Mac OSX’s webclip feature that lets you create a widget from any webpage.

I originally tried Google Docs with a public spreadsheet, but something went wrong with the javascript. A quick wikipedia and I discovered Zoho’s public spreadsheet. It worked great as you can see from the image!

Just a quick note saying I’ve released a REST library that I’ve been using in some of my work. There currently exits a version in PHP and Java and it signs the POST parameters with a key, so that you can be sure of client authenticity:

http://code.google.com/p/randr/

I was writing a program and needed a Java class that would read some text a line at a time but also tell you what the last line seperator was, whether a line feed, carriage return or both. It was written very quickly, and may not be perfect, and it requires a java.io.Reader in the constructor that returns true for markSupported()

You can download it here: SmartBufferedReader.java

I spent some time fixing some bugs in my facebook comments wordpress plugin. It uses a lot of regular expressions to scrape data from facebook. Regular expressions can be a real pain to get working, but I recently found this website that helps you test them in PHP:

PHP regular expression tester

This is also useful:
Regular expression cheat sheet

Just blogging and saying thanks for everyone that’s downloaded one of my plugins for wordpress. Its made me the 352nd most popular plugin author by number of downloads.

http://4webmasters.nicuilie.eu/2008/12/top-1000-wordpress-plugin-authors/