Still finding more reasons to play with and learn YQL, and following up from my experiment with random numbers, today I implemented YQL support for lipsum.com, a “Lorem Ipsum” text generator.
I recently discovered a very cool random number generator site appropriately called Random.org. After poking around a bit at the various generators available on the site, I created a custom data table to access these random number services via Yahoo’s YQL engine.
Recently @tonyadam was asking about for a way to import Twitter search results into Excel via RSS or CSV. I couldn’t find a suitable method on my slightly out of date Excel 2003, but sent Tony a link explaining how Excel 2007 could get him closer to what he wants. Turns out he was on the Mac anyways, so we needed an alternative way. Importing into Excel usual involves using the CSV format. So all we needed was an RSS to CSV format converter, but surprisingly couldn’t find anything relevant on the web. In general there isn’t much interest in…
Having spent the better part of today debugging a problem with cookies on a couple different servers, I stumbled on the fact that the “Private Browsing” feature of Firefox was exceptionally handy for my situation. Private browsing is usually touted as a feature for “porn browsing”, or other activities in which you’re trying to not leave a trail. The same cleanroom features make it ideal for testing and developing web applications. In a typical case where you’d need to clear browser history, clear cookies, and so on, I would usually keep one browser set up with developer tools (bugs, twiki,…
While doing some housekeeping cleanup on my Windows laptop, I noticed an interesting set of files under the Adobe/Macromedia Flash section in “Application Data”. Inside a directory called `#SharedObjects` was a set of sub-directories named after domains I had visited. Each directory contained one or more `.sol` files which I discovered are Local Shared Objects, basically local data storage for Flash components.