Skip to content

{ Author Archives } Danny

Jewish History from a Unique Perspective

My children's Jewish history teacher, Rabbi Yonason Goldson has been teaching at Block Yeshiva High School for many years and presents Jewish history with a mix of traditional and scholarly sources, always from a Torah-true perspective and always looking at the broad sweep of history and the Jews' role in it. He has now published [...]
2010 02 19 Judaism Comments (0)

Engauge Digitizer Tutorial

A simple walkthrough to use the Engauge Digitizer to pull values off a "printed" graph There's a far more complete manual that comes with the download, but these are the steps I used to generate the data for the webservices graphs. It assumes you've got a black and white image of the graph, with continuous lines for [...]
2010 01 14 Medical Informatics Comments (2)

Digitizing graphs

I wanted to add Down Syndrome growth charts to the bililite.com webservices, but as far as I can tell, the charts are available only as images in the AAP's guidelines (and the original paper; subscription only). The often-cited growthcharts.com has charts, and Greg Richards was generous enough to share his data with me. However, some [...]
2010 01 10 Medical Informatics Comments (0)

Parsing the HTTP Accept: header

I wanted the webservices to be as RESTful as possible, so they should use the Accept: header rather than file name extensions to determine the type.
2010 01 06 PHP Comments (0)

bililite.com webservices

I've been spending my project time learning how to manipulate images in PHP to let me create custom growth charts and the like, with a RESTful interface that would allow them to be used as the source of <img> elements. I like the way things turned out; they are available at bililite.com/webservices/. It includes height,weight, [...]
2009 12 31 Medical Informatics
PHP Comments (0)

Hacked!

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Last month, the Young Israel site was hacked and destroyed. A little talking with my ISP's tech support reminded me that I had an old version of Wordpress on the site, in a folder called "wordpress," and that it contained a vulnerability that make the vandalism possible. When I [...]
2009 11 17 Web Design Comments (0)

Column Widths in OOo Tables

Finding the width of a column in a table in OpenOffice.org writer is a bit of a black art, because the widths aren't stored anywhere, just the relative widths in arbitrary units. And if cells have been combined, then the object model has no concept of "columns" and there is no way to find the [...]
2009 10 16 OpenOffice.org Comments (0)

OpenOffice.org FontDescriptor

OOo controls have a Struct FontDescriptor that contains all the information about the text (font name, point size, etc.) so one would hope that to make an editbox have the same font as the containing text range, all you would have to do is textField.fontDescriptor = textRange.fontDescriptor but no such luck. FontDescriptors apply to everything but actual [...]
2009 10 15 OpenOffice.org Comments (0)

Preventing Irony Deficiency

Today was the last day of a 3-month locum stint and they had a lunch for me. Ham and cheese subs. And someone who knew what kosher meant brought in Cheezits (my main vice). But it's sukkot, so I couldn't eat those in the office either.
2009 10 07 Uncategorized Comments (0)

OOo Tutorial on Exporting to PDF

There's a great tutorial on exporting from OpenOffice.org Writer to PDF, but as far as I can tell it's orphaned on the openoffice.org website; there's no link from the tutorials page. It documents all the properties of the export filter and goes through the process in great detail. Hopefully the link from this blog [...]
2009 10 06 OpenOffice.org Comments (0)