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{ Author Archives } Danny

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 [...]
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 [...]
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 will [...]
2009 10 06 OpenOffice.org Comments (0)

OpenOffice.org quirks

Some of the first things I needed to get straight to move from Microsoft Office scripting to Open Office scripting: The BASIC isn't quite compatible: I know the object model is completely different, but even the underlying language isn't quite the same. I wanted to use the InStrRev function, but it wasn't there! Then I [...]
2009 09 22 OpenOffice.org Comments (0)

Diving into OpenOffice.org

My hospital isn't fully electronic yet; they use a hybrid system where doctors notes and orders are written on paper, to be scanned into the electronic chart at the end of the patient's stay. Everything else (nurse's notes, labs, radiology results) are electronic. It actually works pretty well, with most of the advantages of an [...]
2009 09 08 Medical Informatics
OpenOffice.org Comments (0)

Things I Learned About .htaccess

All I wanted was to get a better 404 page for the bililite.com site and to use mod_rewrite to standardize my pages. Of course, nothing is ever simple and mod_rewrite is voodoo. So it took a week of experimenting, pulling my hair and staring at a lot of 500 errors, but I think I got [...]
2009 07 27 Web Design Comments (0)

Updating timepickr

Updated for jQuery UI 1.8 3/25/2010 I like Maxime Haineault's timepickr. But I found it was written for jQuery 1.2, and didn't trigger events correctly with the current jQuery. It also had more dependencies than I wanted, to the extent that the minified version is 49k large, and had some CSS quirks in Internet Explorer [...]
2009 07 09 jQuery Comments (49)