RSS to CSV Converter

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 I couldn’t find a suitable method on my slightly out of date Excel 2003, but sent Tony a link explaining how Excel 2007 could get him closer to what he wants.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…

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Private Browsing as a Developer Tool

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,…

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Posted in: Web

Local Flash Files Reveal Browsing History

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.

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Posted in: Web

Cash for Clunkers Market Distribution

Here’s a quick comparison of the market share for US auto sales compared with participation in the Car Allowance Rebate System (aka “Cash for Clunkers”). The distribution of rebates among top manufacturers tracks pretty closely to their recent market share. But, if you look closely, you’ll see that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are all slightly below expectations, while all the imports (except VW) are above. Conclusion: import manufacturers got a larger share of the incentive program than their general market share would anticipate.

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