What is Lorem Ipsum text? The lipsum.com site explains:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

I made a simple custom data table to access this service via YQL. To use these services, you’ll need to reference the custom table I created, then “select” some random text. The service can create text in a specified amount of either paragraphs, words, bytes, or lists. You can also control whether or not you want each string to start at “lorem ipsum…”, or to start randomly.

For example, to request 5 paragraphs (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/lorem.ipsum.xml";
select * from lorem.ipsum 
  where amount="5" and what="paras";

To request 20 lists (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/lorem.ipsum.xml";
select * from lorem.ipsum
  where amount="20" and what="lists";

As a quick exercise, I made custom data tables to access these random number services via YQL, Yahoo’s “select * from internet” service. To use these services in YQL, you’ll need to include the custom tables I created, then “select” some random numbers.

For example, to request a few random numbers (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/random.integers.xml";
select * from random.integers 
  where num="10" and min="1" and max="1000";

To request a random sequence, where every number in the range is used once (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/random.sequences.xml";
select * from random.sequences 
  where min="10" and max="19";

To generate some random strings (try it in YQL Console):

use "http://scooterlabs.com/yql/random.strings.xml";
select * from random.strings 
  where num="10" and len="20";

For a full description of each service, and more optional parameters, refer to the Random.org HTTP interface description.

Update 2010-02-25: I heard back from the owner of the Random.org site who said he has been blocking all Yahoo! Pipes traffic. So, this YQL query may stop working at some point.

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 XML to CSV conversion because it would only make sense for the simplest of XML files — basically, one table with rows & columns. Anything more complicated won’t fit within the confines of CSV.

To solve this problem, I created an RSS to CSV converter script, using a bit of YQL for the feed fetching and parsing.

We can test it using Tony’s original request — Twitter search results — as follows:

1. Login to twitter
2. Search for something (my sample: nascar)
3. On the right-hand side, copy the “RSS feed for this query link”
4. Go to RSS to CSV converter
5. Paste in Twitter RSS link, changing “.atom” to “.rss” (my sample: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=nascar)
6. Click Submit
7. Save CSV file when prompted, or import into Excel

One problem I discovered (again) is that Excel is not happy with Unicode characters in CSV format. There are some alternatives described, so I may enhance this script to properly handle UTF-8 if someone has a use-case for it.

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, etc.), and launch another browser to be the guinea pig. With private browsing, I can now use my preferred browser (Firefox) for both cases.

I’m not so worried about the privacy aspects of the sites using this local storage; it’s very similar to the issues with normal browser cookies. The surprising thing was the existence of this file set, essentially revealing all of the sites you had ever visited. In my case I had 217 unique domains from November 2007 through today.

For more info, see the recent article on Wired: You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again, or the Adobe article What are local shared objects?. In the meantime, if you care about keeping your browsing history safe, remember to clear out these files regularly.

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.

Data sources:

• Market share (July 2009), Wall Street Journal online
• Cash for Clunkers data (August 26 2009), CARS website

I tried the old trusty CSV file export/import path, but even after painstakingly assigning field names to columns, the results were still jumbled (home phone number labeled as Work, and so on). The Palm Desktop CSV import/export process still has a few bugs in it, including not being able to reliably label the exported fields.

Enter vCard. Palm Desktop does have vCard support (for single or multiple contacts), and does fill in the fields more accurately. And Outlook accepts them as an import format. The only hitch was that Outlook can only handle vCard files with a single contact. Rather than repeat that process for several hundred contacts, I tried (then bought) vCard ImportExport by Topalt.com. This simple Outlook add-in lets Outlook handle vCards with multiple contacts.

With my new vCard software in hand, here’s the process that ultimately worked best for transferring my contacts from Palm Desktop to Outlook:

1. In Palm Desktop, export each category of contacts to its own vCard (.vcf) file (e.g., Personal category -> personal.vcf)
2. In Outlook, use vCard ImportExport to import the first category vCard file
3. Select all contacts just imported and assign to that category (normally they come in with no category assigned)
4. Repeat steps 2-3 for remaining categories

The only problem I encountered was that the Notes field from the Palm Desktop side ended up in Notes and in Web Page fields in Outlook. Not sure if this is a bug with the importer, or Outlook itself. I wrote a quick Outlook macro to clean those up.

I did not work on Yahoo! 360­°, nor was I a serious user of it. I’m sure a lot of existing users are frustrated either because Profiles doesn’t do what they want, or the simple fact that it’s just different. I will say that if a product like this is no longer a high priority internally and does not have a clear future, it’s really best to close it down (in an orderly fashion) and redirect those internal resources elsewhere. Even without any new feature development, the ops impact alone for keeping a service like this online is pretty significant.

For those that are looking for help with 360° migration or other issues, please see the online help.

Tonight I’m releasing a big update to the site: we now have a “home” or index page at Cantoni.mobi. The home page has a list of categories, each of which are now on their own page. The structure is to simply add the category name in the URL, so News junkies for example could bookmark: http://cantoni.mobi/news/.

With the split, the home page is once again really lightweight (under 3KB) while the category pages are all under 8KB each.