anilmakhijani.com » planetdev

Planet WordPress Plugin Released

Anil — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:01:38 +0000

I love the Planet feed aggregator, but I hate managing it via a text configuration file. I created a WordPress plugin that automatically creates a Planet configuration file from the links that are stored in a WordPress database. Every time a link is updated, deleted, or created, a new planet configuration is generated.

For more information on how to install and configure the plugin, visit the plugin’s homepage. The source code for the plugin is hosted at wordpress.org.

DataIO

Anil — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:26:18 +0000

A few weeks ago my employer helped the NY State Senate parse the MTA budget information into a machine searchable format. (The MTA originally published the budget as a PDF.) To parse the PDF I used a utility called pdftohtml to first convert the PDL into an XML document. I then used the python library lxml to convert the document into a set of csv files. The results of this labor can be seen on TOPP’s data site.

Soon after I published this data, however, I was told by a number of people that the data would be more useful if presented in another format. At first I just started creating a bunch of command line python scripts that would suck in these csv files, and spit them out in different formats. I quickly realized that I could accumulate these scripts and create a quick and dirty web application.

Over a few train rides I created an application called DataIO, and today, I finally got a chance to upload it to Google App Engine. The application is pretty simple to interact with; instructions are located on its front page.

Currently the application can only transpose data and multiply the data set by a given factor. I hope to soon add a jsonp api that will make it trivial to convert a given data set into a format that plays nice with google charts and flot.

The code for this application is hosted at bitbucket.

Just for fun, here is some data from data.topplabs.org, sent through dataIO.

Operating Revenue (transposed and multiplied by 1000000):

http://www.dataio.org/data/f?transpose=true&multiplication_factor=1000000&multiplication_start_row=1

Total Receipts by Agency (transposed and returned in json):

http://www.dataio.org/data/Bt?format=json&transpose=true

Bridges and Tunnels Summary of Total Budgeted Debt Service (multiplied by 100 and returned in csv):

http://www.dataio.org/data/IM?multiplication_factor=100&multiplication_start_row=1&format=csv

Compiling a Flowplayer Plugin on Mac OS X

Anil — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:40:14 +0000

For some reason it took me a while to figure out how to compile a flash plugin for Flowplayer. Here were the steps that I took to finally get it working:

Install Ant. Instructions for this can be found here
Download Adobe Flex 3 SDK. You can download this here.
Unzip the Flex 3 SDK that you just downloaded.
```
% unzip flex_sdk_3.zip
```
Download the Flowplayer development kit. The latest version of the development kit can be found here.
Unzip the Flowplayer development kit.
```
% upzip flowplayer.devkit-3.0.3.zip
```
Edit the plugin-build.properties file in the Flowplayer development kit. Specifically edit the line that says:

flex3dir=/Users/api/flex3sdk

to point to the location to which you unzipped the Flex 3 SDK. After editing my file looks like this:

flex3dir=/Users/anil/Desktop/flex_sdk_3

Navigate to the example plugin that is contained within the Flowplayer development kit. For me this is located here:
```
/Users/anil/Desktop/flowplayer.devkit/example
```

Finally, type:

% ant

The output should look like this:

Buildfile: build.xml

build:
     [echo] ++ flowplayer.helloworld.swf +++
     [echo]
     [echo] checking if flowplayer.helloworld.swf is uptodate
     [echo] main up-to-date: ${uptodate.main}

prepare:
    [unzip] Expanding: /Users/anil/env/flowplayer.devkit/flowplayer.swc into
    /Users/anil/env/flowplayer.devkit/example/build

check-compile-dirs:

check-compile-dirs2:

compile:
     [exec] Loading configuration file
           /Users/anil/Desktop/flex_sdk_3/frameworks/flex-config.xml
     [exec] /Users/anil/env/flowplayer.devkit/example/build
/flowplayer.helloworld.swf (1304 bytes)
     [copy] Copying 1 file to /Users/anil/env/flowplayer.devkit/example/build

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds

Congratulations! You have compiled a flash plugin for Flowplayer!

Geo Blogroll Plugin Released

Anil — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:18:22 +0000

I had promised to clean up and release some of the plugins that went into creating Streetsblog.net. Here is the first one: Geo Blogroll.

New Years Resolutions

Anil — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:58:16 +0000

Inspired by a friend I am going to create list of new years resolutions:

Learn a functional programming language. Any suggestions on which one to try out first?
Make fewer mockups and write more code. Web frameworks these days allow for such quick development that I think I would be more productive if I just skipped the Omnigraffle/Photoshop step.
Learn how to engage in effective Test Driven Development. I have heard of the benefits, but I have never seen a good tutorial on how to do this effectively. Maybe I just need to look a bit harder.
Don’t think about work while I am playing and don’t think about playing when I am working. Focus is always good. I am sure at least one person will be happy with this resolution.
Make a daily to do list with no more than three items. This was suggested by some lifehacker post and it seems like a great idea.
Recycle more at home. I recycle consistently at work because we have containers for different type of containers, but since I do not at home, I get lazy more often.
Contribute more back to the open source community. I have written a bunch of code recently that I haven’t yet checked in to a public repository. I have to make contributing back a higher priority.