Lars Olav Torvik

As I blogged earlier I wrote a small widget for the yr.no competition. I had limited time and ran into some issues on while developing it. You can read more about it here. So to my surprise I actually won one of the categories and recived my Asus Eee last week. Seems the competition was time well spend afterall, because now I have a new toy

I use Zend Studio for Eclipse, Version 6.0 for Windows for my coding. This is the first version from Zend in Eclipse. It is a good application but it still have some major bugs. One of the problems is if it crashes to often. Sometimes when I try to restart it after a crash it just hangs on “Loading org.eclipse.php.core”. When you get that problem it doesn’t help to restart the machine. Uninstall and reinstall sometimes works, but not always.

After a while I found out that deleting the org.eclipse.core.resources seems to solve the problem. You can usually find the catalog on
C:\Documents and Settings\\Zend\workspaces\DefaultWorkspace\.metadata\.plugins on a Windows machine. The only thing you need then, is to import your projects again. Actually quite easy solution.

I just found out by accident while I was writing this post that deleting catalog org.eclipse.core.runtime instead also works. But I would not recommend it! The program works fine and I haven’t lost my projects… but I have lost all my settings! So I need to once again set up my Zend with UTF-8 text encoding, unix line delimiter, my custom formatter and more… Much easier to just delete org.eclipse.core.resources!

Hope this advice can help others that are struggling!

Last week I saw a contest on yr.no. Create an application that uses their weather data. They gave away prices for 3 categories; web, desktop and mobile. I had a long time considered making a weather php lib so I decided to join.

First I created a general weather php lib that gathered the weather information from yr.no. Then I had to decide what application I wanted to make. I actually decided to make multiple small applications. One netvibes UWA widget, a facebook application and wordpress widget. I knew I had little time and the other competitors had 5 week head start on me but I wanted at least try.

I started on the UWA widget… and actually never got any time to start on the other applications. It was fun to work with UWA but it have some severe restrictions. To list a few.

• Not allowed with external css and js files. This was a major problem since I decided to use Google Maps to get the longitude and latitude needed of the weather api I had decided to use.
• According to netvibes it is not possible to create a auto completion text box in their preferences. Still think there should be possible to find a way to do it… but haven’t found one yet. If this was allowed I could have used it as way to select location instead of Google Maps. I really didn’t want to use the old fashioned post to get the location, it is just to boring!
• Since you can’t load external js file I was advised to use my Google Maps in an iframe. This would solcethe problem. The only problem was to send the values back from the iframe to the preferences. Since a UWA widget is automatically part of the netvibes.com domain but the iframe is on my domain. There is security restriction that won’t let you access the parent elements functions. This was a major hassle! Thanks to this article I found a solution using javascript and hashes. It work excellent in browsers like Firefox but there are some issues in browsers like IE7. You actually have to change the security settings in IE7 to make it work. And if that wasn’t enough it will not work at all on some browsers if my widget is inside another iframe and thats how netvibes.com add you widget to their page. So on some browsers it works fine in stand alone mode but you have to set the longitude and latitude manually on other browsers.
• The applications in UWA is supposed to automatically work on lots of other platforms like iGoggle, Windows Vista Gadget, Opera Widget, Yahoo Widgets, Mac and more. I have only tried it on iGoogle so far and it doesn’t work and I can’t see I get any error messages. A bit annoying but haven’t really had the time to debug and figure out what is wrong. I’m guessing since I have problems with iGoogle that is supposed to be one of the easier ones it will probably not work on the others either. I will have to try that some other day!

So these problems took way too much time and is the reason why I didn’t manage to create more application. Since I didn’t even manage to make the UWA widget work perfect in all browsers I don’t think I have any chance of winning. Not that my idea was that creative. Probably someone else that have created something better and more creative since they had 6 times as much time But it was fun to finally try and create an UWA application.

Take a look at my weather page on http://weather.larsolavtorvik.com/. Not the prettiest page but at least I have some more information there, including a download for the whole source code fort he project.

This version contains multiple security fixes.

Thanks for the feedback on security. I really apreaciate it. If there are somthing you don’t feel you can post here on the blog you can send me a mesage at meATlarsolavtorvik.com

I created my first Vista gadget ever today, together with my brother in law Didrik.

It might be the most useless gadget ever… but was fun to create Underscore 1.0 is a gadget that let you type inn text in a textbox and while you type the textbox under will show the text without any underscores.

If you for some strange reason you would like to download it you can get it here: Underscore.gadget. Just double click the file to install it on a Vista machine.

Python have been added. There is still some lacking functionality for showing the matches for all the functions in python but I’m getting there.

Changelog:

• Added regex python

No one have written comments here on the blog, but at least I have gotten a lot of great feedback from other forums and on mail. This have helped me sort of many bugs and the version is starting to look good.

Changelog:

• Added support for nation characters like øæå
• Fixed problems with html tags in the subject
• Other small fixes

I have created a new release with support for Perl regular expression.
It was in the 90’s when I last wrote anything in Perl. So the little Perl knowledge I had is long time gone! That was about the same time all private web pages had counters, lots of animated gif’s and we must not forget the infamous blink tag!

Changelog:

• Added regex Perl

A new night is here and another version of the regex tool is released.

Changelog:

• Added regex JavaScript
• Fixed some minor bugs.

The first beta version of my AJAX regular expression tool is finished!
regex lets you easily test regular expressions for PHP5 PCRE and PHP5 POSIX, using AJAX. It is available on regex.larsolavtorvik.com.

This application uses symfony framework 1.1beta2. Symfony is an excellent PHP5 that I would highly recommend to everyone working with PHP5.

Feel free to post comment, bugs, critique or whatever here in this blog. All feedback is appreciated since it will help me make regex a better tool… and I know there must be bugs there now! I’m especially curious how people feel the speed of the application is since it is very javascript and AJAX heavy.

Hope you like the tool and start using it on a regular basis. At least I know I will