Stock quote and chart from Yahoo in Java
I was recently in need of a stock quote web service in order to display quote information and charts for a corporate website I was working on, so I started looking around for something, free of course. I kept reading that the most common example of web as a service is the stock quote example, but I didn't really find any examples that gave me a warm and fuzzy, everyone seemed to be scraping the html from a page. Doesn't seem to be much out there, in the way of quote services for free, but I did come across a yahoo download service and a few half written examples, where you can fetch quote information from Yahoo in .csv format, with a 20 minute delay of course. I've also added a 1-day small chart and a 5-day large chart image by passing the symbol into Yahoo's basic chart image url.
Europa to Ganymede, a flawless Eclipse upgrade
I've been burned by Eclipse upgrades before, especially when it comes to running local tomcat servers in the IDE. I think as recent as 3.1 to 3.2 and 3.2 to 3.3, this or that got moved and all my tomcat servers disappeared, or they were there and they just didn't want to start. I'm pleased to report that this upgrade was uneventful for me. I was able to start all my servers and run my applications with no issues, my eclipse settings were preserved for the most part, with a couple of perspective issues here and there where the perspective reset itself to the default.
Recommended steps to CYA during an eclipse upgrade:
- Back up your old eclipse directory, just rename the folder
- Make a copy of your existing workspace
- Download and unzip eclipse in the same spot the old version was
- Download and unzip any plugins you had previously and were using into the new version of Eclipse, I use PHPEclipse and jadclipse, neither of these have new versions but the plugins worked fine in Ganymede
- Start eclipse, check your servers and apps make sure they compile and run, any sign of trouble just roll on back to the old version of Eclipse and the old version of your workspace
Piece of cake, right. Hopefully your experience is as uneventful as mine.
Firefox 3 released today
Today's the day all us developer types have been waiting for, Firefox 3 will be released and a world record for most downloads in a day will be set. If you're a web app developer and you're not using this browser, with at least Firebug, YSlow, and the Web Developer Toolbar, you might as well be coding with your eyes closed, quit your job and take a job in marketing. That's just how I feel about Firefox, it's literally changed the way I code, debug, and test. Join the good fight today and download Firefox 3.
It's so cold in the office, you'll crap your pants
Got this one this morning and I'm still laughing, I've removed names to protect the innocent. I never knew it could get that cold and something tells me the opposite would occur.
To: IT Department
Subject: Air Conditioning
Hello All,
We have spoken to facilities about the air conditioner. They are hoping we will warm up by this afternoon. The air was left on this weekend, and so that is why it is still so cold in here this morning. Sorry for the incontinence, but they state there is nothing that can be done right now to make it warmer.
Input focus with jQuery
Form input focus always seems a pain to me, I don't like all of the generated inline javascript that struts or other frameworks add to accomplish this and it always seems to be one issue or another. So here's a simple solution that applies focus to the last input element in the document that has a class of focus. Short and sweet, nothing fancy, requires the jQuery library of course.
The javascript, preferrably in an external javascript file
$("input.focus:last").focus();The html