Month: May 2010

This week feels like it has lasted forever. Nicky has had a cold for a while, and now he’s also got conjunctivitis, so he has been quite restless for the last two nights. Anna has also had a bad cold so is also suffering from a lack of sleep. On top of that, on Wednesday my laptop got infected with a rootkit which took me about 7 hours to get rid of, meaning that I’ve had to catch up on the work I missed yesterday and today, whilst feeling like a zombie due to lack of sleep.

We watched Lost on Wednesday, which was a lot better than the previous episode, but still leaves lots of things unanswered, and as there’s only the finale to go I’m not sure how they can resolve everything satisfactorily. I guess we’ll find out on Monday!

I’ve removed the Twitter feed from the right for now – just trying something out. It’s not as if it’s needed there anyway…

As mentioned before, I wanted to create a widget for my Netvibes homepage to allow me to see the current exchange rate between the US dollar and the British pound. This is partly because I’m currently paid in dollars so I’m interested to see how much I’ll get in pounds, plus it was also a good opportunity to remind myself how to create a widget.

It was actually a bit more straightforward than I’d been expecting. In order to keep the actual widget quite small, I have a separate PHP script to find out the latest rate – this is retrieved from The Money Converter.com, who provide an RSS XML feed with the latest rate. The PHP script parses the XML to find the current USD/GBP rate, and outputs this as text.

The widget retrieves this text using Ajax, then works out the exchange rate both ways and displays them. It also allows you to enter a default value in USD to convert to GBP. This is what the widget looks like on my Netvibes home page:

I created the icon in GIMP, just a basic 16×16 GIF and using the text editor to add the two currency symbols.

My widget can be seen on the Netvibes Ecosystem.

Unfortunately I’ve not had time to work on the Netvibes widget that I mentioned in the previous article. We’re still busy unpacking and sorting things out, we’ve got quite a lot done though considering it’s only been a week.

One more thing I want to create is an accelerator for IE8 to show the AcronymFinder page for the selected acronym – according to Google there was something like this before but I can’t find it now. It would help me with my job if I could create this.