As a Web developer, I sometimes find a need to download some huge JSON object into a text file.

Modern browsers now come with some form of developer tool/console to help debug the monstrous amount of JavaScript in the Web page. For Chrome and Firefox, I simply press F12 to bring up the console. From the console, you can naturally copy the JSON object in its string form by first converting the object into a string like so:

JSON.stringify(obj);

Then highlight the output from the developer console and press Ctrl-C to copy. The trouble comes in when the object is huge - to the tune of thousands of properties.

When an object gets to that size, you will need to scroll to be able to select the complete output. Scrolling the console is itself a tiresome task with text that small. Moreover you run the risk of "over scrolling" such that you select two objects rather than one because you can't tell the difference when they are simply chunks of text.

The best solution is to download the JSON as a text file and then use/manipulate the JSON from the file.

The way to do this is to create a function like this:

One of the problems with working on Linux and Windows OSes has to do with manipulating text files. Lines are separated by a carriage return and a line break character in text files on Windows, whereas on Linux, the separation is done through a single line break character.

When text files from Windows are opened in Linux, you often see ^M appearing at the end of lines like this:

Line 1^M
Line 2^M

The easiest way to remove the carriage return characters (represented by ^M) is to use the dos2unix command. This lightweight program can be easily obtained on Debian-based systems with the command:

sudo apt-get install dos2unix

Other than using the dos2unix command, the fastest way to remove the carriage return characters is the following command:

cat file1.txt | tr -d '\r' > file2.txt

I love programming. I really do. To me, writing a program is an act of creation akin to giving new life. In the right hands, lines and lines of code come together like magic that gives purpose to their existence. Part of the journey of writing programs involves learning new technologies (languages, frameworks, techniques, etc.). This usually involves a lot of reading Web articles, blogs, newsletter subscriptions, and tech magazines.

But as I step into another phase of life (goodbye bachelorhood (;_;) I find that I can spare less and less time doing all of these.

This article will explain in a prescriptive manner how to use the Google Cloud Messaging service as a mechanism for performing real-time interactions for your Chrome app or extension.

A year and a half ago, I bought a book Designing Web Applications. The author of the book is Nathan Barry.

Recently, I started seriously using Draft for writing an article for a publishing site. While searching for help on the site, I chanced upon the blog of the creator of the software, Nathan Kontny.

This is a reproduction of the article found at http://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/. It is reproduced here because the contents are fantastic and I have a fear that the page will be removed eventually because it is a Wordpress site with only one article.

Sometimes, things just happen. Just at the end of the work day, my colleagues were talking about this thing they called “Law of Attraction”. Not sure where they got it from. What they were referring to is that when one thing of a nature happens, it seems usual, even natural, to have another event of a similar nature occur as well.

Take for example, when we were taking the lift as we knock off work, we were teasing one guy among us about him leaving his motorbike keys in the office as he dug around his bag trying to look for it. It then happens that another lady (a stranger) who was also in the lift with us turned back after exiting the lift shortly, seemingly to return to her office to get something she had left behind. (One person searching for his keys lead to another person remembering something she left behind.)

I’ve recently started using QUnit for my JavaScript testing. It’s a unit testing framework for JavaScript. It’s quite an easy framework to learn and I strongly encourage everyone who is doing any decent JavaScript coding to use it or any one of the myriad frameworks out there.

One of the strange problems I faced with QUnit is a strange phenomenon where a custom written plugin fails the test on every alternate invocations of the test.

You may or may not have heard. 6.5 million passwords were leaked from LinkedIn. Allegedly at least. It’s possible then that yours is one of them.

If you are using LinkedIn and you are concerned, as well you should be, you can find out if your password is compromised from this (appropriately named) website www.leakedin.org.

This post is going to be about the modifications I’ve made to the Zend Framework’s Gdata library for accessing Google Docs.