At work I'm playing around with restlet, which is a great Java framework to implement RESTful webservices. Today, I needed to read HTTP-GET parameters in a restlet, e.g. http://localhost/restlet?someParam=foo, and came up with:

request.getResourceRef().getQueryAsForm().getFirstValue("someParam");

Is this the right way to do it? I expected the get parameters to be accessible in a way similar to request.getAttributes() - because that's where the attributes go, when you have a router parse the request for you, as in: router.attach("/user/{u}/item/{i}", SomeResource.class);

Any restlet experts around?

For those who use Eclipse in Leopard or Tiger, here's a little tip on how to turn off font antialiasing. There is a system wide setting in the control panel, but it affects all applications. Usually I like smooth fonts - but not for programming. To selectively disable antialiased text for eclipse, fire up console and enter this command:

defaults write org.eclipse.eclipse AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20

So there you go, and thanks to Tim who published this trick as a comment to a more hacky solution to this problem.

Today I had to conveniently dump mysql data in JSON. Here is a script you can use to convert the output of a MYSQL SELECT command into data that can be used by JSON applications. Make sure you have a recent version of sed (I have 4.1.5). Create a file called mysql_to_json.sh fill it with the following lines:

#!/bin/sh
sed -e 's/\t/\",\"/g' \
    -e 's/^/\[\"/'    \
    -e 's/$/\"\],/'   \
    -e '1s/\(.*\)/\{\"fields\":\1\ \"data\":[/g' -e '$s/.$/\]\}/' \
| tr -d "\n"

You can use this script to convert SELECTs into JSON - SELECT INTO OUTFILE using JSON, so to speak.