Random hacking

Posted by: stak
Tags: code
Posted on: 2010-12-27 21:38:23

During the last school term, I was working on two different projects where I realized it would be really handy if I could update cells in a spreadsheet from a script. That step was the one step I had to perform manually in an otherwise fully-scripted chain of commands.

I looked around for existing tools to do this but unfortunately couldn't find any that did quite what I needed. So I grabbed the ODFPY library (closest match for what I wanted), a Python language reference, and my trusty sidekick vim. A few hours later I had my first non-trivial python chunk of code, a module on top of ODFPY to read and write arbitrary blocks of cells from and to an ODF spreadsheet. Also managed to fix an existing ODFPY bug along the way.

I submitted my patch and new module to Søren Roug, the author of ODFPY, and he agreed to include it as one of the contrib modules distributed with the library so others who find it useful can also use it and extend it as they need.

Just another example that shows how open standards (i.e. ODF) and free/open-source software (i.e. ODFPY) empower users.

And speaking of open systems, I really like the design and flexibility of the ContactsContract API in Android. Creating a sync adapter to inject contact information from custom sources is pretty simple and works more or less how I'd expect it to. I just wish the high-level documentation were a bit better; that would have saved me some time. The same goes for the Android Account API - it looks flexible and well-designed but the package-level documentation is kind of hard to follow.

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