matt: Bugfix with the validation global parameter.   Minor changes to merge identical functionality between stock ticker and stock widget. Moved some functions into plugin_utils.   Fixed up the duplicate function definition problem by using some constants instead of relying on include_once

git-svn-id: https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/custom-stock-ticker/trunk@1013686 b8457f37-d9ea-0310-8a92-e5e31aec5664