If it helps, I found that I needed to replace:
var cells = $(">",this);
...with:
var cells = $(this).children();
...in getDataFromTable() to get the basic functionality working in jQuery 1.4.2. Although I don’t know whether the code will format properly in this comment!
Basically, later versions of jQuery don’t seem to like the "greater than" selector, and I figured that the children() function would probably do the same job, though I’m no jQuery (...)