Being able to program a computer has advantages. I have been entering data into a database for some research I am doing. In the last three weeks, I managed to get a quarter of the way through gathering it off the web. I decided this was taking much too long, so I put a webbot together to grab the pages I needed. This took all of fifteen minutes. Another two hours was needed to find the common elements of the data I wanted, and have the bot sift for them. In less than 10 minutes it had gathered the other three quarters of the info, and updated the database. The effort was quick and dirty, and could have been done better (using regular expressions to do the parsing, and automatic updating of the pages to retrieve are a couple of things that come to mind). However, it saved a lot of time and effort in entering the data by hand.
This was my first serious foray with Visual Studio C# Express. The environment is not bad, but I am annoyed that the key mappings for things like compiling and going to errors are different from the C++ edition. I also tried to have it generate the database update statements, which it claimed it did, but I could not find where it put them. It’s a beta product, so I am not sure if this is a bug, or just ignorance on my part. I am thinking the latter.
The family went to see The Incredibles Friday. It was an ok movie; something of a mix of James Bond, the movies where the guy is looking everywhere but his family for fulfillment (sorry, can’t think of any titles), and various superhero movies. Pixar was of course impressive with the animation. Some of the social commentary was unusual for animated films (“When everybody is special, no one will be”). I found myself wondering when it would be over, so it was not that compelling. The kids loved it.
The string of daily entries came to an end Friday as well. There are just too many other things going on to keep it up.
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