As I mentioned in a tweet, I worked with my son in realtime to pull data from the LEGO website. He wanted to see all the pieces counts for products. So we built this ruby script together to pull the data and parse it with Hpricot. Took about 10 minutes.
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<code>
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘open-uri’
require ‘hpricot’
# URL below [...]
You won’t hear much from me in the next couple of weeks. A march to complete lots of software development by Labor Day is driving all my time away from the blog.
The conversation that started this effort went something like this near the end of July.
Boss: “How much development effort do you estimate is left [...]
Many people come here searching for what a named pipe is. Since I’ve got some knowledge on this topic (and it’s the blog’s namesake), I thought I’d try to help them out finally. The article below requires some basic Unix knowledge.
To start off, a pipe (symbolized by |) is way to transfer data between processes [...]
I read at least one quote a week like this one from the July 2005 issue of Software Development:”Finding precise and repeatable ways to make design decisions is the Holy Grail or software development productivity…. It takes years of skill to make these decisions and there is no way to automate them.We recently hired an architect to draw up some designs for some changes and additions to our home.
I’ve spent the better part this week trying to hammer out an architecture for a new application I’m developing. Most of my time was wasted in a problem space too large for solutions. I had a list of all the functions, a list of all the data, and profile of all the users and the [...]
I’m surprised I don’t blog more about technical items since that’s what my day job is. Perhaps my blog is to escape from all things technical.
Anyway, I came across this dialog box the other day on one of my machines and had to laugh. It’s a great example of poor computer security and [...]
Newspapers have recently been focusing on a “we are local” campaign. They are focusing on their strengths of knowing and reporting on local information since national and international news is easy to find from sources like CNN and national networks. **But** Google Maps is about to give them a run for their money.
This service [...]