There was a time when workers were searched when they left, to make sure they weren’t stealing. They were paid by their hour, and had to clock in/clock out. They had supervisors to ensure that they didn’t slack off. They weren’t allowed to make calls at work. After all, people were lazy and thieving in those days. Nowadays, we’re enlightened. We respect and trust our employees. Like a family. We don’t micromanage their activities. We don’t tap their phone calls. ...
Dear Tesco, I do like you. Really. Your products are invariably cheaper than I can find at most other places. I am a methodical, crazy gadget freak, and I find your gadget pricing impressive. I don’t always find what I want, but you often have the items I finally pick as the best value for money, and at very low prices. But. Your books are expensive. Of Amazon’s bestsellers, just 2 out of the 100 books are cheaper on your site. And this is apart from the fact that I’d get free delivery from Amazon on 37 of those books (over £5), while you’d give me free delivery on 5 (over £15). ...
I just put together this little demo that scrapes John Lewis’ site and creates a MediaRSS file out of it. CoolIris has got to be the best way to shop. Apart from being really pretty, it’s quite useful when you know what something looks like, but don’t quite know how to search for it. For example, I was trying to look for a headphone-microphone (you know, the ones that connect into an iPhone or a Blackberry). I didn’t have a clue what it’s called. (TRRS, if you’re interested. I found out later.) The only way I could get it was to browse the wall… ...
A cool thing about Google Spreadsheets is that you can scrape websites using external data functions like importHtml. It’s really easy to use. The formula: =importHtml("http://www.imdb.com/chart/top", "table", 1) imports the Internet Movie Database top 250 table on to Google Spreadsheets. Since you can publish these as RSS feeds, it ought to, in theory, be a great way of generating RSS feeds out of arbitrary content. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t auto update. There are claims that it does every hour. Maybe it does when the sheet is open. I don’t know. But it definitely does not when the sheet is closed. I wrote a simple script that logs the time at which the script was accessed, and prints the log every time it is accessed. ...
Comments Vinu 28 Apr 2010 11:25 pm: Nice ! what did you do? Manually erase the text? Knowing you, i suspect there is some automation at work here :) S Anand 29 Apr 2010 7:17 am: Oh, not quite. By 2006, I’d typed out all the Calvin and Hobbes (by hand, spending 6 years at it). This was just filtering all the strips that didn’t have any text on them :-) Vinu 30 Apr 2010 5:52 pm: Ouch. That’s a lot of typing. Surprised you did not crowdsource it… Perhaps for the next assignment? Asterix comics anybody?