This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from August 2004 and lives here forevermore.

Code monkeying

Nothing much to report on right now, but I’ve been told I really should write more. Therefore here’s a brief rundown on what I’ve been doing codewise recently.

I’ve been learning Ruby, mainly by reading various guides online and experimenting with small bits of code. I’ve also been playing with porting some CPAN modules to Ruby.

I’ve spend this evening hacking together a new script to download the free TV listings from Broadcasting Data. Until Monday they had an FTP server that the old script used to log in to each day and check for new files. This ran happily for months until Monday when they “relaunched” with a new website and no FTP access. From Monday in order to get the listings I had to log on to the site (yes you have to register, although that seems fair enough) and download each file individually. Due to the strange way they have it set up each file isn’t accessible directly but must be acquired by posting a form to the site. Of course I wasn’t happy with this, so a few productive hours of experimentation with WWW::Mechanize later I have an automated script again and can happily leave it to it’s own devices.

After fixing the listings problem I did my good deed for the day and removed the latest wiki spam from the CSS Discuss wiki. I also learned more about the Shanghai shoe selling business than I thought I ever would or wanted to.