The joy of being a programmer
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Ten of my programmer friends (including me) planned a trip to Australia. Jetstar airlines were having a great sale yesterday. When sales prices are so good you will expect the website to have increased traffic and often it is impossible to get the tickets at the discounted price. So, we wrote an application that automated the process of booking the ticket from Jetstar. I am happy to say that we got tickets at a great price. The time and effort spent on writing the application paid off. I feel so sorry for non-programmers who might have tried to manually book the tickets and failed to do so as the web site may have crashed on them. Have you ever used your programming skills, outside of your job, to automate mundane tasks such as these?
The radio station to which my wife listens has "no repeat workdays" -- they don't repeat songs Mon-Fri, 8-6 (or whatever). Last spring (I think) they had a contest -- they would play a song during the morning rush hour and repeat it later in the day -- be the nth caller and win a prize! They have a Website that lists the played songs, so I wrote a simple console app to scrape the site once a minute, detect the repeat (Cthulhu-wise), and raise an alarm (internal speaker beeps). It worked well enough; there were a few false-positives and missed repeats because the Website wasn't 100% accurate. But mainly I didn't have to listen to commercial radio. X|
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Phil Martin... wrote:
The trouble with that of course is that humans being fickle creatures won't necessary answer all the questions according to what the C++ standard requires for sorting.
nope. but the function chugs right along nevertheless.
Phil Martin... wrote:
Therefore I officially proclaim everyone who buys Spice Girls music to have to read the entire C++ standard before they can listen to any of it
cruel !
...and anyone silly enough to read the entire C++ standard should be "rewarded" by having to listen to the entire Spice Girls back catalogue.
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So YOU'RE the reason I had to fight that website for 15 minutes to get flights to Soundwave ?
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
So Decepticons are playing concerts now?[^]
Software Zen:
delete this; -
devj wrote:
Ten of my programmer friends (including me)
You are a programmer and you have a whole ten friends!? Suuuuuure you do.
so... now Imaginary friends count?
Edgar Prieto Software Engineer
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Phil Martin... wrote:
The trouble with that of course is that humans being fickle creatures won't necessary answer all the questions according to what the C++ standard requires for sorting.
nope. but the function chugs right along nevertheless.
Phil Martin... wrote:
Therefore I officially proclaim everyone who buys Spice Girls music to have to read the entire C++ standard before they can listen to any of it
cruel !
Chris Losinger wrote:
Phil Martin... wrote: Therefore I officially proclaim everyone who buys Spice Girls music to have to read the entire C++ standard before they can listen to any of it cruel !
Which one is cruel - reading the entire C++ standard, or listening to Spice Girls music?
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so... now Imaginary friends count?
Edgar Prieto Software Engineer
In that case, I have HUNDREDS of friends!
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Ten of my programmer friends (including me) planned a trip to Australia. Jetstar airlines were having a great sale yesterday. When sales prices are so good you will expect the website to have increased traffic and often it is impossible to get the tickets at the discounted price. So, we wrote an application that automated the process of booking the ticket from Jetstar. I am happy to say that we got tickets at a great price. The time and effort spent on writing the application paid off. I feel so sorry for non-programmers who might have tried to manually book the tickets and failed to do so as the web site may have crashed on them. Have you ever used your programming skills, outside of your job, to automate mundane tasks such as these?
Back in the late 90's a DOT COM start up named TixToGo.com (they sold tickets online for other people's events) was giving away a Porsche Boxter (worth about $60,000 at the time) to someone who picked a new company domain name for them. I wrote a program to take a list of names and search each one on Network Solutions (to see if it was available), the USPTO (to see if it was trademarked) and the five top search engines at the time to see how and how much the name was used. I submitted 248 names that met all the constraints of my software. Then I emailed the CEO about why all my names were clean. They were doing all the searching manually and wanted my software desperately. Anyway, they had received over 55,000 names and were able to sift through them in short order and just pick a good one. By the way, they changed the name to acteva.com. activa.com was one of my names, but as a temporary sub-contractor of the company, my names were invalid.
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devj wrote:
Have you ever used your programming skills, outside of your job, to automate mundane tasks such as these?
all the time. on of my favorites is a little app that i used to help me figure out my top 100 favorite albums. it reads album names from a file, then does a std::sort on them, where the sorting function is:
bool compareRecords(const string &a, const string &b)
{
printf(“\n \”%s\” > \”%s\” ?”, a.c_str(), b.c_str());
string yns;
cin >> yns;
return (toupper(yns.at(0))==’Y');
}so, it asks me questions of the form:
"Spoon, Kill The Moonlight" > "The Beatles, Help!" ?and i just press Y or N and it moves to the next pair. asking until it's done sorting. takes forever, but it works. -
Does std:sort call you a liar if during something like this happens. a > b ? Y b > c ? Y a > c ? N ERROR: You are a liar! The answer must be Y!
nope. it just keeps on going.
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so... now Imaginary friends count?
Edgar Prieto Software Engineer
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Ten of my programmer friends (including me) planned a trip to Australia. Jetstar airlines were having a great sale yesterday. When sales prices are so good you will expect the website to have increased traffic and often it is impossible to get the tickets at the discounted price. So, we wrote an application that automated the process of booking the ticket from Jetstar. I am happy to say that we got tickets at a great price. The time and effort spent on writing the application paid off. I feel so sorry for non-programmers who might have tried to manually book the tickets and failed to do so as the web site may have crashed on them. Have you ever used your programming skills, outside of your job, to automate mundane tasks such as these?
All the time, as necessary. Here are a few:
- screen recognition bot to automate tedious repetitive tasks in 2D Java based MMORPG game. (based on wxWidgets / OpenCV)
- Mutual Fund data aggregation with graphs to aid in choosing Mutual Funds for investment.
- Chore tracker to track which roommates are doing chores, with custom features not available on any online chore tracker I could find.
- Financial tracker similar to the chore tracker to track and encourage equal share in expenses by roommates.
- A quick little web app to allow entry and search of recipes by ingredients they use.
- A brute force tool to determine the most optimized set of folders (or files) to burn to a DVD and waste as little space as possible.
- An app to quickly sort duplicate files into good/bad folders from a music folder which is constantly filled with new files most of which are the same name as ones that were previously deleted. Names are stored in a database and user is queried to manually tag new names as good or bad for the next run on a new set of files.
And if you want to go really far back, how about autoexec.bat and config.bat files with built in menus to allow boot time selection of unique memory configurations for various DOS based games so they would actually run.
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Ten of my programmer friends (including me) planned a trip to Australia. Jetstar airlines were having a great sale yesterday. When sales prices are so good you will expect the website to have increased traffic and often it is impossible to get the tickets at the discounted price. So, we wrote an application that automated the process of booking the ticket from Jetstar. I am happy to say that we got tickets at a great price. The time and effort spent on writing the application paid off. I feel so sorry for non-programmers who might have tried to manually book the tickets and failed to do so as the web site may have crashed on them. Have you ever used your programming skills, outside of your job, to automate mundane tasks such as these?
Quite some time ago a local newspaper was running a contest where they gave you a large list of cities in Texas then give you daily hints on two cities. They'd give you the letters in the two cities' name but have them scrambled. Those who turned in the most correct daily responses got to compete in a head to head finale. I didn't play the game but I wrote a program for some friends where I included the list of cities. I'd input the scrambled letters, determined the character count then run through every combination of two cities from the list. If the combined character count was equal to the count for the scrambled letters I'd sort the combined letters of both and compare against the sorted letters of the daily scrambled letters and if they matched I was pretty certain to have the right answer that day.
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
