rullzer

So since it is vacation, Christmas is over and I have some time to fill. I have been thinking about some projects to do but could not really think of something doable in a few days. Since well I do not mind long term project I just want something where I have something working in a few days.

I had a nice idea that I borrowed from Tobias Koenig about bus-services. So I checked the transport company in Amsterdam. Wrote them a nice email if they have a way to communicate with the database. XML-RPC or something like that. Since I do understand they would not allow me directly on the database. An email came back that they do not have such a service and indeed could not allow me on directly on the database.

That is all understandable but the departure times are all available on the internet so I decided to give it one last try. A dump of the departure times from the database. But again they could not help me. Now I wonder why is that. I wrote a nice email that I just wanted to make a nice program. Why can’t they share that stuff with me? Or anyone else?

Now I could ofcourse parse the whole stuf by myself. But that would mean I had to write some ugly parser in their web of html. Which I do not like.

So that project won’t work for me. Then a friend of mine suggested a simple bittorrent client. That can run on a server and a nice client program to connect to it. So It can run while you are asleep or whatever. However after looking at a bittorrent file and the protocol I figured that would not be something I could have working in a few days.

So no project now. If you have any suggestions drop a comment please.