Peter Tirrell

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The Whiteboard

General Discussion for softwareengineering.stackexchange.com P...

Peter Tirrell

May 20, 2018 16:30

Asking here since I think it's probably related to SE but too broad for an actual question on the SE site...

There's a local pop up restaurant that posts their weekly menu on their Facebook page. I want to get a weekly email of that menu. They post on their FB page roughly the same time each week.

I've built an AWS lambda function in python (language of choice) that uses the FB api to retrieve posts from the page, and returns the most recent entry that contains the word "menu"; at a high level I have something that returns the data I want when it runs. I just need some advice on where to…

Peter Tirrell

Mar 17, 2014 19:40

Good to know...I think I was maybe hoping that we were on some sort of bandwagon, even if it wasn't great from my experience. Not sure if I feel better or not now!

Peter Tirrell

Mar 17, 2014 19:39

@Ampt @GlenH7 @MichaelT thanks! Hah, oh, I'll be definitely seeing about getting more resources, but I wouldn't bet the main server isn't over allocated

Peter Tirrell

Mar 17, 2014 19:34

We're entirely on a virtual development infrastructure, i.e., we log into VMs from thick desktop clients and do 100% of our development work on the VMs. Normal .NET stack. But the experience isn't great and I feel like the VMs are underpowered. Just wondering if that's the norm elsewhere or if I'm special :-)

Peter Tirrell

Mar 17, 2014 19:33

Just curious :-)

Peter Tirrell

Mar 17, 2014 19:23

Appropriate place to pose such a question I mean....

Peter Tirrell

Mar 17, 2014 19:23

So I'd like to pose a poll-like question for developers to find out if my work development environment infrastructure is common or not in the greater corporate world. Is there an appropriate SE place for such a thing? SO? Meta SO? Programmers? Workplace? Or one of the chats?

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:33

+1 either way! I like it!

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:32

exactly

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:31

Ok, so then I was thinking I could have acorresponding 'winners' table, with week number and winning team....I think that would let me join or contains or something to see which players are still alive

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:30

@MichaelT sure, yeah, that would get clumsy wouldn't it

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:29

Somehow I need to be able to tie that back to a record of which teams actually did win, to do the test on if the player is still in

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:28

For the player entries, I keep going back and forth between a single row for each entry, with a field correpsonding to each week's pick (i.e., week1 - week17), or structuring it so that each week's pick is a unique record...i.e., .playerid, .week, .teampicked

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:26

Both for keeping track of player' picks and running a comparison to tell who won and is "still in".

Peter Tirrell

Jul 22, 2013 17:26

I'm looking for some advice on database design: I'm wanting to make an "NFL Survivor" web app. Basically the mechanics are each week, a player chooses an NFL team to win that week. If that team wins, the player stays in and the next week chooses another team; a team can't be selected more than once by the same player. If the team loses, that player is out. I'm wrestling with how I want to model this in a database.

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 03:01

Yeah, we're still hashing out all of the requirements, or at least what the expectations are. At the moment I think it's leaning more on the "reports" side, i.e. tables of data results, vs full on charts and graphs

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 02:59

cool, I'll check that out.

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 02:59

I'm familiar with reporting tools, I'm just undecided between embedding some sort of reporting server package vs coding up some custom displays of data, presenting them with some HTML/javascript charting tools and leaving the separate report server aspect out of it.

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 02:57

Yeah, I use SSRS at work; this would be fitting into a python web app with a mysql backend

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 02:56

I don't think we'd offer customizing reports from raw data source, but instead pre-build things for clients to run.

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 02:55

Do people usually write custom coded reports, a la Google datavis tools or something? Or do they embed some sort of prebuilt reporting package like Pentaho or Jasper reports or something?

edmicman

Mar 8, 2013 02:55

What do people typically use for web-based reporting? We're working on a web app that will have a data analysis aspect - measuring response rates, customer answers, etc. for instance.

edmicman

Mar 1, 2013 02:57

hmmm that's interesting....I think I'll mull that over a bit. I think that helped me with some ideas though, too. Thanks!

edmicman

Mar 1, 2013 02:51

I guess I'm debating between a scheduled send for everything (i.e., 9am every day) vs being able to define specifically when something might be sent, or at least close. I don't think the scheduled polling (i.e, the sender app runs and sees what is due to go in that window) might work very well ,though.

edmicman

Mar 1, 2013 02:47

I don't think so, at least if it were set to a certain time. I'm thinking if I went that way at best I'd give a window of time that things would be sent

edmicman

Mar 1, 2013 02:31

But now I'm wondering if I want to get as granular as timing to send the surveys. Like be able to say 'send at 9am and 6pm' or maybe just 'send in the afternoon between 3 and 4'. Adding the time component made me wonder if instead of having a scheduled polling service I should have a dedicated sender script - i.e. if I want survey foo to go daily at 9am I'd do something like "sendsurvey /foo" and schedule that in cron. But I'd really like to not have to maintain a bunch of cron jobs either.

edmicman

Mar 1, 2013 02:31

I'm making an app where we create online surveys that are sent out. Right now the sending is manual but I'd sketching out how I might make a schedule functionality that could run automatically. I was initially thinking I would store in a table a map of surveys and days of the week. Then I'd have a scheduled app script (I'm using python) run daily and grab anything that is scheduled for that day.

edmicman

Mar 1, 2013 02:22

Can I bounce some application architecture ideas off anyone?

edmicman

Dec 28, 2012 16:08

@JimmyHoffa cool thanks!

Ask Ubuntu General Room

Normally: General discussion around Ask Ubuntu, Ubuntu & offic...

Peter Tirrell

Sep 7, 2014 17:18

The default nautilus explorer lets me browse the SSD home dir for the most part, but I get permissions errors when trying to get to my VM folder or pretty much all of the hidden . folders

Peter Tirrell

Sep 7, 2014 17:17

The only way I can access all the files on the home dir on the SSD is to do "sudo nautilus", but I can't browse the nework with the nautilus running as root. The only way to browse to the NAS is via a non-root nautilus. Any help? How can I use the livecd to copy my SSD homedir someplace?

Peter Tirrell

Sep 7, 2014 17:16

I have an xubuntu 13.10 installation on a thinkpad with an SSD that I tried upgrading to 14.04. Somewhere in the middle it froze; I came to check the status and it would not come out of the screensaver. I hard rebooted and now I just get some stacktrace and some "swapper/0 not tainted" message. I can't get any kernel to boot but can get into a 14.04 livecd. I have a NAS on my network and would like to copy my home dir from the SSD to the NAS.

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:35

Does anyone know what the avconv output means? There's a dup= value that I found some forum reference that that might be slowing it down, and a time= value that I wonder if that's incrementing up to the total time of my video. Like it's a 20 second video and it's at 0.12 now after about 10 minutes.

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:23

It seems to do what I want to do, just some of the source videos I'm working with need tweaking.

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:22

Well that and the package version in Ubuntu seems to be a few versions behind, even in the PPAs. I haven't tried compiling from source yet.

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:21

@NathanOsman I'm using DVDStyler right now, it seemed to have the better menu options. DeVeDe actually seemed to natively let me rotate videos, but it's menu editor sucks.

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:20

But some of them were taken portrait style and I need to rotate them to look right.

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:19

Hmmm. I think I need the latter actually...I'm trying to ultimately make a video DVD of some family videos

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:18

I tried winff as well, but that just dropped to avconv too

Peter Tirrell

Dec 5, 2013 02:17

I have an mp4 video taken with a galaxy nexus that I want to rotate 90 deg clockwise. I tried avconv and it looked like it tried to work, but took overnight before I killed the process...it's slow as heck and runs my CPU hot. Is there a simple way to rotate video files in something?

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edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:07

@voretaq7 lol that's where I am, too.

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:06

I still might post to serverfault then just to see if from the Exchange side what if anything is possible

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:06

errr, does Exchange have plugin/addin support?

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:05

@voretaq7 thank you for your help :-)

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:04

No built-in addins then? I was hoping there might be some sort of 'run custom macro on incoming messages' option at least through the Outlook client

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:04

I guess what I really would want would be to take any incoming messages from address X, parse the subject, then redirect to embedded address Y

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:03

@voretaq7 good point....I'll have to point that out although the system in question is fairly locked down, that's why we're entertaining this idea. I think they'd limit it to only internal addresses as it is

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:02

What about these "custom actions" I see options for in the Outlook UI, although they are greyed out on my work system

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 17:01

Hah thanks, that's part of the problem....not sure what my options are, if it could be done on the Exchange side that'd be best I think

edmicman

Jan 16, 2013 16:58

Which would be more appropriate, serverfault or superuser, to ask about how one might set up an Outlook/Exchange rule that would take incoming messages, parse the subject for an email address, and forward the message on to the embedded email address? Or if something like that were even possible?