maybe i should try again

robert l. bentham

robert l. bentham

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i have to use a computer for my work. it should be doing more for me. enter imacros. thats a pretty good deal for a computer simpleton like me who is still waiting for technology to rise up to my whims and demands. i cant voice create the software i want. its an issue. but anyway i have to process huge amounts of data. i have to run lists of names thru a variety of databases and i am willing to pay someone to simplify the whole matter. i am willing to pay for this as it will save me countless hours of effort. it would be worth a few thousand dollars to me. if anyone is bored or just wants a free trip to hawaii please get a hold of me

i honestly cant imagine itd take any of you fellers more than a week to put this together... thanx in advance
 
theonestonecutter said:
i honestly cant imagine itd take any of you fellers more than a week to put this together... thanx in advance
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And nor would any of us because programmers are all hopeless optimists. It's what allows us to do the job. If we actually knew how grindingly maddeningly virtually impossible any given task was we'd never start it. :)

OTOH, I am finding myself insanely busy at the moment. Back twenty years ago when time was my own I'd have done it just for fun.
 
Ya, I was supposed to be done my Android app 6 months ago...
 
wow, "a free trip to hawaii"!!
I'd love that, but I can't leave mom and the many appointments

anyway, I don't program
not to mention I don't fly (boycott, you know)
 
Karlos could do with a holiday. I'd offer myself, but I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag with a machette, a dummys guide and a care person present. Sorry.
 
im actually offering cash, i was just saying it would be basically enuff for a vacation
 
No I saw that, I just know that with his current workload, Karlos could do with a holiday away from it all.
 
Give us more details on the job. Be specific. It might be as you say trivial, in which case it should be no big deal. Some times the hardest part of developing software for a client is figuring out what the client wants. This is why so many software projects often go way off budget. Quite often, even the client doesn't know what they really want, or they change their mind half way through.
 
i use a database that often has 100,000 names on it. its in spreadsheet format (i use open office). what im looking for and ive had some success using imacros; is a program that will take the name off the list and cross reference it in the various people locating databases. if data is found it needs to put that into the spreadsheet. if data is not found it needs to be able to annotate that it has been through that particular check. an example is i use social security death index first. if the name is on the death index it would need to add the result. if it doesnt find the name it would need to move onto the next database and run the name through that. some of the databases i use arent bot friendly at all. so the program would have to be able to go to the log in page each time and sign in. enter the name and then retrieve the data. i have about 20 different databases i use.

i dont know if this helps at all...?
 
Don't you mean tables instead of databases? I mean, 20 databases, is, kind-of a lot......
-edit- I got the feeling the whole database setup is horribly not-normalized and vulnerable to integrity errors. Besides, you have to take into account that if you want it set up decently, you may have to change the way you work alltogether.
 
Nah, it seems like he's data mining from different data sources. Or perhaps you could say cross referencing across different databases. It also seems like he doesn't have full and direct access to these databases and uses a manual procedure. Creating a system based on UI macros is a bit tricky because the UI can change at any moment, and that could potentially break your macro.

@theonestonecutter, how possible is it to gain a direct database connection to these databases? Or are you stuck using some kind of UI to access the data? The data seems like it's fairly sensitive so I imagine security is an issue as well.
 
Speelgoedmannetje said:
Don't you mean tables instead of databases? I mean, 20 databases, is, kind-of a lot......
-edit- I got the feeling the whole database setup is horribly not-normalized and vulnerable to integrity errors. Besides, you have to take into account that if you want it set up decently, you may have to change the way you work alltogether.
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I think he's cross referencing several online databases.
 
theonestonecutter said:
i dont know if this helps at all...?
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It's a little bit helpy - but it's not really a spec yet.

These "difficult" databases ... do they require sign in for each search or do they time out? Is it possible to sign in and then do multiple searches thereafter? And do they limit the number of queries per hour or some such quota to prevent people from automating searches?

I guess you might not want to say too much in public without an NDA if you are doing something you don't need competition in but the effort involved would be hard to estimate without some more detail.

Then again - if there were just one or two databases that were automatable, would that be a saving worth having? Could this process be moved along incrementally, one db at a time?
 
Also wondering how much human brains is needed to check the results. There could be a few people with the same name and I don't know how specific or accurate your target databases are. If you are looking for Mr Bellamy Backbiter and it's a miss, would you want to know that there is a Mr. B Backbutter of the same age?
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
It's a little bit helpy - but it's not really a spec yet.

These "difficult" databases ... do they require sign in for each search or do they time out? Is it possible to sign in and then do multiple searches thereafter? And do they limit the number of queries per hour or some such quota to prevent people from automating searches?

I guess you might not want to say too much in public without an NDA if you are doing something you don't need competition in but the effort involved would be hard to estimate without some more detail.

Then again - if there were just one or two databases that were automatable, would that be a saving worth having? Could this process be moved along incrementally, one db at a time?
Click to expand...

i receive the information in a formatted manner which i convert to a spreadsheet. so the program would only have to be able to pick the name from the table that has the name entered into. some of the dbs i use are kind of difficult as they dont necessarily let you have unrestricted access. logins, while not required at each use are still required and timing out would definitely be an issue. i am primarily focused on using it to do the stuff that requires monkey typing and not the "brainy" parts that are actually required at various stages. ss death index would be one such example. if a person is on the list lets say then to find an heir i have to go into that particular town and start rooting thru the left behind paper trails that almost all of us leave.

id prolly want a no compete agreement with whomever did this as well. but id entertain the notion also of showing someone else how to do it. its more than i or a hundred men armed with bots could ever work through and the lists almost never grow shorter.

and yes, any part of the process that could be automated is better than nothing.
 
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