In 2010 I saw 100 different movies in 100 different theaters. Here are the details.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

New Movie Database

I've been sprucing up my movie database this past week, to make it simpler, more attractive, and easier to use.


One of the benefits is that I can now use the database to add a movie to my Netflix Instant queue, and then saunter over to the television to watch it.  Of all the movies I've ever seen that, in my opinion, are worth seeing again, just under 20% of them are currently available for Netflix instant streaming.  That's not too shabby.

I've added a new field to bind each movie record to its Internet Movie Database counterpart.  In populating that field (using a script to scrape the HTML from IMDB's site), I hit upon an interesting limit: IMDB shut me down after about 3500 calls.  Their server identified that an unusually high number of page requests was coming from my IP address, and refused to serve up any more pages for a short period of time.  The disclaimer says they are trying to be fair in how the bandwidth is utilized, but I'm guessing they also want to prevent the very sort of massive, automated interaction that I was performing.

In other news, I'm behind in my reviews again, with four new ones in the hopper.  I hope to get to those soon.

2 comments:

  1. Apparently Google has their own anti-robot logic as well. One of my tabs is a web viewer that performs a Google search, looking for a post for the selected movie. One day I received an error that Google suspected I was an automaton.

    ReplyDelete
  2. With such an elaborate database and all these reviews streaming to your blog, I sometimes wonder if you're an automaton myself :)

    ReplyDelete