thejester

All your work & effort is much appreciated bga.

iamnothitler

bga, we thank you for the latest update. cheers.
LJ

bga

Another new update. About 30 new titles, about 30 new enrollments, about 60 price decreases, and it looks like the 40% off box set sale is reflected in the sales price column.

Bill Needle

I haven't started posting until recently, so I now want to take advantage of the opportunity to personally thank bga for your efforts. This is the Gutenberg Bible of the Columbia House DVD Club.

bga

You're making me blush. There's no way my slight contribution could be compared to the Gutenberg Bible (one of which I saw last month at the Library of Congress). BTW, if you have free time, I encourage you to check out Distributed Proofreaders, which has collectively scanned and proofread over 5000 books to make them available for free downloads to anyone that wants them. Most books in their queue were written prior to 1923 (thanks to Disney's nasty lobbying effort that extended US copyrights by another 20 years), but there usually something I find interesting whenever I go there to proofread.

Abintra, I didn't understand your request, did you just want an additional column listing the # of discs for new releases, etc? If so, that would be pretty easy for me to add.

CrumpsBrother

C'mon, bga! your "slight" contribution is one of the highlights of my week! I can't wait to see what new disks CH has added every Tuesday.

Bill Needle

I've previously heard about Distributed Proofreaders through other sources, but have never checked it out. Thanks for the invite. I just may have to take you up on it.

bga

There's a new update available, with at least 100 new titles, 60 new enrollments, and 100 titles that were gone and back again. I also implemented abintra's request to add a new column in the differences html list with the number of discs. For some reason, the Twilight Zone Collections didn't show up as 9 discs. Something to look at for next time, I guess.

bga

A new update, but not very much new. About 10 new titles, 10 new enrollments, and about 50 price decreases.

drh4

Thanks bga!

Forgive me if I missed this being addressed earlier, but I'm puzzled that a couple of the new enrollmentes are "pre-order: 9/28/04" titles. Is that a glitch, or are they actually making some titles available for enrollment immediately these days?

Bill Needle

Also, maybe you ran your miner before it showed up, but "Blazing Saddles 30Th Edition" (3207503) is actually available as an enrollment as of last Sunday pm/Monday am.

bga

Both of these titles were from Blue Underground. Maybe their contract with BU doesn't have a restriction on when a title becomes an enrollment.

I've had problems where the data miner stopped finding enrollments in the past, and my only solution has been to guess as to whether I need to restart it to check again. I might change it again to run through the enrollment check until it doesn't find any new enrollments. I also know that the disc count is off on a few of the sets, and I have an idea on how to fix it the next time I feel like fiddling with the code. The program also doesn't find anything from the mature section, but I'm not sure when or if I'm going to fix that.

muffynn

ok, I am not familiar with spreadsheets.
I downloaded open office, so now HOW do I get it to read the file?

help!!!!

SRGilbert

I've noticed that you are required to re-enter your name and password to access the adult section, maybe that has something to do with it? Anyway, the adult section will likely never be part of the enrollments, and once you are a member, you have access.

bga

Start up OpenOffice. It should start up with a blank screen. Go to the File menu and select Open. It will bring up a dialog box, select ch_20040928.csv (or whatever .csv file you downloaded), click on open. This will bring up another dialog box. You could just click on OK, but I like to click on the first column, and change the column_type to text, and click on the second column and change the column_type to text before clicking on OK. This will force the first two columns to be text columns, so OpenOffice won't drop the leading zeros in a selection number, nor incorrectly identify a few titles as being numeric (makes them right justified entries).

Once the document is loaded, you can do things like adjust the width of the columns, hide columns you don't care about, etc. The best part of loading them into a spreadsheet program is that you can sort the file by up to 3 columns. I usually sort by criteria like:

1) enrollment ascending, price descending, title ascending
2) enrollment ascending, discs descending, price descending
3) enrollment ascending, Release Date ascending, title ascending

The above examples will sort all enrollment titles first, with the secondary sorts based on the other selections.

muffynn

I must be doing 'something' wrong.
arrghh
which office program do I open 1st?
I tried "open document". "html document" "spreadsheet"
then tried clicking 'open' on the file.
but it all comes up as words with a bunch of ",,,,," between.
or am I saving the file wrong?

( I know this can't be that hard.)

abintra

For some reason I've had the same problem so it isn't you. It has to do with the way the file downloads, sometimes working and sometimes not.

The only advice I know to give is to download the file again. If you can open the downloaded file and open it in notepad with it looking like the example below then it will open up fine (using bga's advice above).

"Selection","Title","Studio","Release Date","Genre","Price","Enrollment","Features","Sound","Rating","Time","Discs","DVD Release Date","Sale Price"
"2425205","Pink Floyd: The Wall","Sony Music Video","","drama/epics,

If it looks largely like gibberish, try downloading it again.

MISS PEACH

The 4D GONE WITH THE WIND Pre-Order at CH (out early November) is not 23.97 but 29.96.

Just to correct the record.

PEACH

dcloye

Dear BGA,
Thanks for the tremendously useful list! I've just about sucked CH dry of DVDs interesting to me using your little marvel!
A friend of mine is trying to set up a Data Miner on a different Web Site and could use some pointers. I can see how you wouldn't want to muddy the waters at CH by releasing the Source Code for this particular Data Miner Perl Script but it would be interesting for all of us if you outlined the basic steps your script takes. I'd like to put my friend in touch with you if you could send me an email address. He might be in the market for one of your other Perl scripts. You can reach me at [email protected].
Thanks again!
-Chris Loye

dougb222

WOW! Quite a lot of new stuff this week. I'm really interested in the british tv (poirot, wodehouse etc.), so a whole lot of new ch opportunities just opened up.

Thanks bga!

bga

Another new update with a lot of new stuff, around 150 new titles and 150 new enrollments. Next week should include the new genres. Also, it looks to me like a lot of the missing titles aren't really missing, so if you really wanted to get something from the list of missing, check the website, it might really be available. I have an idea on double-checking the missing titles that should be really easy to implement, I'll try to implement it this week if I have time and inclination.

Jim

Note the following sale titles with no other purchase required:

2806933 Catch Me If You Can
2971737 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
3103538 Matrix Revolutions^TM, The
3100914 Runaway Jury
3015823 Dirty Dancing Ultimate Edition
2838522 Daredevil
2932424 Anger Management

Catch Me If You Can is $5.95 and the rest are $7.95.

Bill Needle

Wow, Lost In La Mancha - 3395605 as an enrollment. Nice.

cfloyd3

Thanks for the news Bill Needle I need to get my account closed up, been wanting Lost in La Mancha for some time.

bga

A new update is available. Over 200 new titles, a high percentage are British series from A&E/BBC. Over 100 new enrollments, too.