08.08.06

“I’ve got more taste in my penis.”

Posted in Media, Protest at 1:02 pm by Robert Keogh

“Body Bags 2.”
“Oooh, that’s imaginative. I’ve got more taste in my penis.” Lee Donowitz True Romance (1993)

We have all been hearing the long loud laments from Hollywood about declining attendence, blah, blah, blah. With these forthcoming gems of cinematographic is it any wonder?

  • Die Hard IV
  • Ghostbusters III
  • Indiana Jones IV
  • Jurassic Park IV
  • Rambo IV
  • Rocky VI
  • Terminator 4

      • Hollywood is making it so easy for me to stick to my commitment not to contribute money to the MPAA. The greed, avarice, theft and generally despicable tactics of the MPAA/RIAA and their members over the decades compounded by their recent assault on consumers fair use rights have led me to adopt a simple, pacifist and legal protest. I absolutely refuse to purchase any movies or music firsthand. That’s about 100 movies and 250 albums a year that no longer go to these companies bottom lines. And I don’t have to sacrifice anything, between Netflix, Amoeba Music and Acquarius Records I get all the second hand media I want.

      If you want to persnickety I am making indirect financial contributions but I have sacrificed nothing and I have dramatically decreased the cash flow from me to them. Neener, neener, neener.

      Update I was thinking about this later and my numbers are wrong it’s more like 60 movies and 150 CDs a year. The vast majority of my purchases are from indie labels and although I don’t keep a list of the “good” and “bad” labels there are bands for whom the wait for the second-hand bin is far too great a torture and I stray from my line of purity. Oh forgive me, Jeebus.

      This post reminded me of a guy I went to college with (Chris Troy) who once told me that buying two CDs a week would get old. Well if you ever read this Chris, I’ve been buying 3+ CDs a week since June 1994 and it hasn’t got old yet.

08.07.06

Your Netflix Ratings

Posted in Application, Media, Movie at 10:10 pm by Robert Keogh

I really love my Netflix account. I’ve been using it for years and at this point I’ve rated almost 3000 movies. Granted just over 900 of those I never, ever want to see and most of those I wish had never been made - but hey that’s enough about me. I enjoy toying with data like this, amalgamating it and proffering it for view by friends and strangers alike.

The other day I decided to abstract my ratings data from Netflix and a cursory Google search turned up some previous work by John Ressig and Devanshu Mehta. Naturally, it was not going to be as straightforward as downloading someone else’s hard work and running a script. Netflix has changed the Login URL and Ratings page URL, as well as the HTML format of the Ratings page since these packages were written. So I figured it was time for me to try my hand at updating the requisite code.

I decided to add a few enchancements such as abstracting the URLs and regexp to a config file. Provide the functionality to capture the retrieved data in a database (PostGreSQL) if the user so desires. Cleanup the codebase and apply several of Damian Conway’s best practices.

I highly reccomend downloading Devanshu’s package as it has several python scripts that garner additional meta-data from Netflix. Devanshu has also gone to the trouble of documenting many of the basic steps required to get your environment set up, check out his blog article for the instructions. The file my code generates is in a format compatible with his. Download and have some fun.