Wires and string and tunnels
Jan. 27th, 2002 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteSometimes, when I'm sitting at the console happily clicking away, I stop and marvel at the complexity of my pastime.
I just wrote a script in Perl that takes a raw binary database file from the ICQ 2001 program and spiders through it, extracting all the messages, URLs, file exchanges, and contact list events. It writes this data out to a tab-delimited file, which another script then slurps up and translates into database records in an SQL database running on the internal network socket.
This data is, in turn, highly referenced by a set of perl scripts that run through the CGI wrapper off a bunch of HTML forms, also served off the internal network socket. Through a cooperative exchange, they combine the ICQ logs with archived emails, journal entries, schoolwork, irc chats, and JPEG and GIF images, into a browseable and searchable module, with a calendar view and subsections in HTML frames. All password protected and isolated from the outside network.
What kind of sick twisted freak would consider this a hobby? And yet I bop right along, coding away, chasing down bugs and swimming in the documentation. Every time I come back to this I rediscover how stimulating and inspiring the whole practice can be.
Oh well, if my job skills as a web coder fail me, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true path to profit -- being a "rock star". >:)
I just wrote a script in Perl that takes a raw binary database file from the ICQ 2001 program and spiders through it, extracting all the messages, URLs, file exchanges, and contact list events. It writes this data out to a tab-delimited file, which another script then slurps up and translates into database records in an SQL database running on the internal network socket.
This data is, in turn, highly referenced by a set of perl scripts that run through the CGI wrapper off a bunch of HTML forms, also served off the internal network socket. Through a cooperative exchange, they combine the ICQ logs with archived emails, journal entries, schoolwork, irc chats, and JPEG and GIF images, into a browseable and searchable module, with a calendar view and subsections in HTML frames. All password protected and isolated from the outside network.
What kind of sick twisted freak would consider this a hobby? And yet I bop right along, coding away, chasing down bugs and swimming in the documentation. Every time I come back to this I rediscover how stimulating and inspiring the whole practice can be.Oh well, if my job skills as a web coder fail me, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true path to profit -- being a "rock star". >:)
