Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with MeFi

MeFi still down at work...Help!

Rad_Boy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:39:26 -0800

Remember when the MetaFilter forum was down a couple weeks ago due to server problems? I'm glad it's back up and working again, but from my desktop at work, I still get the "splash" screen that MetaFilter is having a massage (or whatever it said - from memory) and is down. Now what do I do?

Programming neophyte looking for a language to start with. Or, what language should I learn to complete these tasks?

monkishies — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:24:00 -0800

What programming language should a neophyte start with to organize his life? Yes, another one of those questions. But I have two specific tasks that I'd like to accomplish and this makes choosing a language really hard for me. Especially since i'm a complete n00bler. I'm a complete virgin to programming other than the little bit of BASIC that was taught to me in High School ages ago. But I REALLY want to learn a programming language. One that I can use as a foundation but more importantly a tool for doing things on/to/with my internet connected PC.

I have two specific tasks that I'd like to start out with for my first programs that I believe will be simple enough for a beginner like me.

1. Organize my horribly disorganized library
---Read through a folder filled with books in .pdf/.chm/.djvu format
---rename the files with their isbn number (queried from somewhere like amazon)
---fill in the "title","subject","author","category","keywords", and "comments" sections under right click on file Properties->Summary (also queried from amazon or the like)
---compress the file
---create a subject/category folder and place the compressed file there

2. Organize ~20mb worth of bookmarks (in multiple .html files)
---Check for duplicate bookmarks in this collection of .html files
----Use the pages content to scrape tag words then input them in the right click on bookmark Properties->"keyword" section and if possible also fill in the "description" area. Delicious to me would be a last resort as it's become a mess with people using tags that often look like gibberish and probably only make sense to their user and/or their own piece of code.

It'd also be nice for these apps to be cross platform (Windows and Linux) but that's an afterthought really.

Now, I know this might sound like a tall order for a complete neophyte but I believe the first program that I've outlined above could be easy enough to complete for someone like me.

So, what should it be? Perl, Python, C, C++, something else? Maybe someone out there knows of a *free ware/beggar ware/Open Source* program that does what I desperately need to get done? Please impart your collective wisdom unto me, AskMeFi! I beg you!

Quick, MeFi I need a dog park to go to in Yokohama, Japan, anyone, anyone???

nintendo — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:18:13 -0800

Quick, MeFi I need a dog park to go to in Yokohama, Japan, anyone, anyone???

Help with SQL unions needed

mathowie — Wed, 10 May 2006 00:06:01 -0800

Question for the SQL ninjas in the house. Say you're grabbing data from a bunch of similar tables in a big union. Now say you want the last ten items added anywhere to the database, from any one of those tables. What's the most efficient way to do that? I've got a working query to pull up similar items from four tables that have similar items. That works great, but I'm concerned when there will be queries pulling hundreds of items from the table, so I'd like to grab say, just the last two items. But how best to do that?

Plain english view of the current query (at the end, it is ordered by date descending to get the most recent stuff at the top):

select stuff from table 1
union
select stuff from table 2
union
...etc

And what I really want in plain english is this:
select top 20 (
select stuff from table 1
union
select stuff from table 2
union
...etc
)

Here's what I've tried and it doesn't work so well:
select top 20 stuff from table 1
union
select top 20 stuff from table 2
union
...etc

It's a horrible waste and the order is all wrong in the output. I'm using Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and nothing I've found online points to working with TOP n records in a union setting.

(this is for MeFi by the way and solving it will help get a major new feature out the door sooner)

Estimate how many people who have MeFi accounts are now dead.

biffa — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:56:32 -0800

Actuary Filter: How many MeFites are dead? [MI] This is essentially an exercise for me in statistical recognition of how many people are likely to die from a sample that I can relate to (hence Ask not MeTa). MeFi's been going for a while, people who sign up then die would have difficulty in letting us know their accounts aren't useful anymore, statistically how many will be ex-members? Let us know your assumptions.

What Link had most posts to Mefi

warhol — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:03:39 -0800

[FrontPagePostFilter]. What link has been the victim of the most front page posts on MeFi? I wonder, only because Strandbeest hit its 4th one today and I suspect that the record's got to be higher than that.

Mefi tribute

solistrato — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 00:07:59 -0800

A while ago, on my old site, I posted this parody of MeFi. (It was subsequently, um, noticed. Yeah, sorry about that.) I thought a fitting tribute would be to post it to my user page. As is plainly obvious, tis fux0red for I am not l33t. Or else, there's some sort of cotton-pickin' interference, as the anchor tags seem to be all kerfluuey. Help, pwease?

Are There Any Tricks, Subsites or Generally Unknown Secrets to Metafilter (i.e. Lofi)?

tetsuo — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 13:21:28 -0800

I didn't know about lofi until graventy mentioned it in Metatalk. Are there any other tricks, sub-sites, whatever you want to call them to Metafilter?

www dot not boring?

feelinglistless — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 13:24:14 -0800

I'm bored with the World Wide Web. Can anyone help? [more inside] Whenever I log on in the evening I seem to find myself looking at the same websites. I check my favourite weblogs, read the usual news sites, check through the trends at blogdex, check the visitors to the weblog, write said weblog then go to bed. For some reason it feels like I'm in a rut. Google searches 4,285,199,774 and I end up seeing the same twenty-five or so. Is this it? Has the web flat lined or would things be different if I was on broadband, and is dial-up my downfall? Can anyone suggest ways in which I can make my time online more interesting? Perhaps some websites they find invaluable or reliably interesting (beyond something you would post on the front page)? What else do you do online when you're not using Metafilter? I need web therapy ...