thanks for the replies, im a junior in university and I'm going to invest 10-15 hours each week to learn some type of comp sci skill before I graduate school. It's something that I always wanted to do but never got a chance with normal schooling (im in econ fwiw). Only reason Python stood out for me is because there could be some usefulness for sports betting (i think) lol. ty again

How does one go about hiring a programmer to write a simple script/program to grab data from a certain type of PDF or Text file and insert it into certain fields on an excel spreadsheet? Also how expensive will that be?

walter,

i thought we had a dedicated thread for that but it looks like you can just start a thread out in the forum. if you describe what you want clearly, you should get a good estimate of difficulty/cost.

(if you don't talk to programmers much, you might want to read an article on how to ask good technical questions before composing your post.)

I use the Xubuntu version of it on my netbook for work which includes different kinds of devstuff. Pretty happy with it

Done...didn't know they had this Greenlight stuff..nice. Also added you as a firend so better accept imo

NumPy, SciPy stuff will come in pretty handy for econ (and sports betting). Fairly good language (porbaly the best imo) for a scientist in general. The only other language I'd concider picking up with that extra info would probably be R and that's way too specialized as a first language.
10-15h seems like a good choice. Just go with the coursera.org course...first project is due this weekend so you'll probably not make it but it doesn't really matter since it's just for learning anyways (I'd obviously recommend doing the project regardless)
Course name is: An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python

Thanks!!! Added you

Xubuntu is now the standard at my work when we need a linux box. I like it much better than unity or gnome3.

For those of you that just ubuntu - do you play online poker as well or do any sort of other gaming?

I've liked mac the last 5 or so years because it seemed a really good compromise between windows and unix.

Edit: And do you run any poker database software or HUD setup? As it is it seems like I'm going to have to use a Windows VM in order to get a HUD for zoom poker.

What's the best way to set up a MySQL table for college basketball scores, where the vast majority of games will have only first half and second half scores, but a few games have additional overtime scores? For example if I set up the table with the following columns:

Date, HomeTeam, AwayTeam, Home1H, Away1H, Home2H, Away2H, Home1OT, Away1OT, Home2OT, Away2OT, Home3OT, Away3OT

all of the OT columns will be NULL for most of the games, which seems like a sign of poor design. But I can't just get rid of the OT columns entirely, since they're needed for the rare games that have overtime scores.

put a 0 in there

Why is null a poor design? Logically it seems like the best option especially since its theoretically possible for one team to get 0.

I have a gaming machine with Windows...always wanted to move that to a VM but was too lazy :P

I agree null makes more sense than 0. It just feels like it's poor design to have six columns that will be null over 90% of the time, but I guess the only ways to avoid it would be to maintain a separate table for overtime scores, or lump all the overtime columns into one (comma-separated) string, but those both seem far worse for useability.

How I see it:

Game:
gameid, tipofftime, siteid, hometeamid, awayteamid

Site:
siteid, sitename

Team:
teamid, teamname

Score:
gameid, half, homescore, awayscore

There is some question of intended usage. Teams have multiple home locations. Two teams can share a home gym. Games are played at neutral sites. Games can go to any number of overtimes.

Multiple columns for scores seems bad. Score.half can be 1, 2, 3(first OT), 4(second OT), ...

Give each game an id and create separate table for scores related by id.
So new table has
id, period, home, away

Period 3+ are ot periods

Good idea, thanks.

How has Greasemonkey had this critical bug over a year?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4...n-greasemonkey

Trying to solve a problem for a user, wrote a script for him... and he runs into this. How on Earth am I going to walk him through this?

asdgkljas;ldghalk;sdgh;lkadsghlk;asdg

I made the classic mistake of believing what the engineers told me about the product. ****, ****, ****ity, ****.

That will be going up in the cube.

Really helpful info, thanks

bahaha. I feel your pain. Complete rewrite or is some of it salvageable?

I'm involved in a project where I am trying to get information from end users but have to go through a middleman, who doesn't know much about programming nor what this program is supposed to be. I'm not even sure the end-users actually *want* the software. Le sigh.

Honestly, programming professionally can be pretty demoralizing at times. It's so much fun at the beginning of a project, but the ensuing support and headaches that go along with actually releasing something can really grind you down.

i just have X's there am i doing bad design



its not like i'm constantly queuing anyway, i just cache everything on my side after its done and i just have it set where if ot != "X" then display OT when recreating boxscore

for my purposes i don't care if there is 1 or 9 OTs

Wow. I actually have the site up on Heroku. I only have to get the PostgreSQL schema from my computer to Heroku because otherwise the site completely sucks.

I was utterly lost on how to use AWS.

Null is 'better' than an X since its the logical score and you could potentially avoid typing issues down the road - null can be an int but X can't be.

But it probably doesn't matter for you. If you're building your own database for your own particular use case you don't need to worry as much about finding the best schema design. If you can easily answer all of your questions you've covered the most important case.

Sweet, post a URL when its ready!