HackniacBLOG

Spawned of Fear

Last day of summer. A very visceral experience. To stave off depression, and the resulting chemical imbalances, I sorely needed something to do. I sprung on the idea after uttering the modern day equivalent of a laugh, the very noneternal "lol". It dawned on me that I have been using such phrases more and more, eroding my support of the engish language with every short explosion of abbreviation. To quantify this slip, I decided to write a short application. A spider of sorts, crawling the web of junk that is an IM log, searching for the nuggets of nutritional and syrupy bug fluid that is useful data.

The Guts of a Spider

While nature's spiders are very difficult to produce, my (competing) spider design is very easy to carry out. I gutted two apps I have previously written in Visual Basic .Net (good for recreational programming, ONLY, imo [there i go again, slippery slope]). The gooey insides from one supplied the file I/O in a plug and play format, while the other supplied some much needed data parsing ability. With a few modifications I had something running in a few minutes that was capable of tearing apart the HTML file generated by my instant messanger of choice, AIM, and reporting back to me with the data on word usage that I wanted. A very viscious spider indeed.

Spread to the Wind

I'll post the code here when I finish a few bugs that keep it from working every time