"Scientific Programmer"?? A Question A Story

Your 'scientific programmer' sounds like a charlatan.
You should have looked at his credentials first.
On the other hand did you provided a concise specification for the work in the first place?

I offer to tell you 'it cant be done' in ony 10 hours at half his money! Please send the cheque to
Del the Cat
KrisDel Enterprises,
Etherville
UK

Del

(Please add a note on the envelope stating 'There are no nuts in the package, squirrels keep out')

Thanks Del...You are absolutely correct in that I should of checked his credentials but

like many, I suffer from a self perceived notion of being an expert judge of character,

not to mention that he seemed like such an enthusiastic kid. OK so I'm a sucker...

Oh, Ive already given him $230......now he wants the other $230....How about I split it

and give you both $115...

I was as concise as my limited lexicon permitted and was clear from the get-go.

Your cheque is in the mail....

Dlois

Your 'scientific programmer' sounds like a scam artist.
You should have verified his credentials first.
I assume that you provided a concise specification for the work in the first place?

We will offer to tell you "It can't be done" in only 10 9 hours at a little less than half his invoiced amount! Please send the check to:

LynDoor™Industries
East Undershirt, Minnesota

^{Let the bidding war begin! GA for Del because I mooched his idea.}

Is that what you call Moorhead (east undershirt) these days?

ignator

There is not enough information here to say who misrepresented the situation.

Since others here have already taken the OP's perspective, I'll take the programmers. The data the OP wishes to mine maybe proprietary data that your programmer is telling you is illegal to acquire. The volume of data you wish to mine may overwhelm your computing system. The conclusion you wish to decide from this data may not be validly decided. The report page platform may not be capable of displaying this live or stored data that will be meaningful to the intended audience.

There is also the simple communication problem that happens between people. The OP may have inadvertently implied or unknowingly actually asked the programmer to do one of the things I've proposed. When all the OP actually wanted was a simple capture of this web page cropped and presented into a power point presentation.

Frist let me say drop down windows are used for human interfaces otherwise you are just matipulating data. This is a database issue not programming.

Going in a different direction here, regarding the data extraction from the web page, the web page is just a user interface with the data hidden in the background. You want access to the data.

You should be able to access or view the data in the background using an HTML web page editor like dreamweaver or Microsoft frontpage (or similar) which should allow easier data harvesting than trying to automate the drop down menus (effectively simulating a human interaction).

What you need to do is hire someone who makes or updates web pages, additionally there may be copyright issues with you extracting, copying and using the data for a scientific study so don't forget to look into this also.

There are free HTML editors on the internet that you could try yourself as long as you have a fairly good understanding of computers (there are plenty of online manuals and self-help books to guide you).

Thanks jack,

Yes it is the data base we need access to. Actually two databases, both having to do with automotive safety recall info. These are both public and the amount of data is minimal. I think he tried using Auto Hot Key....but your approach seems much better.....I guess once the editor is open a macro or small program could determine

what gets copied and pasted. Is it possible that some sites block access to their data

and if not, am I correct in assuming that this should be pretty straight forward stuff

for anyone with basic chops?

As Del indicated, I need to better check credentials.

Cheers

Dlois

The selectable analysis of the databases can be public but not the database themselves.

Assuming that the database is public then parsing out the data and interpreting it should be very easy and straight forward for a programmer. Only because I have access to Mathematica and Mathcad programs, I would prefer to use these platforms but C or C++ object oriented languages could handle the program execution. Combining two databases into one usable database can be a pain in the a$$.

Just playing devil's advocate for this programmer, the implied tiny data size might prevent an accurate conclusion to be found.