Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The data presented on this site comes from daily scrapes of the broadcasters' own web sites, along with
traditional data feeds, so it is accurate and timely. It is also legal, as permission has been granted to the site for its
inclusion.
N
Curiously, the data for the UK's ITV companies are not available. This includes ITV, ITV2, ITV3, and ITV4. This is
because ITV doesn't want its data shared on other web sites, although it has no objection to using other TV schedule data
on its own site! This might be because of the purely commercial aspect of its business. However, until ITV changes its
rules (or the petition takes effect), no geek following these instructions will be able to determine what's on ITV, which in
turn will limit ITV's advertising revenues, causing them to have shot themselves in the proverbial foot!
Note
The data itself is available as a web page on the site or as XML files that can be downloaded to your PC and
processed at your leisure. The URLs for each XML file follow a strict format so that you can automate the process.
The root URL is
http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings
and is followed by this:
u
The day offset, between -1 (yesterday) and 6 (next week)
u
The station name
Therefore, you can find today's BBC1 schedule here:
http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings/0/bbc1.xml
And tomorrow's TMF guide is here:
http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings/1/tmf.xml
The format is XMLTV and very easy to parse with a suitable library or even XSLT. With this data in a local usable
format, you can then search the descriptions for films starring your favorite actors, be alerted to new series, or check
for musicians appearing within talk shows or programs outside your usual sphere. These results can be piped into any
file, such as a web page or e-mail, for review.
Despite its free nature, Bleb does have a couple of restrictions of its own, but the only requirements are that you
don't repeatedly ask for data from the server by including a two-second gap between requests and that you include
the program name that's making these requests along with an e-mail.
Minerva includes an example of this in action; I cover this in Chapter 7. There are many other examples, such as
executables for Windows, Flash code, and the WhensItOn code found here:
http://ccgi.useyourhead.force9.co.uk/
This alphabetically sorts the entire week's TV schedule so that you can see at what time the show is on and when
it's repeated.
Train Times
Like the TV schedules, obtaining complete timetables for every train around the world is a thankless and impossible
task. But fortunately, like TV, the rail journeys of interest are generally based in one country, so you need to find only
one suitable data source for your area.
Any search engine will return several different data sources for this information, depending on your country,
so you need to spend a little time looking at each one to determine which have APIs (that are usable) or, failing that,
which can be scraped with the least amount of effort. Most people who use trains regularly have a routine, and they
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