Updating Weather
An interesting thing happened yesterday that I, unfortunately, did not catch in time to correct. It turned out that the Weather Channel's web site wasn't updated at 7 AM and the previous day's data was still there. So... my INSERT failed. That's really pretty good news. The problem was that had I retried it a few minutes later, it probably would have worked. So what I did was put in the same kind of retrying I had in the beginning of the code when no HTML could be found, and this should work much better. It's interesting how this code is evolving - partly because of the moving target of web page scraping but also as error conditions arise how they are handled. It's interesting.
I also took the time to update sparky with the latest patches from Sun. Now that I have the script working pretty well, it's really pretty easy to do this and just watch for errors. The most common problem is that Sun doesn't allow free downloading of some of their patches - you have to be on their maintenance program. There is an occaisional patch that doesn't fit the hardware profile, but I haven't spent a lot of time trying to figure out how many of these are really applicable. I suppose I could, but that's not a high priority to me right now.