IMDb to SQLite

Over the last few days I played around with importing IMDb data into SQLite, which thanks to the availability of IMDb data in plain-text is not that hard. There already exists software for doing that in the form of IMDbPy, but I decided to roll my own in Ruby for practice purpose.

The good news is that it is quite fun to have IMDb data in an SQL database, as it allows a great flexibility in terms of queries you can do, much more then you can get out of the website. So you can get a list of all Sci-Fi movies in which an actor plays that also played in Terminator 2 and things like that. Which makes it a great way to discover new movies, which otherwise would be hard to find.

The bad news however is that I found SQLite to be incredible slow for the task. The basic import, of just a subset of the data already takes around two hours, generating the SQL indices then takes another eight hours.

Code is a bit of an unfinished mess and might not receive much further development, but for those interested, it is available via:

git clone http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/imdb.git

How much is a Flattr worth?

The practical value of a Flattr "point" seems to be right now around 0.15€, at least judging from the flattring I have done and that I have seen on my Flattr buttons. The exact value might of course differ, but as the current monthly money you can spend on Flattr is capped at 20€, things shouldn't be to far away for that estimate in general.

Summing up the numbers from Spreeblick.com confirms this, they had 679 flattrings and they say they collected 110,94€, which means 0.16€ per flattr, which comes pretty close to my own numbers.

Summing up the numbers of taz.de gives around 1616 flattrs und 143,55€, making the Flattr worth 0.09€.