In a quest to bring my soft synths up to date, I took up Native Instruments offer to upgrade my entire NI Complete collection to their latest and greatest, for free - after I buy the KORE - their midi/audio hardware interface and controller.
The KORE arrived today, and I played with it a little using my old synths, but I couldn't take full advantage of the KORE without using their preset library (which apparently contains 10,000+ sounds). I couldn't use the presets just yet, because they are all for the upgraded versions of the instruments, which I don't have until the DVDs arrive with KOMPLETE 4 I can't do much with this beautiful piece of gear.
Stay tuned for a proper review. Can't wait till it's all here and working.
Make Model What? If you like me were tasked with loading a database of recent car makes/models/years, you would start by looking on the web and seeing if someone else just has it out there, readily available, hopefully for free, but perhaps for a tiny nominal fee.? If only it was that simple... I looked and looked, and couldn't find anything that would fit the above requirements. So I thought, who would know about US car models better than Kelly Blue Book? So I went on their site, and sure enough they have a javascript file that lists all known to them makes and models of used cars. Since the file is public, I figured it's not really "evil" if I scrape and parse it for my own benefit. Disagree? Have a better source? Then leave a comment. Anyway, to cut the long story short, I'm hoping to save a day or so to someone else who may, like me, be looking for this information. The ruby module shown below retrieves and parses the javascript from KBB site into
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