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Setup Instructions
Directions for the impatient
- For those of you in the US, setting up Showtimes is very easy. Open getdata.cfg
with Notepad (make sure word-wrap is turned off in the menu), find these three URL lines:
URL http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes/showtimes.html?z=92656&r=sim&m=&t=&a=&dt=0&s=tm&p=4
URL http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes/showtimes.html?z=92656&r=sim&m=&t=&a=&dt=1&s=tm&p=4
URL http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes/showtimes.html?z=92656&r=sim&m=&t=&a=&dt=2&s=tm&p=4
Change the zip code (shown in bold) in all three lines to your zip code. Save the file, run getdata.exe, hotsync.
Getting Started
- Unpack the .zip. The zip has directory info inside it, so be sure you set your zip utility to create these directories. The location where you unzip the files to is unimportant, as long as you keep the files together.
- Install the Showtimes.prc on your Palm, but don't run it until you have some data.
Getting Perl
- Windows
- Windows users do not need to download perl.
The Windows version of Showtimes comes with a Windows exe: getdata.exe. Run this where you would otherwise be prompted to run perl getdata.pl.
- ActiveState has a compiled version of perl available on their ActivePerl page.
Download and install the Windows MSI package.
- Macintosh
- MacPerl maintains a compiled version of perl and is available on many mirrors. Visit http://www.macperl.com/ for general info about running perl on Macintosh.
This link will take you to the closest mirror for you. The file you want to download is called Mac_Perl_520r4_appl.bin.
- Unix
- The recommended course of action for unix perl users is to download the source and build it yourself. The main perl page is http://www.perl.com/.
- Other
Configuring the Script
- To tailor the script to your needs, you need to edit the getdata.cfg file.
Find the file in the appropriate subdirectory for you system, either Windows, Unix, or Mac.
You do not need the subdirectories for the other OSes, and you may delete these.
Inside getdata.cfg
- URLs
- You may have as many URLs as you like. Each URL must appear on its own line in the file, where the line begins with URL, the a space, and then the URL.
- Yahoo! (US)
- Visit Yahoo! Movies, and put in your zip code.
- The script only understands how to interpret the pages that list multiple theaters. Here is an example.
- The pages for a particular theater, such as this one, will not work.
- AlloCine (France)
- Au.Yahoo (Australia)
- Visit Au.Yahoo, and find your area. You need to provide the URL that is a list of theaters, and not the URL to a theater itself. For example, this URL, this one, and this one are valid URLs.
Australian users will want to explore the THEATERLIST option of the configuration file, to limit the number of theaters that the script downloads data for.
- EXTRAMOVIEINFO
- This is set to 1 by default, meaning you wish to download movie plots. Change the 1 to a 0 if you want to disable this feature.
- QUERYIMDB
- This enables downloading plots from IMDb. Both this option and the above EXTRAMOVIEINFO need to be set to 1 to download plots at this time.
- DESTDIR
- This is the location where the .pdb files are to be created. This should be the directory where HotSync copies .prc's and .pdb's from, when installing them to your Palm.
- When the next option, FLIPREG, is enabled, the DESTDIR is ignored. Windows users will not need to set DESTDIR, when they have FLIPREG enabled.
- For Macintosh, it will look like DESTDIR MyDrive:Palm:Users:RobertJ:Files to Install
- FLIPREG
- HotSync requires that the registry have a key added before it will install files during a HotSync. Showtimes comes with a program called FlipReg2.exe to do this for you.
- Windows users should set this to one, so it looks like FLIPREG 1
- All other platforms should turn this off, so it looks like FLIPREG 0
- USERNUM
- If you have FLIPREG turned on, you need to set your USERNUM. FlipReg2.exe will print out a list of valid USERNUMs when you run it. Run FlipReg2.exe and set USERNUM to the number next to the line with your Palm device's name. It will likely be 0 unless you have more than one profile on your computer.
- You can have multiple USERNUM lines in your configuration file, if you would like the data to be installed on more than one Palm device.
- PROXY (and friends)
- If you have to go through a proxy at your site, you can configure it here.
- PROXY is where you set the URL to your web proxy, and might look something like PROXY http://proxy.mycompany.com:8080/
- If your proxy requires a username and password, these can be set with PROXYUSERNAME and PROXYPASSWORD
- If none of this applies to you, keep these lines commented out, by putting a # in the beginning of each line.
- THEATERLIST
- The Theaterlist allows you to make the script ignore theaters so they don't appear in Showtimes.
- To enable this feature, uncomment out THEATERLIST, and optionally change the name of the file it uses.
You may want to put an explicit path here, such as THEATERLIST c:/somewhere/theaters.txt.
- After you run the script, the file theaters.txt will be created.
This file will contain the list of all your theaters.
- For each theater you do not want, add the word ignore to the end of the line, so that the line may look like
Some Crummy Theater ignore
- Save the file, and run the script again. The theaters that you ignored should no longer appear in Showtimes.
Running the Script
- The script can be run in a variety of ways, the easiest being clicking on the getdata.pl icon.
- You can run it from the command prompt (or DOS prompt) by typing perl getdata.pl
- Windows users can run the compiled getdata.exe program, instead of the above choices.
- When the script runs successfully, the output will look something like this:
C:\usr\people\robert\palmdev\showtimes\script>perl getdata.pl
Grabbing page 1 of 1 from yahoo...Done!
Writing pdb ST_Dates with 1 records.
Writing pdb ST_Theaters with 14 records.
Writing pdb ST_Movies with 43 records.
Writing pdb ST_Strings with 109 records.
Writing pdb ST_Times with 115 records.
Updating registry.
- The getdata.pl script can be called with a command line option to specify where the getdata.cfg file is. This is useful if you want to run the script from a scheduled task.
The form is getdata.pl -d /path/to/getdata.cfg (just the path, don't actually put getdata.cfg there).
getdata.pl -h will report usage info.
Finishing Up
- At this point, you should have five .pdb's ready to be installed on your Palm. HotSync, and then try running Showtimes on your Palm device.
Getting Help
- You can get help for more specific problems in the FAQ.
- Try searching usenet for your problem, or ask a Palm users mailing list.
- I usually hang out on IRC on slashnet (irc.slashnet.org:6667) in channel #showtimes.
- I cannot promise to answer any email regarding setup problems.
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