[Edu-sig] How do we tell truths that might hurt

[Kirby Urner]

On Friday 23 April 2004 01:39 pm, Anna Ravenscroft wrote:
> On Friday 23 April 2004 18:09, Kirby Urner wrote:
> > But none of this is to say *only* looking at math topics is relevant.  I
> > think word frequency stuff is cool too, and whatever other humanities
> > topics we can think of, that are within reach from a certain level.
> >
> > It's just that math is a fact of life, is going to be there, so why not
> > make it more interesting and interactive, too?
>
> Hey! We agree!
>
> Anna

Apropos to "whatever other humanities topics", I just spent the last couple 
hours writing a screen scraper to lookup movies in IMDb (the movie database).  

Yes, there's already such a Python module at:
http://www.python.org/pypi?:action=browse&asdf=256 (top entry for me -- right 
above "KirbyBase").  But this one didn't work for me (got errors just running 
a demo).

So... thought I'd just cobble one together myself, while sitting here at 
Powell's Books, sipping a coffee (rare these days), and connecting by 
wireless from my Linux laptop (fun fun!).

I'll upload the code to http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/getmovie.py for 
anyone who wants to play around with it.  So far, it only extracts the 
Director and Tagline (if there is one).  I'll overwrite this file at will 
if/as I add any features.

To use:
   >>>  import getmovie
   >>> getmovie.test()

Returns:

--------------
Movie West Side Story (1961) /title/tt0055614/
Director: Jerome Robbins
Tagline: The Screen Achieves One of the Great Entertainments in the History of 
Motion Pictures(more)
--------------
Movie Soylent Green (1973) /title/tt0070723/
Director: Richard Fleischer
Tagline: It's the year 2022... People are still the same. They'll do anything 
to get what they need. And they need SOYLENT GREEN.
--------------
Movie Bullet (1996) /title/tt0115781/
Director: Julien Temple
--------------
Movie Bullet (1984) /title/tt0350664/
Director: M.S. Mani
--------------
Movie Bullet (1999) /title/tt0305342/
Director: Cesar Montano
--------------
Movie Bullet (1976) /title/tt0154265/
Director: Vijay Anand
--------------
Movie Bullet (1985) /title/tt0155575/
Director: Bapu
--------------
Movie Bullet (1993) /title/tt0279711/
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
--------------
Movie Bob Hayes /name/nm0370915/
--------------
Movie Fists of Freedom: The Story of the '68 Summer Games (1999) 
/title/tt0275353/

==========
Too many movies named Bullet!

I recall Jeff Sandys @ LinuxFest saying he'd written a similar screen scraper 
to monitor a stock or two -- and send an email if it changed by some amount.

Kirby