My computer is hosed
4/24/2006
First of all, I want to give my thanks to all the individuals who have sent me emails and del.icio.us xml files. All of you guys rock. Now comes the bad news. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to run any Python script (including the interpreter) without encountering a blue screen of death (I have seen error messages including "bad caller" and other exceptions). Also, Windows XP seems to forget where Python is despite resetting the environmental variable on boot. On the last boot, Windows did a disk check and complained that the "volume appears dirty." Now it appears I cannot even log in and use my computer for more than 45 seconds before encountering any error. Yikes. Until I get this situation sorted out, I am going to be on a slow computer that lacks the capability to create visualizations. This whole thing is depressing.
Some XML exam questions
4/09/2006
Inspired by Daniel Lemire's post, if I was teaching a class about XML, the following practical (and interesting) questions would certainly comprise my exam:
- Given at least 10 blog/link feeds, determine the top ten outbound URLs?
- Parse an iTunes library file and capture all the unique artist/albums.
- Given a user's XML file from del.icio.us, determine the top 10 intersecting tags.
- Scrape a dynamic list from a web site (i.e. the Google Zeitgeist) and serialize a well-formed Atom feed.
