Friday, November 15, 8:00 - 10:00 PM (Location TBA)

Go play with this: http://what-would-i-say.com/

"It's pretty cool," says you. But WHY? Well, my friend, you've just stumbled upon a bigram word model, a.k.a. depth-2 Markov Chain. "Wow, that sounds fancy. I'll never be able to build something like that."

Well, consider yourself wrong!

Markov chains are super-straightforward and very applicable to a bunch of things. And if everything goes well, by the end of the two hours you will have your very own super-special Markov system.

Basic Terminal Commands * ls * cd * mv * rm * mkdir

Markov Chain - Algorithm Overview * What is a Markov Chain? * Programming it in Python * Testing it on sample data

Retrieving Data from Other Websites * Using "curl" to grab web pages * Using regex to parse pages and save them to files

Extra: Linking With Twitter * The Twitter API * OAuth magic (via tmhOAuth)

1. Download Python 3.x: http://python.org/download/

2. Get a shell:

For Windows:

Download Cygwin: http://cygwin.com/install.html

*** Will update with better instructions later ***

NOTE: For Windows users, I strongly recommend setting up a virtual machine with VirtualBox and Ubuntu or one of its variants, but the process is nuanced and I can understand if you don't want to set up something so heavy. But Cygwin really sucks.

For Macintosh & Linux:

You already have a shell! Yay!

(except Macs don't have apt-get or gcc installed by default but hopefully we won't touch those for now)

3. Get a text editor:

Vim:

http://www.vim.org/download.php

    or type

sudo apt-get install vim

    in Terminal

Emacs:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/#Obtaining

    or type

sudo apt-get install emacs

    in Terminal

* I don't actually know how to use Emacs.

4. Make sure the commands "curl" and "wget" run from your shell.

   *** Will update with better instructions later ***

5. OPTIONAL: Get git

For Windows:

http://git-scm.com/download/win

For Mac:

http://git-scm.com/download/mac

For Linux:

In Terminal:

    sudo apt-get install git

*** MORE SOON ***