GF: hey baby, can you help me get the pricing for my wishlist?

BF: absolutely, I can help you scrape lancome’s whole websites and give you all the pricing! (fingercrossed).

I took a quick look at lancome’s website and realized that it is a very typical website, every tag has well formatted class name or id. Even if they don’t have well formatted json requests while monitoring their network activity, it is still doable just collect the populated HTML and use beautifulsoup to narrow down to the desired elements and content.

I used urllib2 to make a simple http request and clearly what I want is captured in the response and then it is just a matter of parsing the HTML, thanks to Beautifulsoup, life is so easy now.

Then the idea of using requests quickly came up to me. However, seems like the requests library is not working right out of box.

Here is a screenshot of comparing urlib2 with requests.

In the end, I realized that `r.text` is not enough. First, r.text will return the html in the unicode format and then screw up the soup while passing to the BeautifulSoup function.

In the end, I have to upgrade my Python version and meanwhile using r.content instead of r.text to make it work.

Cartodb is the open source library which specializes in creating maps easily.

Apache Cloudstack is a OSCC (open source cloud computing).

Here is a great tutorial walking you through some of the basic features of Cloudstack by visiting the frontend management console.

In the big data world, qualified data scientists are really rare and within the qualified ones, most of them are well educated, highly skilled foreign labors, like people from China, India etc.

For the alien employees to legally work in the U.S., they have to hold certain type of VISA (H1B temporary working VISA). To make sure they will keep contributing to the employer, one must understand the PERM process and help the employee to get GC (green card) so the employee can work permanently in the U.S.

Here is a page from United States DOL (Department of Labor) that briefly describes the 9 steps to get the PERM application approved.

http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/perm_detail.cfm

I came across the Ruby tutorial from code academy and realized that it is really light weight, easy to program since it is a high level interpreting language.

To help you get started, make sure you know where the documentation is first.

also, here is a few commands that I ran through the ruby shell and a file.

If you are interested in learning how to code, here is a website which integrates online code editor that you and learn and hone your skill there. GO codeacademy! 

Here is a list of free online scrum training videos. They include a brief introduction to the idea of SCRUM as a whole, and then dive into each component of a scrum process. They have some interesting animations and real life case which makes the training very logical and vivid. I personally think this is the most amazing and well-made online scrum training. Definitely check it out if you think your team is not well organized.