[Purdue-pm] Monger Meeting Idea, or ...

[David Jacoby]

I mentioned that I could pull out my Stupid Agents talk, add
some newer, less-Stupid topics (such as AJAX) that I've been
playing with, then present that. Since screen-scraping is a
big part of what people use Perl for (so much, they wrote a
book about it!), this would possibly be of some interest.

But, I've been working on a framework that would allow
less-Stupid* agents to work upon your data. Thing is, I get
the constitant parts -- the Greasemonkey user.js script that
sends your data to the Agent's server and collects the data,
the Firefox Sidebar that serves as the main focus for
back-and-forth communication between Agent and you, and the
Agent sitting on server doing stuff for you. But while I'm
sure something as simple as a word-search on the last 20
URLs could get you a word sample that you could use to
search Google and get the next piece of the puzzle for
whatever you're working on, I'm less sure where the dividing
line between a "Smart" agent like that Google search would
do, I'm far less sure about what you could do with
"Intelligent" as in AI technologies. If this is a subject
for drawing on a napkin at a social meeting, great. If this
is a subject for a technical talk, great. If this is a
subject noboby here can tackle, fine.  Just stating
something I'm curious about.

*"Stupid" is not a bad thing, unless you make it. "Go get
today's Dilbert and store it where I can find it!" is, when
translated into computer, a perfectly Stupid and a perfectly
wonderful command, except when Scott Adams has a page
redesign and the computer doesn't know where to look
anymore.

-- 
Dave Jacoby    jacoby at csociety.org
        You never need a plumber until you need one badly