Atomistic confusion

I was doing a course at MIT on atomistic computing (3.320) and it is graduate level so one expects a different environment where you might be expected to make your own way as opposed to being spoon fed a subject. The thing is that the documentation is so scrambled and disorganized compared to other OCW that it glares. It is supposed to be about computing and yet they do not show that usual organization and standardization one would expect from a professional presentation of facts. It seems to show a lack of care about detail, which is everything when dealing with an atomistic model.

So,... I decided I would take their index and video and documents and unscramble them so I could use them more effectively. One issue is names and ordering. Of course -1- and -10- are not going to sort right so that was fix 01, then BeautifulSoup4 to deal with the index page as it is packed HTML and not suited to analysis without a tool that is DOM aware. Then came regular expressions, wget, argparse, os, and more. By the time I was done, I had virtually reviewed all common python usage. It does rust a bit, especially if you indulge in bash, C, C++, and other forms of mental abuse. So I was planning to post the code, but then it became so convolved, tortured, and complex that I have no time left to demonstrate the way it was solved. I can say that stackoverflow.com seems thee most effective place to get answers without somebody trying to shove a flash object into your skull. It has advertising, but is not intrusive. Apparently they have some employee benefits that are also nice:

employees will never be poked with a sharp stick

Many sites have such intrusive behavior that it makes no difference what they are harking, I block them permanently. I get enough mental duress just trying to juggle specs, subjects, and languages without indulging in virtual data combat with somebody who wants to game me.

I did learn some really interesting things along the way about re and why it works the way it does as well as matching things like bash(awk,sed,grep) in python. [*}

ocw-3.320-lec-01-01feb05-220k.ogv to L_01_Introduction and_Case_Studies_.ogv
ocw-3.320-lec-02-03feb05-220k.ogv to L_02_Potentials__Supercells__Relaxation__Methodology_.ogv
ocw-3.320-lec-03-08feb05-220k.ogv to L_03_Potentials_for_Organic_Materials_and_Oxides__It_s_a_Quantum_World__.ogv