Programming exercises/challenges

[Mr.SpOOn]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:39 AM, Mensanator <mensanator at aol.com> wrote:
> Another hobby I have is tracking movie box-office receipts
> (where you can make interesting graphs comparing Titanic
> to Harry Potter or how well the various sequels do, if Pierce
> Brosnan saved the James Bond franchise, what can you say about
> Daniel Craig?). Lots of potential database problems there.
> Not to mention automating the data collection from the Internet
> Movie Database by writing a web page scraper than can grab
> six months worth of data in a single session (you probably
> wouldn't need this if you cough up a subscription fee for
> professional access, but I'm not THAT serious about it).

This is really interesting. What would one need to do such a thing?
The only program web related I did in Python was generating a rss feed
from a local newspaper static site, using BeautifulSoup. But I never
put it on an online host. I'm not even sure if I could run. What
requisites should have the host to run python code?

Thanks and sorry for the meddling.