bitwise operations.

241294492511762325 >> 46 means shift the binary form of number which is

  0000001101011001010000000001000000000000011010111111011110010101

to the right 46 spaces while replacing with 0s

  0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000110101100101

0xFFFF is hex version of 1111111111111111 (note two missing bits he reserved for gold :D )

& 0xFFFF is doing a AND operation of the bits.

  0000110101100101
  1111111111111111
  ----------------
  0000110101100101

so 0000110101100101 in decimal is 3429

Hi, I'm on os x using macport. What are my options for installing InfluxDB?

Switch to Homebrew and "brew install influxdb" or build from source. It'll be much easier to do the latter once 0.9.0 is released.

why not use the twitter api?

from the github page: Birdeater does not use Twitter's API. It was built as a demonstration of an approach I like to use for parsing structured information from unstructured HTML.

A better (and practical) example is scraping an internet forum (I've done it, partially)

The API probably has a key that can be blocked.

Not that I'm advocating this, but a potential advantage of scraping, is it can be combined with tor or proxies, etc to get around limits.

It's rate-limited to 150 requests per hour and you can only pull the 3,200 most recent tweets for a user.

api has rate limits

So does this it seems: Be mindful when running it, as Twitter limits the number of requests that a single client can make per hour.

Looks like this webpage is drawn in Canvas. Can this tool translate the entire Canvas content to a HTML doc that I can then publish?