Sometimes I get involved in some internet japes that are only there to make me giggle. The latest is the twitter bot, @robot_santa. So on twitter he’s telling anybody that they are very naughty, to much amusement and bemusement. For those who don’t know, he stared in an awesome episode of Futurama and basically blew up everybody on XMAS eve.

God knows what I’ll do with him now…

# Rakefile

require 'rake'
require 'twitter'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
namespace :b3ta do
  desc 'find a random quote from b3ta.com/talk and post it to twitter'
  task :random_quote do
    hdoc = Hpricot(open('http://www.b3ta.com/talk').read)
    subs = []
    hdoc.search(".post1, .post2") do |post|
      username, subject = '', ''
      post.search(".username") do |un|
        username = un.inner_html
      end
      post.search("b") do |b|
        subject = b.inner_html.to_s.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")
      end
      subs << "\"#{subject}\" #{username}" if subject != ''
    end
    message = subs[rand(subs.size - 1)]
    twitter = Twitter::Base.new('twitter_username','twitter_password')
    twitter.post(message)
    puts message
  end
end

To set it up and running, just put in a real twitter account and use “rake b3ta:random_quote”. Simple. Ok it may lack any error checking what so ever, but its still amazing what you can do with Ruby with such little code. (check out the rather offensive twitter feed here)

mibly.com/radiofall

What is it using I hear you bellow?

• Ruby – well what else?
• xmpp4r gem – for connecting to the xmpp server and parsing the messages
• json gem – for outputting the messages in …. json
• jQuery – to make all those Ajax requests

The next steps are to add some intelligence into the script, interacting with some APIs or something. I have a few ideas, but it depends upon time and if I can get somebody to help with design.

require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-growl'
require 'xmpp4r-simple'

username = 'myusername'
password = 'password'
domain = 'hug.hellomatty.com'
im = Jabber::Simple.new("#{username}@#{domain}", password)
im.status(:chat, 'Hello world')

#  This bit just adds a few radio stations.  Should only be run once for your user
#
#  %w(radio1 radio2 radio3 radio4 5live 6music radio7 1xtra).each do |r|
#    im.add("#{r}@#{domain}")
#  end

g = Growl.new "localhost", "ruby-growl", ["ruby-growl Notification"], nil, "growl"
i = 0
while true
  i+=1
  if im.connected? == true
    im.presence_updates.each do |friend, old_presence, new_presence|
      if new_presence != nil
        puts "#{friend.gsub("@#{domain}", '')} #{new_presence}"
        g.notify("ruby-growl Notification", friend.gsub("@#{domain}", ''), new_presence)
      end
    end
  else
    puts '**************************** disconnected *************************'
    im = Jabber::Simple.new("#{username}@#{domain}", password)
    im.status(:chat, 'Hello world')
  end
  sleep(2)
  if i == 10
    # reconnect every now and then as we seem to be having odd issues.  a bug really
    im.reconnect
    i = 0
  end
end

Here is some sample output.

radio3: Details from bbc.co.uk/radio3 or call 08700 100 300.
1xtra: 1Xtra Dancehall Show - Robbo Ranx. Txt 88111 [network rates apply].
radio4: The World Tonight. Web - bbc.co.uk/news
radio2: Mark Lamarr. Mark presents the Shake, Rattle and Roll Show.
5live: Richard Bacon: Lively and provocative discussion regarding the day's key stories

Now I have no idea what I can do with this (twitter posting is already done to death), so I might have a think about this sort of thing. Be fun if it makes it into production.