agray's tilde.club page

@tilde_fortune twitter bot

Mon Oct 13 15:51:02 UTC 2014

In the end it was too easy to set this up. THANKS UNIX. I was planning to have to learn (more) python and choose a python Twitter library etc but in the end I just used TTYtter.pl called from a shell script. I even got to use TR(1) to strip newlines, woo-hoo!

So the bot is made up of:

TTYtter.pl in my ~/bin directory
shortfortune, a shell script that does this:
```
fortune -n 140 -s
```

tweet_fortune, a shell script that does this:

shortfortune | tr '\n' ' ' | TTYtter.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

a cron job that runs tweet_fortune every 20 minutes

It's a demonstration of the power of the Unix Philosophy of small well-defined tools that can be joined together easily.

Tweeting fortunes is fun but I'm thinking about creating a better source of tweets:

Tweetable quotes about tilde.club from articles about it?
Tweetable quots from pages on tilde.club, with links to the pages
User-submitted (anonymized) bash.org style quotes from IRC/Wall?

Find-the-Spam

Mon Oct 6 14:03:43 UTC 2014

Can you Find-the-spam?

Campaign for a Non-Browser Specific WWW

Mon Oct 6 13:54:07 UTC 2014

This page is still here, like a time capsule!

X Terminal Screenshot Nov. 1998

Sun Oct 5 22:37:01 UTC 2014

Terrible resolution. I don't know how I took this screenshot. It was a high resolution grayscale X Terminal in the university labs. Looks like I was viewing my friend Hans' home page. Also from the xload at the top looks like picard was very busy.

Page updates!

Sun Oct 5 22:25:34 UTC 2014

I found the actual background image that I was using on my ~agray homepage in 1995 (or so??)

Click here to download it.

Flatbed scanner

Sun Oct 5 22:43:45 UTC 2014

Parallel port flatbed scanner, under Linux. I think it used CUPS? Click here to learn more about CUPS.

Linux desktop panels

Sun Oct 5 22:31:43 UTC 2014

I can't believe I cannot recall the name of this window manager. It wasn't GNUStep but it looked like that. When pressed these buttons would either launch a program or slide out a drawer of other programs to choose from.

This would have been running off a 500MB partition on my Pentium 166. This was right around the time that Linux took over on the desktop *cough*

Dragon Fire

Sun Oct 5 22:41:49 UTC 2014

I used to play Atari 2600 games using the Stella emulator under Linux.

xeyes

Sat Oct 4 19:24:59 UTC 2014

Logged in, ran W(1). So great. (I've removed IPs)

Sat Oct 4 01:39:53 UTC 2014

 01:34:24 up 3 days, 22:53, 60 users,  load average: 0.05, 0.12, 0.20
USER     TTY       LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
eric     pts/0     20:59    4:34m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
harper   pts/1     Wed18   23:16m  0.61s  0.61s screen
harper   pts/4     Wed18   23:16m  0.03s  2:41  SCREEN
tim      pts/5     17:46   36:24   0.03s  0.03s -sh
ryan     pts/11    23:42    8.00s  0.01s  0.01s -bash
englishm pts/13    22:58    2:01m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
brandizz pts/14    00:42    4:40   0.15s  0.00s /bin/bash /home
delfuego pts/18    01:08    1:36   0.00s  0.00s -bash
spider   pts/20    23:25    1:46m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
englishm pts/26    Fri03   21:52m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
danbri   pts/28    Fri09    3:26m  0.33s  0.33s -sh
joshua   pts/36    23:18   52:08   0.06s  0.06s -sh
englishm pts/41    22:58    1:57m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
ec2-user pts/48    23:51    8.00s  0.02s  0.00s sshd: ec2-user 
summeran pts/53    22:28    3:06m  0.42s  0.42s emacs public_ht
ryan320  pts/56    01:23   40.00s  0.00s  0.00s -sh
harper   pts/57    Wed18    2days  0.00s  0.00s -/bin/bash
phcordne pts/62    23:18    5:28   0.00s  0.00s -sh
kjell    pts/70    Wed17    4:09m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
ford     pts/76    23:26    2:01m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
nick     pts/78    14:57    4:03m  0.07s  0.03s bash
pmg      pts/82    00:33    1:00m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
crazybut pts/84    Thu18    3:29m  0.12s  0.12s -sh
kjell    pts/73    Thu03   32:08   0.00s  0.00s tmux attach
ec2-user pts/92    01:11    1:12   0.35s  0.00s sshd: ec2-user 
jeffbonh pts/94    23:27    8.00s  0.09s  0.09s -sh
pfhawkin pts/95    00:12    1:18m  0.00s  0.00s -bash
michaelc pts/98    17:43    5:16m  0.09s  0.09s -bash
cblgh    pts/99    13:40   21:28   0.23s  0.23s /bin/bash
ikesmith pts/103   01:16    8.00s  0.32s  0.32s vim index.html
pfhawkin pts/100   00:12    1:22m  0.00s  0.00s -bash
joshua   pts/102   23:54   58:08   0.01s  0.01s -sh
john     pts/107   14:32    3:19m  0.18s  0.18s -sh
everypla pts/111   01:22   16.00s  0.01s  0.01s -sh
stefan   pts/112   Thu04   45:33m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
bradchoa pts/117   01:25   32.00s  0.01s  0.01s -bash
activity pts/118   01:31    8.00s  0.05s  0.05s vim public_html
eric     pts/93    20:42    4:35m  0.00s  0.00s -sh
dbaker   pts/108   01:19   56.00s  0.02s  0.02s -sh
pushcx   pts/120   00:15    4:48   0.00s  0.00s -bash
joelj    pts/121   01:26    6:16   0.00s  0.00s -sh
Clement_ pts/122   01:26    4:40   0.00s  0.00s -sh
meyer    pts/123   01:26    8.00s  0.02s  0.00s -sh
eaton    pts/124   01:27    0.00s  0.07s  0.07s nano index.html
ford     pts/125   01:32   32.00s  0.05s  0.05s talk mo
stefan   pts/127   Wed18   22:48  55.95s 55.89s vim index.html
dansband pts/128   01:30   32.00s  0.01s  0.01s -sh
beau     pts/130   Thu21    2:28m  0.05s  0.05s -sh
zycom    pts/131   01:28    1:12   0.00s  0.00s /bin/sh /usr/bi
silver   pts/133   14:41    1:04   0.15s  0.00s wall
raven    pts/135   01:34    8.00s  0.00s  0.00s -sh
mo       pts/136   01:30    8.00s  0.02s  0.02s talk ford
smnevans pts/138   01:32   40.00s  0.00s  0.00s /bin/sh /usr/bi
agray    pts/141   01:33    0.00s  0.00s  0.00s w
beau     pts/152   18:09    2:28m  0.02s  0.02s -sh
ryan     pts/154   21:10    3:01m  0.02s  0.02s -bash
elb      pts/155   21:51    3:40m  0.00s  0.00s -bash
rfreeber pts/161   18:44    6:21m  0.01s  0.01s -bash
michaelc pts/171   19:54    5:39m  0.00s  0.00s tmux a

Woo hoo!

Sat Oct 4 02:14:14 UTC 2014

Just got password-less login set up. Don't forget to chmod 700 your ~/.ssh directory.

Neko cursor

Sat Oct 4 19:22:58 UTC 2014

I could live here.

Sat Oct 4 01:46:44 UTC 2014

-sh-4.1$ which lynx
/usr/bin/lynx

-sh-4.1$ which mutt
/usr/bin/mutt

xkoules

Sat Oct 4 21:05:32 UTC 2014

Great game.

Grover on the toilet

Sat Oct 4 21:22:10 UTC 2014

In university I had a page called "Grover on the toilet" it was just a page with this image. I may be misremembering but this page may have been in the Yahoo! directory? That's what the world was like back then.

cube

Sat Oct 4 16:47:19 UTC 2014

Python!

Sat Oct 18 16:34:40 UTC 2014

I wrote the original crawling code for the @tilde_fortune bot in perl. It's still there, the files are src/extract_users.pl and src/local_crawl.pl. But when I decided to store text in a sqlite3 database I ran into a roadblock when I discovered that the perl installation on tilde.club didn't include DBI.

So I checked whether it was possible with python and lo and behold the necessary packages were present. Rewrite the code in python? challenge accepted. It was easier than I expected and I really like python. Dare I say it but it is now my language-of-choice for small things like this. I'm so sorry, perl. I never thought this day would come.

I have googled how to do specific things in python but not really immersed myself in python culture/community so I have a feeling that my python code is not very pythonic (I think that's the word). Like, I'm not creating any classes. Just functions. eg:

add_users_to_db(get_users(user_url))

Verdict: python good.

Dial-in callback

Thu Oct 9 03:44:12 UTC 2014

In that same dial-up period at University I also set up a way that I could get files off my home computer while on campus.

I left my computer on all the time with the modem hooked up. From campus I'd call my home phone number and after a few rings my computer would answer. I'd written an ugly bash script that relied on a nifty program (whose name I forget) that told you which DTMF tones your modem was hearing. The bash script was a simple voicemail menu that, if I entered my super-secret number code, would:

Pause for 30(?) seconds.
Dial in to my ISP
E-mail its (dynamically assigned) IP address to me

Then I could FTP whatever I needed off my computer. When I was done I'd enter some kind of command that hung up the dial-in connection.

It took me quite a while to build and test this system and I only recall really having to use it once or twice.

Sharing a dial up connection

Thu Oct 9 03:25:43 UTC 2014

Around 1997 or 1998 my University roommate and I had our Pentiums connected to each other through an ethernet hub. I'm not sure why because (a) neither of us were gamers and (b) we were running Linux so there really weren't any games anyway. We were probably cross-mounting mp3 collections with NFS.

One cool thing we set up was sharing a single dial up connection via routing and NAT. The way it worked was one of us would dial in to what was basically the school-run ISP and the other would set up a default network route that pointed at the machine that was dialed in. We thought this was extremely cool. I mean, both of us could be online at the same time through the same phone line!

I forget exactly how much this dial-in service cost. I'm pretty sure that to buy credit you'd go down somewhere in the bowels of the Math building and wait in line. In my last term of school the house shared a cable modem connection that was online all the time which was truly amazing.

tilde roll