Yesterday, I hacked up a website, Glitchr, which is heavily inspired by youpy's great work, GlitchMonkey. It aimes to let people know fun of glitched things easier without installing greasemonkey script.

A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, and in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games, although it is applied to all types of systems including human organizations and nature. The term derives from the German glitschen, meaning 'to slip.'

Source: Glitch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As the entry from Wikipedia says, glitch is a word which originally come from electronics industries terms, but it's also a name of a genre in some kind of arts, music, movie, image, and so on. Speaking about music, I really love Oval, who compose songs filled with glitched noises, nevertheless, they're really melodious and beautiful.

Glitchr is a website which glitches images in webpages, and of course, you can also specify the image by its URL on the Net. Anyway, seeing is believing. I'll show you some examples (by specifing an image).

It's interesting!

Surely, it's totally useless. But usefulness doesn't matter for arts at all, you know ;)

The feature to set new graph data has been offered since the API was released, but the method to enable users to do so is now renamed to postdata() from post() to distingish posting some graph data , postdata(), from posting some configs, post_config().

Here's a usage of this module:

use WebService::Hatena::Graph;

my $graph = WebService::Hatena::Graph->new(
    username => $username,
    password => $password,
);

# set data to the specified graph
$graph->post_data(
    graphname => $graphname,
    date      => $date,
    value     => $value,
);

# retrieve graph data
my $graph_data = $graph->get_data(
    graphname  => $graphname,
    username   => $username,
);

# set config
$graph->post_data(
    graphname      => $graphname,
    graphcolor     => $graphcolor,
    graphtype      => $graphtype,
    status         => $status,
    allowuser      => $allowuser,
    allowgrouplist => $allowgrouplist,
    stack          => $stack,
    reverse        => $reverse,
    formula        => $formula,
    maxy           => $maxy,
    miny           => $miny,
    showdata       => $showdata,
    nolabel        => $nolabel,
    userline       => $userline,
    userlinecolor  => $userlinecolor,
    comment        => $comment,
);

# retrieve config
my $graph_config = $graph->get_config( graphname => $graphname );

Enjoy!

Timelog is one of such sites, but it wisely started providing API which allows its users to access most functions and data on it easily. Really great! As soon as I heard the news, I went straight to work on writing a perl interface to it. Then, I hacked it up as WebService::Timelog, and uploaded it to CPAN.

• WebService::Timelog

Here's a simple usage of this module. For more details, consult the documentation on CPAN and the official documentation of Timelog API. Enjoy!

use WebService::Timelog;

my $timelog = WebService::Timelog->new(
    username => $username,
    password => $password,
);

# update status
$timelog->new_msg(text => $text);

# or you can do so like this
$timelog->update($text);

# retrieve public messages
my $public_messages  = $timelog->public_msg(cnt => $count, since => $since);

# retrieve friends' messages
my $friends_messages = $timelog->friends_msg(cnt => $count, since => $since);

# retrieve direct messages
my $direct_messages  = $timelog->direct_msg(cnt => $count);

# retrieve some information on you
my $me               = $timelog->show();

# retrieve some informtion on your friends
my $friends          = $timelog->friends(cnt => $count);

For instance, there's a tweet which broadcasts weather forecast of Tokyo area in Japan to its followers.

• Twitter / tokyoforecast

Sorry to say, since I'm not live in Tokyo or near there but Amami Island, Kagoshima, forecast of Tokyo area is entirely useless for me. So, I made my version of it:

• Twitter / amamiforecast

Also, I made another tweets which convey QotD, Question of the Day, from Vox, really fascinating blogging tool offered by Six Apart, to Twitter.

• Twitter / qotd_vox (in English)
• Twitter / qotdvoxja (in Japanese)

They just only fetch QotD from Vox and dump it onto Twitter, but QotD is suitable also for such sites as Twitter, so it's worth the trial to do it, I think.

Acknowledgements:

• Plagger: fetches, processes, and publishes feeds.
• livedoor weather forecast service: offers information of weather forecast as a feed.

I made it so that I could neatly write a template for a Plagger plugin, P::P::Publish::Twitter, which now supports templatization using TT. I'm afraid that it may cause some problems in other contexts.

Here's a usage of this module:

# Load this plugin
[% USE Shorten %]

# Shortening URLs
[% FILTER shorten_url %]
  <a href="http://search.cpan.org/">search.cpan.org</a>
[% END %]

# or

[% text | shorten_url %]

# Lengthening URLs
[% FILTER lengthen_url %]
  <a href="http://tinyurl.com/37rwu">search.cpan.org</a>
[% END %]

# or

[% text | lengthen_url %]

Be sure that now it just only posts the mood text to twitter, that is, it doesn't synchronize the mood text and the status on Twitter, which can be updated from Web, IM or the other various places. I expect someone to enhance it to enable to do it.

To tell the truth, what I did with the script is just to mix this script and another one. Thank to them!

skype2twitter.js

// configurations
var username = 'username';
var password = 'password';
var interval = 60000;

var status;
var skype = newComObject("Skype4Com.Skype");
var ua    = createUserAgent();

while (true) {
    if (status == skype.CurrentUserProfile.MoodText) continue;

    status = skype.CurrentUserProfile.MoodText
    postStatus(ua, username, password, status);
    WScript.Sleep(interval);
}

function postStatus (ua, username, password, status) {
    try {
        ua.open(
            'POST',
            'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json',
            false,
            username,
            password
        );
        ua.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
        ua.setRequestHeader('X-Twitter-Client', 'Skype2Twitter');
        ua.setRequestHeader('X-Twitter-Client-Version', '0.01');
        ua.setRequestHeader('X-Twitter-Client-URL',  'http://blog.kentarok.org/2007/04/10/skype2twitter.xml');
        ua.send('status=' + encodeURIComponent(status));

        if(ua.status == 200) {
            print('Updated: ' + status);
        }
        else {
            print('Error: ' + ua.status + ' - ' + ua.statusText);
        }
    }
    catch (e) {
        print (e.message);
    }
}

function createUserAgent () {
    try{
        return new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');
    }
    catch (e) {
        try{
            return new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');
        }
        catch(e){
            return null;
        }
    }
}

function newComObject (lib) {
    var obj;

    try {
        obj = WScript.CreateObject(lib);
    }
    catch(e){
        obj = new ActiveXObject(lib);
    }

    return obj;
}

function print (string) {
    WScript.Echo(string);
}