fortune.shtml

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Cjmovie

fortune.shtml

Post by Cjmovie »

How many of us have spent hours at http://thinkgeek.com/fortune.shtml ? (If you don't know what it is spend the rest of the day there....)

Well, after a couple of hours of refreshing, you see, I got smart. I have a program running right now that will request a new copy every second and parse the quote out. Then it formats it all nice and saves it to a file for easy viewing.

Then I search for my own quote :D.
AGI1122

Re:fortune.shtml

Post by AGI1122 »

Heh, I have something similiar to that hidden somewhere on my website. :P Good luck finding it.

Anyway I like the quote I saw on there "I found jesus... apparently he was under the couch the whole time."
Cjmovie

Re:fortune.shtml

Post by Cjmovie »

I'm sad. I've written a program to continuously pull down and extract the posts here into a gigantic file which I can read at my leasure. I'm adding a feature now to sort out the repeated posts... URL to follow... find it if you can! (Feindish Grin)

Update: I'm not rewriting it to post to the site too, as that might encourage a lot of same-message spam. (in reply to someone's request)

Update to the Update: Now it has a cool setting to stop you after reading more than a specified amount of posts (defaults to 5000). It also has a feature which runs the quotes through your start bar at a speed you can specify...
Found this halfway down my 4th download file. Each download file is 350K, quotes only, seperated by "... ... ...". I have not skipped a single quote.

I need a life.

;)

*edit*
This sucks. I can't find my quote, but I can find one that says exactly the same thing......
GLneo

Re:fortune.shtml

Post by GLneo »

thy should advertise on that page make a lot of money with all that refreshing the ads;D

p.s. isn't thinkgeek related to sourcefourge somehow, made by same pepole or something???

p.p.s. how would you make a auto retiver like that, i have no clue how the internet works??? :)
Cjmovie

Re:fortune.shtml

Post by Cjmovie »

You would connect to "ThinkGeek.com" on port 80. Then you would send the following command through the socket:

"GET /fortune.shtml HTTP/1.0\n\n"

Then, taking into account (of course) that the incoming data is split into an average of 4 packets (TCP is streaming protocol) you gather the data of the web-page's source. Then you search it for the quote, save the quote to a file, and close the socket. Repeat.

As for them being connected to sourceforge..... http://www.thinkgeek.com/about-us/
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Re:fortune.shtml

Post by Pype.Clicker »

GLneo wrote: p.s. isn't thinkgeek related to sourcefourge somehow, made by same pepole or something???
afaik, they're both members of the "Open Source Technology Group" (http://www.ostg.com/)

Freshmeat, newsforge and slashdot are also members of that group.
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