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fortune.shtml
Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2005 11:19 pm
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
.
Re:fortune.shtml
Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2005 11:32 pm
by AGI1122
Heh, I have something similiar to that hidden somewhere on my website.
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."
Re:fortune.shtml
Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2005 3:28 am
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......
Re:fortune.shtml
Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2005 9:53 am
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???
Re:fortune.shtml
Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2005 7:30 pm
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/
Re:fortune.shtml
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2006 4:01 am
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.