chip the glasses

the shakesbot

I came across this collection by chance recently. I noticed that the HTML used for each play was clean and well structured, so I thought I’d write a twitter bot to perform them. I’ve been waiting for a chance to learn Ruby, too, so I thought I’d use this as an excuse.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

features

• parses MIT shakespeare plays
• can handle an over-capacity twitter
• specify tweet interval, rehearsal (dry-run) mode
• authenticates to Twitter using the twitter_oauth gem

installation

it’s just source code for now as it’s not really useful outside of my one twitter account. However, it could provide a basis for a more general structured-play reader/tweeter, so in the future it may be a releasable tool.

For now, check out the source on github.

thanks to

• MIT, for having nicely parse-able plays
• mirhampt for getting excited about ruby with me
• twitter for trying its best to make the oauth conversion less annoying for one-off twitter toy writers like myself

A friend had the idea to start up a game of musical telephone. The details of it are still somewhat foggy to me but, basically, I make one or more tracks, give them to someone else, and get tracks in return. I do what I want to what I get and trade those in. after some N number of trades, a song appears.

I took this as an opportunity to practice with some new stuff. First, I ran my pdrss program through the great jack rack for two minutes, recording into Rosegarden. Next, I just programmed some oscillators in pure data, put them through jack rack, and recorded another two minutes.

It’s late, and since someone else is going to be hacking these up anyway, I didn’t strive for perfection. I only did two or three takes for each track. They don’t match up all that great and their sluggish changes represent my still-neophyte computer music skillz (computer mice are different than mixer knobs).

I had a lot of fun, and since these tracks are for collaboration (and fairly large…nay, extremely large) I put them up here instead of gmailing them.

Enjoy, and please, take them and destroy them.

twittertalk
oscs

I like perusing the spam that makes it through the spam filter I have plugged into my claws mail at work. Here’s a gem:

From: KIMBERLY CUTLER
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:47:14 +0100
Reply-To: ncvohelpdesk@yahoo.com.hk
X-Mailer: Sun Java(tm) System Messenger Express 6.3-6.03 (built Mar 14
2008; 32bit)

(NCVO) in collaboration with Michael Jackson Trust Fund and donation.
Regent’s Wharf, 8 All Saints Street, London
N1 9RL, United Kingdom

Attn: Ref: PTD/747/09

OFFICIAL CASH PRIZE ONLINE GRANT

You have just won 1,000,000.00 (One Million Great British Pounds) in the ongoing give away prize by The king of pop music, Michael J.Jackson who left in our custody seven million Great British Pounds, part of a portion of its profits of auctioning off lots of memorabilia of the Jackson family to his fans to keep alive an annonymous charity organisation.

We have been officially mandated to give out One Million Great British Pounds each to fans from the seven different continent( Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia) of the world for charity purpose (NOT FOR PERSONAL USE ALONE).

Before his demise, he asked us to keep this donation confidential from his family members because they are content with what they have and also want this to be one of the last good deeds for his amiable fans the world over.

For more information and procedure of claims, Contact the CEO
of NCVO Mr. Stuart Etherington with your winning verification number (MJJ-46819-890PA) randomly selected by our integrated data computer.

E-mail Enquiry:ncvohelpdesk@yahoo.com.hk

24hrs Online Service :+44-702-404-7929
Yours sincerely,
Mrs Kimberly Cutler.
Public Relations officer.

IMPORTANT: 18 years and below cannot file for claims
——————————————————————————————————————
Management ©2009 Ncvo Annual Web Promo in collaboration with Michael Jackson Trust Fund and Donation.®

[cutler.39.vcf text/x-vcard (114 bytes)]

largely for archiving but also up for review:

idea for part of a larger story:

corporate workers convinced that the massive cluster super computer they work on is the biggest in the world; the over-computer; the omega…

through a series of whatevers one of the workers departs from the company…wanders…discovers equally powerful computers…

discovers that there is a level of super computer siblings which their computer is a member of; turns out that each sibling is actually a virtual entity comprising one massive computer…

this thus lends itself to (seemingly) infinite and eternal recurrence up to….what? a false history written by a megalomaniac supercomputer with millions of hierarchically organized corporate children, each of which parades itself as Omega to its worker-followers?

every company thinks it’s competing with the others; but each one is just representing another sibling in this huge cluster grid.

what implication does this have for the individual living/working in this system? for the eventual (?) ‘real’ Omega computer?

(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer?
)

let’s make an entity that just sits on the internet and slowly propagates itself in a non-threatening way and responds when people talk to it

how…?

write a daemon process. put it on a 24/7 server (socrates). teach it to find/join social networking sites. have it be honest (“i am not a person”). have it join IRC channels. have it merely wander around and introduce itself and, maybe, record things said to it (posted to its pages, directed towards it on irc).

why…?

something to discover for the interested…humanize a computational process…and make the internet a more mysterious place. also to gauge peoples’ reactions to talking programs.

let’s stop writing READMEs and make the internet more wiley…you will encounter strange things…bots programmed to do nothing but troll on irc and quote edgar allen poe…strange bots advertising sockets…when you telnet to them you get marquis de sade books in XML…leave accounts on a server open to SSH access and people log in dump them in a sandbox dir where they can make notes and leave files or messages…create an undernet of connected “strange places” and bots that only uses the internet as a means of transport…black market thinking.

let’s program bots to make art and post it in strange places….people will stumble on it (the bot randomly posted its art on craigslist or IMed it to a random screen name using a text-based aim client) and maybe seek out its other works….

program bots to play online games. bots join WoW and run marathons for cancer while reciting ts eliot…or they join an fps match and just wander around striking up meaningful conversation while getting shot over and over…or join online chess games and win…or join a starcraft game and just build a million SCVs…

remind the meat-based entities that they’re living inside of thinking machines.