chip the glasses » twitter

shakesbot: a shakespeare play performer for twitter

nathanielksmith — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:10:45 +0000

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

tabtweet — a Twitter tab-completion extension for Google Chrome (or Chromium)

nathanielksmith — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:37:15 +0000

I just uploaded a chrom{e,ium} extension to google’s extension repository. It adds tab-completion to twitter; when you type an @ symbol into your status box an autocomplete menu pops up with all of your friends’ screen names in it.

tabtweet screenshot

The project is open source. Here is the code (as well as an issue tracker, if you need to submit a bug report).

Technically speaking it’s an interesting project. It is a combination of:

the Chrom{e,ium} extensions framework / API
the Twitter API
the OAuth specification
HTML5 (local storage)
The jQuery library (with a patched autocomplete plugin)

and is the first open source javascript OAuth application I’ve come across. It uses code from this project (albiet with a small patch) to successfully implement the 7-step OAuth flow using AJAX. This was a pretty tremendous struggle as the internet doesn’t think you should do that.

The extension is in the Google chrome extensions directory. Try it out!

global collaboration

nathanielksmith — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:01:03 +0000

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