now there's an idea

[rone]

The redoubtable Dave Zuckerman writes:

I'm not a huge blog fan.  Every once in a while, just to be contrarian, I think about doing periodic .plan updates, just so I can tell people who ask if I blog that they'll have to finger me to find out!  Bwahahahah!

Now i'm tempted to figure a way to stick my latest LJ entry into my .plan.

Comments

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

Does anyone still use finger(1)?

I find I tend to log into machines and use w(1).

[wisn.livejournal.com]

I was thinking, "Hey, isn't that what John Carmack was doing?" and googled and found http://www.webdog.org which archives .plan messages for a variety of software developers. For what it's worth, Carmack's last archived update was Jan 23 of last year, and finger johnc@idsoftware.com yields 'connection refused'.

[bivaughn.livejournal.com]

I'll write you something in PHP if you want.

No problemo!

[fabio-heinz.livejournal.com]

perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint "http://www.livejournal.com/users/ronebofh"' > $HOME/.plan

HTH! HAND! SEND ME A DOLLAR!

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

Can you run a python? If so that possibly I can hack an xml-rpc -> ftp script.

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

Here is my python version.

---
import xmlrpclib,string,ftplib,os

ljUserName = "put your lj name here"
ljPassword = "put your lj password here"
tempFileName = "MyPlan"
fingerHost = "put the ip or hostname of the ftp site where you want to put your plan"
fingerUserName = "put the account name of the ftp account on the finger site"
fingerPassword = "put the password of the ftp account on the finger site"
fingerFile = ".plan"

server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(uri="http://www.livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc",verbose=False)
result = {}
plan = ""

result = server.LJ.XMLRPC.getevents({"username": ljUserName,"password": ljPassword,"selecttype":"one","itemid":"-1"})
plan = string.join(
[ result['events'][0]['eventtime'],
result['events'][0]['subject'],
"",
result['events'][0]['event']],
"\n")

temp = file(tempFileName,"w+a")
temp.write(plan)
temp.close()

storeCommand = "STOR " + fingerFile

temp = file(tempFileName)
ftpClient = ftplib.FTP(fingerHost, fingerUserName, fingerPassword)
ftpClient.storlines(storeCommand,temp)
ftpClient.quit()
temp.close()

os.remove(tempFileName)
---

Simple no?

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

bah! I forgot to take into account how html would warp formatting and Python is formatting sensitive. Here is the URL to the python file.

http://home.earthlink.net/~eviltofu/ljfinger.py