a view from afar

WARNING: the following post is not suitable for anyone who has left high school, unless (like me maybe) your sense of humour didn't

There's a meme doing its round of the blogosphere lately: apparently swearing is good for you and good for your business. Well not at my workplace - UPDATE: ok might leave this bit off until I actually stop working there...

Even DHH is onto this. (Well, when I say "even"-)

However, while e-mail may be an inappropriate medium for venting anger, your Adium display name certainly is not :D

Inspired by this site that got sent round the office today, I put together this little Ruby script to update your Adium display name with a razor-sharp, mature, witty tagline:

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# usage:
#   adium_display_name <yourname>

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'

doc = Hpricot(open("http://www.swearalot.com/"))
message = doc.search("#theswear > a").inner_html

name = ARGV[0]

`/usr/bin/osascript -e \
  'tell application "Adium" to \
    set the display name of the first account to \
    "#{name} - #{message}"'`

It will need tweaking if you've got several accounts (I only use one at work).

UPDATE: ok, nobody sent their launchd script on the back of a postcard, so here is mine. Found out something I didn't know, namely that the OnDemand setting must be true for one-shot scripts, otherwise launchd sees the process terminate and tries to restart it (about 10 times, until it gives up and unloads the plist).

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
                       "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>net.codeweavers.adium-name-update</string>
        <key>OnDemand</key>
        <true/>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>/Applications/adium_display_name.rb</string>
                <string>YOUR NAME</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>2700</integer>
</dict>
</plist>