zedstar dot org » twitter

btlogger updated to support OAuth

john — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:57:37 +0000

Twitter pulling the plug on basic authentication meant I had to make changes to btlogger to support OAuth. Fortunately, librest made the code changes trivial. However, I ran into some problems. The clock was out of sync on the PC where btlogger runs. This caused the authenticate process to fail at the token request stage and was not easy to debug. The other issue which has been heavily documented is how to support authentication keys in FOSS. Currently configure.ac requires an edit to supply the key information. In theory I could supply the keys to somebody who wants to build the software from source until I figure out another way to handle this. I think they call this “best effort security”.

btlogger is now running from its own twitter account at: http://twitter.com/bluetoothlogger

btlogger update

john — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:41:23 +0000

I finally got around to fixing btlogger. It broke after an Ubuntu upgrade which contained BlueZ changes. Anyway, I have moved the code over to Gitorious and made a new tarball and Debian package.

Binary: http://zedstar.org/deb/btlogger_0.3.3-1_i386.deb

Tarball: http://zedstar.org/tarballs/btlogger-0.3.3.tar.gz

Repo: git clone git://gitorious.org/btlogger/btlogger.git

Take a look at the README for further information.

Tweeting from an IRC bot

john — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:25:05 +0000

I have made a Guile module which is capable of being used by the IRC bot bobot++. The code is available here:

http://zedstar.org/tarballs/sneektweet-0.1.tar.gz

The readme:

sneektweet 0.1:

Wraps some C/GLib code which posts to Twitter.

setup:

Edit configure.ac to set twitter account details.

from REPL:

john@thinkpad:~/workspace/sneektweet$ guile
guile> (use-modules (twitter sneektweet))
guile> (tweet "foobar")
guile> ** Message: posted update to Twitter

todo:

Add reading updates and posting back to IRC channel. 

bobot example code:

(use-modules (twitter sneektweet))

(define (sneektweet channel message)
  (if (> (string-length message) 140)
    (bot:say channel "Your message needs to be under 140 characters in length!")
    (tweet message)))

(bot:addcommand "tweet" sneektweet #t 2 0)

shakeyshakey

john — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:13:21 +0000

When accelerometers meet Twitter.

This programs calculates the covariance of data sampled from a Thinkpad’s accelerometers. If the covariance is over a certain threshold it posts the result to Twitter. Or more simply put, shake your laptop and make it tweet!

It is a command line program which requires a Twitter username and password to be supplied e.g.

shakeyshakey -u foo -p bar

Built and tested on Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope).

http://zedstar.org/tarballs/shakeyshakey_0.1.orig.tar.gz

http://zedstar.org/deb/shakeyshakey_0.1-1_i386.deb

geotwitta

john — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:44:23 +0000

geotwitta lets you see how far you are from other twitter users running the program. It will post to your twitter account letting you know the distance in kilometers from those users. It is based on a bunch of technologies I wanted to try out. As a result it is somewhat over-engineered for what it does. For those that are interested it uses Guile to script a binary network protocol that happens to be encoded efficiently over UDP packets.

It is a command line program. An example of usage is:

geotwitta -u foo -p bar --lat=55.55 --long=-0.25

This would authenticate against the Twitter account ‘foo’ with password ‘bar’ and ping in those coordinates. These account details are only exchanged securely with Twitter and not sent over the network protocol. The protocol also does not provide coordinates back of other users. It simply shows a relative distance. The full source of the client is available. If there is an interest I will also tidy up the server code and release it.

To get started you need two packages: The program itself and the Guile module which does the network protocol work. The following tarballs are availble for those who want to build from source.

http://zedstar.org/tarballs/packedobjects-0.1.tar.gz

http://zedstar.org/tarballs/geotwitta-0.1.tar.gz

http://zedstar.org/tarballs/geotwitta-0.2.tar.gz

Untar and do the usual ./configure… routine. The configure script will let you know which dependencies are required to compile. If you don’t feel like building from source I have also built some Debian packages. I have tested these on Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex).

http://zedstar.org/deb/packedobjects_0.1-1_i386.deb

http://zedstar.org/deb/geotwitta_0.1-1_i386.deb

http://zedstar.org/deb/geotwitta_0.2-1_i386.deb

If you manage to get the software running I will see you on Twitter!

All the usual disclaimers about the software apply.

**update**

Version 0.2 of geotwitta added: ignores UDP packet loss on pings

Bluetooth logging to Twitter with btlogger

john — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:17:55 +0000

I decided to hack my Bluetooth logger so that it could post any new devices it saw to my Twitter account. This should be interesting once I get it setup on my desk at work! After moving to Intrepid Ibex I realised the changes in BlueZ versions borked my software. It took me a while to figure out what needed to be fixed. Anyway, these changes and Twitter hack are available as a tarball here:

zedstar.org/tarballs/btlogger-0.3.2.tar.gz

The tarball should install an sqlite db file in /var/lib/misc but you can move it else where if you don’t want to run as root. If you supply a username and password on the command line it will try and post the scan results to Twitter like:

http://twitter.com/jptmoore

To see the command line options run btlogger –help