Impress Women II

A sequel to this node: Impress Women, and my response: Re: Impress Women that I thought I'd share....

I've had a small perl script running each morning to send an email to my wife so she gets mail from me frequently. I had the script capturing the output of "fortune" each time so the email would have a little bit of variety, but lately got into reading a SOAP::Lite tutorial at http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/01/soap.html so I thought I'd implement something using that instead. My wife really doesn't understand a lot of the computer-sci related jokes output by "fortune", and even some I find really dry. Luckily I ran across a SOAP service that would return random jokes, and was able to use that pretty nicely.

So here's the code in case anyone's interested in wooing their significant other with their geekiness ;) Simple, but effective in brightening up another's workday.


#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use SOAP::Lite;

my $addr = 'wife@emailaddress.com';

my $soap = SOAP::Lite
    ->uri('urn:vgx-joke')
        ->proxy('http://services.xmltoday.com/vx_engine/soap-trigger.p
+perl')
        ->on_fault(
            sub {
                my($soap, $res) = @_; 
                die ref $res ? $res->faultdetail : $soap->transport->s
+tatus, "\n";
            }
        );

my $res;
eval { $res = $soap->JokeOfTheDay()->result; };

my ($subject, $message);

if (!$@ && $res->{'title'} && $res->{'text'}) {
        $subject = "My daily email: $res->{'title'}";
        $message = $res->{'text'};
}
else {
        $subject = 'My daily email';
        $message = "Sorry, I can't think of any jokes today.  :(";
}

open(MAIL, "| /usr/sbin/sendmail $addr") or die $!;

print MAIL<<THE_END;
From: my@address
To: $addr
Subject: $subject

<sappy message .... >

$message

THE_END

close(MAIL) or die $!;
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Comment on Impress Women II Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Impress Women II by khippy (Scribe) on Sep 05, 2001 at 16:41 UTC
Nice idea, but I have had no luck, yet, testing it. Are you shure, that uri and proxy settings are ok for all? A quick read over the soap-module didn't help, so I ask you, would you please explain a bit more? BTW: You have to escape the @ for the mailadresses to be changed, right? -- there are no silly questions killerhippy	[reply]
Re: Re: Impress Women II by koolade (Pilgrim) on Sep 06, 2001 at 03:51 UTC
That's odd...it works for me. What kind of errors does it give you? Does the script die, or does it just not fetch the jokes? Actually, you don't need to escape the @ if the address is in single quotes. Oh...you mean in the here-docs? Yeah, that needs to be escaped.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Impress Women II by khippy (Scribe) on Sep 06, 2001 at 11:29 UTC
Hi koolade, I had put in one escape too much at line 4. Deleting it and keeping the one at line 27 works fine, now. Thanx 4 your advice. -- there are no silly questions killerhippy	[reply]
Re: Impress Women II by one4k4 (Hermit) on Sep 05, 2001 at 23:57 UTC
I like it. Now only if I could get it to deliver her flowers when I do one of the "stupid-male" tricks and get on her nerves. ;) _14k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)	[reply]
Re: Impress Women II by shadox (Priest) on Sep 06, 2001 at 01:33 UTC
Nice idea, it is very useful for all of us who forget to write a few lines to our g/f or wife. The only thing that i would add to it to be perfect will be a "flowers" sub, so the program will send a request to some flower delivery site in the aniversary date :) ( that would save my life ) Shadox	[reply]
Re: Re: Impress Women II by pmas (Hermit) on Sep 06, 2001 at 05:48 UTC
To save your life, brother monk: create yourself calendar reminder at calendar.yahoo.com. These guys will send you email reminder. Then, you can email greeting postcard at greetings.yahoo.com. What if you do not have net access? When not distracted, how possibly you can forget?....;-) pmas To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Impress Women II by zakzebrowski (Curate) on Sep 06, 2001 at 20:41 UTC
Cough. sparks.com - I "worked" there a while ago. They have reminder systems and a history feature to make sure you don't get same card twice... :) ---- Zak	[reply]
Re: Impress Women II by vroom (His Eminence) on Sep 11, 2001 at 21:50 UTC
Cool, I've been enlisted to set up a word(s) of the day mailer for my female friend studying for the GRE. This weekend I'm supposed to teach her Everything programming basics so she can update the site I made for the college group we were both a part of last year. Fun. Fun. vroom \| Tim Vroom \| vroom@blockstackers.com	[reply]