So for a long time I had the current song from XMMS in my GAIM info, but I switched to amaroK and I needed to do something else. So I got the AutoProfile Plugin and it can run any program and use the output from that. I suggest setting up the program as a cron job and having AutoProfile reading from a file as that won't cause it to take a long time if you want perl to do something that takes a while. Anyway, after browsing around on CPAN through the Acme namespace a bit, I came up with this simple and fun info message: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
#use Acme::Terror::UK;
use Acme::Terror;
use DCOP;

my $t = Acme::Terror->new();
#my $s = Acme::Terror::UK->new();
my $dcop = DCOP->new();

#my $uLevel = $s->fetch();
my $level = $t->fetch();

my $current_song = $dcop->run( 'amarok player nowPlaying' );

if ($dcop->run('amarok player status') == 1) {
    $current_song = "$current_song [paused]";
}

if ($current_song) {
    print "I am currently listening to: $current_song\n";
}
print "Stay informed!  The current terrorist threat level in the US is
+: $level\n";
#print "Also: The current terrorist threat level in the UK is: $uLevel
+\n";

[download]
The UK stuff is commented out because the server seems to be down. Probably because of the recent unfortunate events in that area. Either way, I hope someone finds this cool and useful. I certainly dig it!

Note: Because getting the terror level seems to be taking a while I had this delegated to a cron job. I can't figure out how to get the information from amaroK via cron, supposedly because of user permission issues. If anyone figures out a way, let me know. Update: I figured out what my problem was with getting the music via cron. The DCOP module uses kde-config to locate the dcop binary, but if kde-config is not in your path, it will just choke. I added a PATH variable to my cron and that fixed everything. Now hopefully you will all have the current song in your gaim info as well!

In reply to Dynamic GAIM Info by frew

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