After yesterday's ( June 28, 2001 ) rather busy day at Slashdot with a number of common themed stories being hit on , I commented in the CB that I was just this far away from winning a fictional Slashdot bingo game...

Well, now you too can play Slashdot bingo with your friends! Simply run this script, which generates an HTML page, any number of times, and the first one to get 5 in a row (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) wins! The code is generic enough that you can change the data out with any other similar site and enjoy bingo in that form as well.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI qw(:all);
use Algorithm::Numerical::Shuffle qw(shuffle);

my @items = <DATA>;
die "Need at least 24 items" if @items < 24;
@items = shuffle @items;

print header("text/html"),
      start_html(-title=>"Slashdot Bingo!"),
      table( { -align=>"center", -border=>1, -frame=>"border", -rules=
+>"all" },
        Tr( {-align=>"center", -valign=>"middle", -height=>"100" },
          [
            td( { -width=>"100" },
                [ map { pop @items } (1..5) ] ),
            td( { -width=>"100" },
                [ map { pop @items } (1..5) ] ),
            td( { -width=>"100" },
                [ pop @items, pop @items, big(b("FREE")),
                  pop @items, pop @items ] ),
            td( { -width=>"100" },
                [ map { pop @items } (1..5) ] ),
            td( { -width=>"100" },
                [ map { pop @items } (1..5) ] )
          ]
        )
      ),
      end_html,
      "\n";

__DATA__
Jon Katz article
Microsoft FUD
Microsoft vs DOJ
Napster
DeCSS
Anime
Movie Review
ICANN
Frivolious Patents
Rambus
KDE vs GNOME
Linux Kernel Update
GPL
Ask Slashdot (on frontpage)
Science (on frontpage)
Apple Computers
Microsoft .NET
Book Review
BSD (on frontpage)
Console Games
AOL
IANAL
Privacy (on frontpage)
Your Rights Online (on frontpage)
Doubleclick & Friends
Star Wars
Distributed Computing
[download]

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain