Long distance relationship? Perl can help.

http://code.google.com/p/serendipity/

by mayank • 16 years ago

86 20 16 years ago

code.google.com

This is very cool. Does anyone know whether Kayak is OK with this sort of scraping? (translation: will this break if it gets popular?)

sync• 16 years ago

It's not scraping, it's using Kayak's API: http://www.kayak.com/labs/api/search/

natep3• 16 years ago

Answer to the translation: yes :(

abecedarius• 16 years ago

My favorite example of Perl helping a relationship: http://hop.perl.plover.com/cover.html

"I wish all my programs achieved their design goals so spectacularly."

cloudwalking3• 16 years ago

Cool, thanks. Just installed this and it works great. Do you know a good way to send SMS programmatically (as you mention)?

natep3• 16 years ago

A crude way would be to send an email to #@carrier.tld (e.g. 1234567890@verizon.net) and it will be converted to SMS by the carrier.

bps4484• 16 years ago

I agree, that's the easiest crude way to do it. The only problem will be is if you're trying to make an app where people supply their numbers in order to get an SMS, because you don't know the carrier. To get around that, afaik, there is:

1. [hard to implement, and costs money, easy for the user] integrate with an sms gateway. Here is a comparison of two: http://dcwilkie.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/sms-gateway-compari...

2. [easy(er) to implement, free, hard(er) for the user, hacky] Have the user sms a user id (or some identifier) to an email address, you read that email, and associate the identifier with the "from" field, and send sms's to that email.

chrisbroadfoot• 16 years ago

Twilio.

andreaja• 16 years ago

I've used clickatell (which costs money) to do this. The API is fairly simple, they're pretty stable and they can send to most places in the world.

natep3• 16 years ago

This is a really great project! I can think of two things would make it better, but both are beyond your control.

1. Use Hipmunk's (nonexistent at the moment) API and show the least agonizing flight of each day.

2. Somehow include Southwest's flights and prices (which nobody else has, AFAIK)

citricsquid• 16 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but forcing me to download an image preview when I could quite as easily view it in my browser drives me insane, now I have a file I don't want that I didn't expect and have to delete it! Silly.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

That's a browser issue. My browser asks if I want to download, or if I want to view internally (and if so, what mime type; to which I replied image/png).

Don't blame your poor configuration on the author of web pages. Ultimately clients should control the web experience, not servers.

cloudwalking3• 16 years ago

It's how Google code handles files in SVN, rather than a browser issue. They specifically set the content-type header to binary, rather than image.

I would hate it if my browser asked me what to do every time I load an image.

fedora1111• 16 years ago

1. The Kayak dev key is here:

  http://www.kayak.com/labs/api/search/developerkey.html

2. Using your email as a perl string requires a \ in front of @

3. I had to install many packages before the Perl script ran on a basic EC2 Linux instance:

  sudo yum install gcc perl-CPAN perl-libwww-perl expat-devel gnuplot

4. Before installing the CPAN packages he mentions:

  sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Digest::SHA'
  sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Test::More'
  sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install XML::Parser'

You may have to do additional debugging and install other CPAN packages.

5. Install the CPAN packages he mentions

  nohup perl SerenDaemon.pl > errors.txt 2> exceptions.txt < /dev/null &

herdrick• 16 years ago

Related: see the cheapest flight to each of your Facebook friends. http://apps.facebook.com/milehighflyer/

mayank• 16 years ago

Hi everyone, thanks for the great feedback. As the author of the program, I have taken down Serendipity out of courtesy to Kayak.com after receiving an email (very nice, I might add) about the costs incurred by continuously running searches. Please back off your search frequencies if you are using the script. Thanks!

gst• 16 years ago

Hello, I've checked out Serendipity earlier today and wanted to download it when I get back home. But now it's too late.

Would it be possible that you send me the source via mail (my email address is in my profile)? Of course I'll take care not to overload the service.

Thanks!

cloudwalking3• 16 years ago

Just got an email from them for too much API usage. :(

Long distance relationship? Perl can help.

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