botWerks

i had a need to stretch and do something moderately nerdy and anti-social this weekend. i’ve been poking at foursquare over the last month or so and i  must say, it’s kind of cute. i don’t wander around the ‘hood as much as i’d  like to, but the app’s been a little more interesting to me than your average social media app.

i was a little curious as to what kind of checks were implemented with the API and how interaction with the API actually worked. it turns out that the API operation is dead easy. however, they don’t do some things like check the realistic time difference between checkins or the distance between venues for consecutive checkins.  as such there’s no notion of physicality associated with the application and the check-in process and the game.

of course this means that they’re dependent upon well behaved client behavior. to that end you only have to present the coordinates for the venue(s) you’re interested in, in order to obtain (or maintain) mayoral dominance.  you can use this to periodically check into a venue, even if you’re not physically there to pick up the GPS coordinate.  given that there are often perks associated with being a mayor of a particular venue, there might be some value in squatting on a particular location.

this begged a little experimentation. yielding foursquatter. a perl foursquare client script which can be trivially used to squat on a venue, or venues.

code and such is available on github.

before i dropped vonage a month or so ago for the comcast triple play. i used to use this schell script bound to a quicksilver action to dial my phone. eliminating the need to deal with a pesky phone dial pad.

note, this grabs the phone number to dial from your system clipboard. (note the use of the pbpaste command. users of non-OS X platforms should adjust to something appropriate. i seem to recall the gnome had something similar.

in the interests of posterity.

vonage dial