King of Cars on A&E is definitely an entertaining show – las vegas, 50 salesmen, 1 boss, and 500 ways to get your soul and give you a car in return. Apparently, the guys are real, and the boss – Chop is a 26-year old who looks more like a 40ish mob moss just taking over the reins of an empire from his ailing family. But, what really impressed me is the guy’s confidence, his dexterity, his drive and his ability to make selling cars look like a patriotic thing to do.
I sometimes wish I had a chance to sell cars myself; I’ve heard that to sell cars – you have to forget what ego is, take mud in your face everyday, be ready to be rejected every 10 minutes, and yet dust everything off, smile and make a sale. Honestly, if you can sell cars, you can sell pretty darn anything.
After passing up on the idea of writing scripts to message my friends on yahoo messenger many times, i finally decided to research if there’s a quick and dirty way. As always, to do some off-beat thing like this, my order of action is…..
- search on sourceforge is some wise guy has already done it before
- search on cpan if there is a perl module which is close to what i need
- search for c++/java programs which are close
- postpone till i get the same idea again
In any case, as for connecting to yahoo, my mega-plan was to write a small perl script to fool my friends into believing they are chatting with some hot girl/guy (yep, just like that ebaumsworld aim prank). So how does it work……
- create a few (3-4) yahoo accounts
- find a good chat bot, there’s a whole bunch of them these days……there’s actually a good competetion called the chatter box challenge (http://www.chatterboxchallenge.org). there are some pretty good chat bots in there.
- find a way to interface with yahoo messenger
- redirect input/output between the chatbot and yahoo messenger, so that ppl on yahoo think they are chatting with humans when they are actually talking to a bot
Ok, that sounds easy…..but try and find a open source chat bot….its a little hard because they are always in c++ and have all kinds of neural networks/markov model/other AI stuff. Luckily, we don’t care as we will try and use the web versions of those chat-bots. Some of the bots use flash/frames/etc in their websites, we want to avoid those. Instead look for a simple one like Ultrahal (www.ultrahal.com); this bot has a really nice simple interface, where everything is posted to a ASP form (http://www.ultrahal.com/halrep/UltraHal.asp?WCI=Chat).
Using the “Tamper Data” extension in firefox, it is fairly easy to see what variables are being posted. All said and done, I was able to post and receive a chat message back using LWP (in perl) fairly easily.
The next thing to do is to figure out a way to interface with YM. Now, a quick search on CPAN brings up a library or two which do just that. The primary one seems to be Net::Yahoo-Messenger.
To be continued…..
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