I wrote a program which grabs a bunch of stuff, assembles it into an email and sends the email to a bunch of email addresses of people (in a list I maintain myself and won't distribute).
YOU could be one of those people if you so desired.
You earn ten points. Woo-hoo!
Some of you have never heard of the New Day--let me explain: One day back in 1996, Will (that's me) was sitting in the DEClab bored out of his mind and he decided that he could build this whole program that would guarantee that he got at least one cool email every day. Each day was marked with a missive of fortune, of humor, of silliness, of thought.... Scratch that--no thought involved.
And the program underwent several revisions--some because Will thought of better ways to do things. Some because Will just wanted to make some changes. And some because Will has this tendency to fix things that aren't broken. Friends of Will can attest to this last one. Eagerly, in fact.
Then Will graduated from BC in 1998. When that happened, the administrator revoked all cron permissions on the server Will was running the New Day list from and all kinds of other stupid administration crap stuff. So Will was forced to go out into the world and figure out his options. It should be noted that Will still has an account on the cs server. Half-done administrative crap....
And one day late in 1998, Pat, friend of Will, informed Will that he would put up a server on the Internet if he had the hardware. And Will and Pat and Josh banded together like merry men and put up a Linux box at varium.com. Giving Will a shell account, administrative access, and cron permissions. Woo Woo!
So Will re-wrote the entire thing in Perl on October 26th, 1998, adding a bunch of cutsie lines and words and things. After some minor debugging and functional improvements launched the New Day once again.
And the world was happy. :)
Then Will discovered a bunch more bugs--some of them minor and some of them mildly irritating and others that were the sole contributors to El Nino and his lessor known fascist sister La Nina who then proceeded to wreak havoc weather-wise on the world.
But like the responsible programmer that Will is, he fixed them. (And didn't tell anyone about the El Nino/La Nina stuff he inadvertantly caused.)
Then Will got a slew of friends who decided to get a server at bluesock.org in early 2000 and Will moved the script and all that blah to bluesock.org.
In November of 2002, Will promptly forgot how to write/edit in Perl and re-wrote the whole script in Python. In doing so, he fixed some minor issues with the script and added some new functionality.
Unfortunately the first run was plagued with issues. First it didn't kick off at the time it was supposed to. Then I kicked it off manually and it sent a blank message to people. Then I fixed a couple of minor bugs and kicked it off again and it sent a quote which was misappropriated to Homer Simpson (it was really Ralph Wiggum who said that).
It was a rough rollout. I almost rolled back to go into another beta period, but then I decided after looking at my MS Project schedule of the scheduled delivery dates that I just had to push it out and cross my fingers and see what happens.
Luckily, it worked just fine after that. So I was lucky. Another hair-raising adventure in the world of seat-of-the-pants software development.
Then my customer service department got flooded with emails from folks who got the blank email and email from people who noted the misquote. My customer service department attempted (valiantly) to field all the issues and discontent and things are quiet again. Crazy stuff.
The question on everyone's mind is "which language will Will re-write the New Day script in next?" and "will it work the first time?"
Benn, Bobb, Chris, Chris, Chris, Deirdre (spell it right!), Erin, Erik, George, Ginny, Jenn, John, Josh, Kyle, Lukasz, Lydia, Mary, Mike, Mike, Mike, Pat, Will, your name could appear here!
If your name isn't here and should be, send me an email with the following text:
Will, you are a mean and nasty person and I hope you get a paper-cut on your EYE!
[Note: all names have been changed to protect the innocent.]
I've been asked why all the quotes aren't funny. To which I reply that this is a New Day list not a Funny Joke list.
Quotes on this list come in all flavors: chocolate, funny, lame, intuitive, jokes, stupid things George said, religious banter, political humor, puns, tongue-in-cheek, rhymes, poetry, misquotes, lies, clever, witty, abysmal, depressing, statistics, veiled threats (well, not so many of those), eviction notices, and occasionally I serve jury summons via the New Day list as well.
Sometimes they're in English, and occasionally in other languages whose character sets fall nicely into the ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) character set. You'll never see Chinese or Tagalog here. Pig-latin is right out, too.
Occasionally you'll find repeats, vocal mooings of the local cow population, and once in a blue moon, you might see the sporadic yet alluring abuse of alliteration.
Sporting a completely re-done re-done back-end in Python (because Perl is sooooo cool but Python is way nicer), the New day email program runs in just under 2 seconds. What once was 400 lines of code in C, and 140 in Perl, is now 370 lines in Python. However, it's now documented and has more functionality. Python is less terse than Perl anyhow. We also talk directly to sendmail rather than going over the command line. Though you probably won't notice because you can't see the back-end. (You shouldn't be looking at back-ends anyways!)
There are like 50 or so cool people getting this email every day! Of which 15 were signed up without their consent!
All comments, criticisms, interesting quotes, interesting words, and "get me off of this list!" - style emails should be directed to willg at bluesock dot org .
But don't expect me to read any of your tedious drivel.
Be warned--it's not exactly pretty code.