last year’s model

There are too many folks competing in this year’s MediaBistro beauty pageant for me to take sides. But I’m always eager to convince my friends to learn some scripting mojo (seriously, it’ll make your life better). So here’s the code that worked last year. How to configure it, modify it, and run it is left as an exercise for the reader.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $num_votes_to_make = 9999; # this would be a bit obvious, wouldn't it?
my $min_sleep_time = 1; # sleep at least a second between votes
my $max_sleep_time = 10; # but no more than ten seconds
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$mech->proxy(['http', 'ftp'], 'http://127.0.0.1:8118/'); # use a Tor proxy on port 8118 to hide our IP address (http://tor.eff.org)
for(my $i=0;$i<$num_votes_to_make;$i++)
{
print "voting...\n";
my $url = 'http://mediabistro.com/articles/poll/000091/';
$mech->get( $url );
$mech->submit_form(
form_number => 0,
fields => {
rsld => '330'
}
);
my  $random_sleep_time = int(rand( $max_sleep_time-$min_sleep_time+1 ) ) + $min_sleep_time;
print "sleeping " . $random_sleep_time . " seconds...\n";
sleep $random_sleep_time;
}

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.