Being a little bored today, I decided to surf around. Thanks to my friend Thaweesak, I got this site called F*** My Life.

A few hilarious stories and minutes later, I realised they had a web api. Thats when I got an epiphany!!! Why not get a random story from here to cheer me up on demand? And for a linux junkie, what better way than through a terminal?

Since I have been experimenting with python for awhile, what better way to practice a new language than something fun?

Here’s my script:-

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#!/usr/bin/env python
# Ugly script to get a random quote from www.fmylife.com
# Yeah, so ugly I dont even bother catching exceptions
#
# Meant to run on python 2.5++ as I'm using the inbuilt ElementTree package
#
 
import urllib
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import cStringIO
 
FML_SITE_RANDOM = 'http://api.betacie.com/view/random'
paramsDict = { 'language':'en', 'key':'readonly'}
encodedParams = urllib.urlencode(paramsDict)
 
try:
	fmldata = urllib.urlopen(FML_SITE_RANDOM, encodedParams).read()
	fmldata = ET.XML(fmldata)
	author = fmldata.findtext('items/item/author').strip()
	if len(author) == 0:
		author = 'anonymous'
 
	peopleAgreed = fmldata.findtext('items/item/agree').strip()
	peopleDisagreed = fmldata.findtext('items/item/deserved').strip()
	story = fmldata.findtext('items/item/text').strip()
 
	print "Think your life sucks?\n"
	print 'This happened to ' + author + '.'
	print ''
	print story + '\n'
	print peopleAgreed + ' reader(s) agreed'
	print peopleDisagreed + ' reader(s) have seen worse. '
	print
	print 'F*** My Life'
	print 'http://www.fmylife.com'
 
 
except:
	msg = '''Whoops!!! Some error, probably your connection. I guess
	your life sucks after all.... :('''
	print msg

Just chmod 755 it and place it in your ~/bin directory. Then just type in fml in your terminal for some random F*** ups.

Assuming you have Fedora 10 or Python 2.5++ installed, it should work perfectly.

Here’s a shot of it running:-

My F*** My Life script in action.

My F*** My Life script in action.

Sources I used to create this program:-

The wonders of Open Source Technology. w00t!!! :)