Tonight, instead of being at the Dutch Pinball Open as I should have been (curseth be thee, o weak flu-ridden body), I whipped up a little script to retweet everything on twitter that has the hashtag #revspace on the revspace twitter feed. Just for your enjoyment, here is the script. It probably has some caveats (eg. looping forever when authentication fails), and almost no error handling at all, but it suffices for now.

#
#    retweet.py - retweet based on hashtag
#    Copyright (C) 2009  Koen Martens
#
#    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#    along with this program.  If not, see .
#

import json
import urllib
import os
import sys

hashtag  = '#revspace'
user     = 'revspacenl'
password = 'foobarbaz'

class MyUrlOpener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
    def set_user(self,user):
        self.user=user

    def set_password(self,password):
        self.password=password

    def prompt_user_passwd(self,host,realm):
        print 'auth host '+host+' realm '+realm
        return (self.user, self.password)

def get_searchurl(hashtag):
    if (os.path.exists('refresh.'+hashtag)):
      file = open('refresh.'+hashtag)
      refresh_url = file.readline()
      file.close()
      return refresh_url
    return 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=' + urllib.quote(hashtag)

def search(searchurl):
    sock = urllib.urlopen( searchurl )
    response = json.load( sock )
    sock.close()

    return response

def save_refreshurl(hashtag,refresh_url):
    file = open('refresh.'+hashtag,'w');
    file.write(refresh_url+'\n');
    file.close()

def update_status(user,password,tweet):
    data = urllib.urlencode( { 'status': tweet } )

    try:
      opener = MyUrlOpener()
      opener.set_user(user)
      opener.set_password(password)
      sock = opener.open( 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json',data )
      response = json.load( sock )
      sock.close
    except:
      sys.stderr.write( "Unexpected error:" + sys.exc_info()[0] )

searchurl = get_searchurl(hashtag)

print 'Search url: '+searchurl

response = search(searchurl)

for result in response['results']:
  if result['from_user'] != user:
    tweet = 'RT @'+result['from_user']+': '+result['text']
    print tweet
    update_status(user,password,tweet)

save_refreshurl(hashtag,'http://search.twitter.com/search.json'+response['refresh_url'])