Two Programming Firsts! (for me)

It took me the better part of about 2 hours to figure out how to get everything to work correctly, but I am finally done with my program, GNaughtyNice. It figures out how naughty or nice a word is by using the Google search API and searching once with the porn filter on and once with it off. You can access this great feat of programming at http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/GNaughtyNice.html

I think it’ll probably make a pretty god party game. You also need a Google search API key because I only get 1000 searches which could get used up quite quickly if this were to become popular enough.

I want to give thanks to Mark Pilgrim and Magnus Hetland as their books on python provided me with the Python knowhow to make this fun little hack possible. I also want to thank the authors of Google Hacks for putting the idea into my head. Although they didn’t have any representative code, they mentioned a very similar idea as a way to take advantage of the Google Search API. Of course, I have to thank Google for “not being evil” and allowing their API to be open. (Although I still think they are part-evil for allowing that crap to go on in China where they censor the searches just because the government tells them to)

This is why we need free and open source software and standards! Because Guido von Rossum made Python free and Linux (also free) has it built-in, I was able to host this on my server, running (free) Apache!

It’s been a fun exercise and I hope to use what I learned today to build better and slightly more complicated programs. As a treat for myself and for you, here’s a lovely picture of Tai Shan, who had his first birthday one week ago.

• Python