Snurching Slashdot Futurama Quotes

If you are a slashdot reader, you probably know that the site sends out silly Futurama quotes with it’s headers. They are contained in custom fields like X-Fry, X-Bender, X-Leela and etc… Here is an example of a typical slashdot HTML header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 16:35:56 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_perl/1.29
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005000113
X-Bender: We're both expressible as the sum of two cubes!

No, I did not discover this myself and no, it’s not new. Google for it, and see how many hits you get. I just figured that I share the script I use to snurch the quote from that header. I have my Kmail set up so that it uses this to append a random quote at the end of each of may emails:

lynx -mime_header http://slashdot.org/ | head -n6 | tail -1 | cut -f2 -d-

I have also seen this done using sed regexps, and perl but eh… This is easier.

For the windows folk who do not speak unix, here is an English translation: grab the 6th line of the slashdot HTML header, and display everything after the first ‘-‘ (the one that appears in X-Bender and etc..)

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