I have a link among my bookmarks to the great page — Astronomy Picture of the Day by NASA. Several times a week I visit this place to get a new charge of positive energy. It’s inconceivable that they have so many great shots from all over the universe!

As you might know if you are reading this blog that lately I got interested in Ruby. I’m a Linux guy and all these scriptic-cryptic languages are fun to learn for me, so I quickly jumped in the boots and found some applications for it including the one I wish to share with you today.

Below is a small Ruby application which is fetching the NASA’s page, parses it, takes the picture link, fetches the picture into some local file and sets it as a wallpaper for the Gnome desktop. Everything is in 7 lines of uncompressed code excluding initial setup, comments and white spaces. What would you say, heh? Fun, isn’t it? ;)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

# Absolute path to the place where to store pics
picture_root = '/home/aleksey/pics/astro/'

# Find URL, fetch file and set the background
sourceURL = 'http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html'
page = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(sourceURL))
imageTag = page.scan(/<img [^/>]+>/i)[0]
url = URI.parse(sourceURL.scan(/^.+//)[0] + imageTag.scan(/src="([^"]+)"/i)[0][0])

filename = picture_root + Time.now.strftime('%y%m%d') + ".jpg";
File.open(filename, 'w') { |file| file << Net::HTTP.get(url); }

`gconftool -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename #{filename}`

Comments from the past

Pito Salas on 02/02/2006

Aleksey, cool. This article is mesed up in display in BB though … the stuff after url.scan(/ is somehow confused with an image and the whole thing is truncated…

Aleksey Gureiev on 02/02/2006

Thanks! Fixed the article.

Kevin Yank on 03/11/2006

I love APOD too, Aleksey. That’s why I rolled up my own scripting language sleeves and wrote a scraper to generate and RSS feed for it! This floats near the top of my “Five Starz” Guide in BlogBridge. :-)

http://www.kevinyank.com/rss/apod.php

Aleksey Gureiev on 03/11/2006

Oh yeah, I’m your subscriber! :)

Ruby + NASA = Nice Wallpapers

Comments from the past