Pssssst - Want to skew a poll?

[JeremyD]

Top Ten Sports Car List

View the story in the link - you then get to cast your vote

Which of the cars below--that we did include--would you most like to drive?
Jaguar E-Type
Lamborghini Miura
Porsche 911
BMW M3
Dodge Viper
Chevrolet Corvette
Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution
Ferrari 275 GTB/4 Berlinetta
McLaren F1
Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing

The McLaren and 300SL are in the lead currently.

[RallyJon]

Hmm, Porsche 911 or McLaren F1? Think, Jon, think!

[Rot 911]

Hmmm, and no cookie is installed on your computer to keep you from voting more than once!

[Tim Walsh]

ooo that's wrong/nice
I voted a few times

[mwbaum]

McLaren then 300SL......I'll abstain from voting...

[masraum]

McLaren and Miura... damn, I've driven and will continue to drive my 911, but damn, if I got the chance I would be all over the Ferrari, Lambo, or Merc.

[rcwaldo]

the poll should have included only the realistic sports car that be desired to drive...

[RallyJon]

only the realistic sports car

It's Forbes. I'm sure they don't mean MY 911.

Probably more like a 996 loaded with "supple leather" "ass from hole in ground LCD differentiator" and "advanced cell phone stability management" options.

[widebody911]

If I had the time this morning, I could write a neat little perl script to stuff that box seven ways to sunday...

[surflvr911sc]

I dare you...

[widebody911]

Originally posted by surflvr911sc
I dare you...

You're on. It's running right now. I can't tell if they're doing anything server-side to detect multiple votes, but I put a 'sleep 5' in the code to slow it down a little.

[GenX Porsche]

D@mn straight Thom...I think that perl world needs to unite and strike down the competition against Porsche. hahahaha

[surflvr911sc]

LOL! I didn't even have to Double Dare You! I had the Double Dog Dare You in reserve though so it had to happen.

Good job Thom!

[GenX Porsche]

I was just going to proxy them...sleeps always good...hehehe

[widebody911]

For you perl guys, here's the code. It's dirty, but I had to learn as I went:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use HTML::Form;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use WWW::Scraper;

my $URL="http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/2003/09/29/cx_dl_0929feat.html";
my $file="vote.txt";
system("lynx --source \"$URL\" > $file 2>>err my $html=`cat $file`;
my $base_uri = URI->new($URL);
my @forms = HTML::Form->parse($html,$base_uri);
my $form=$forms[2];
my $SUBMIT;
my @INPUTS = $form->inputs;
foreach my $input (@INPUTS) {
if ($input->name eq "vote") {
print "vote!\n";
$input->value("3");
next;
}
if (grep m/submit/i, $input->type) {
$SUBMIT=$input->name;
next;
}
}
my $request;
if ($SUBMIT) {
$request=$form->click($SUBMIT);
} else {
$request=$form->click();
}
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$ua->agent("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; MSNIA; Windows 95)");
my $res = $ua->request($request);

[widebody911]

Oh, and after you do the first fetch, you can just re-read from the saved file - that speeds it up a little...

It would appear they're doing something server-side to counter stuffing the ballot box - I've voted 1500 times so far, and it hasn't changed to total at all...

[GenX Porsche]

I program Intelligent Web Agents...spiders...and I have never used the www::scraper mod. Looking into it now it is awesome...

[Tim Walsh]

logging of IP?

[widebody911]

Originally posted by l33t9eek
logging of IP?

Probably.

If I really had time on my hands I could work around that, too

But seriously, I gotta get a lot done at work today, as I'm heading out to T-Hill tomorrow.

[jbryant]

Double Dare?