Stream your Last.fm updates to Twitter

Imagine if you will the following conundrum...

You have impeccable taste in music. So much so that you have no misgivings about sharing your taste in music with the world at large via your favourite Web2.0 music site Last.fm.

In addition to being a hip young thing with impeccable musical nous, you are ambiently connected to the continuous partial attention stream known as twitter.

The problem is how do you let your generation Y chummies know that right now you are listening to the most blissful zeitgeisty tune without being a completely obnoxious musical bore?

The solution I present is straightforward enough though it will require a little computer programming experience (if you don't have the coding chops, one of your geek buddies on twitter will surely help). Just follow these simple steps and your exhibitionist impulses will soon be satisfied...

If you are running Windows, install perl. (Yes - I know - perl is dying and all the cool kids are using Ruby these days. I don't care. Perl is good. Larry Wall is god. I know stuff. You will listen to me.)
Copy and paste the code below into a text file and call it 'twitter_fm.pl'
Change the $twitter_username and $twitter_password variables to match your own twitter credentials.
Change the $lastfm_id variable to match your last.fm username.
Run the script as follows...
perl twitter_fm.pl
or better still, if you have root access, put the above command in a .sh file located in your rc.d directory.
You're done. You can commence sharing your unassailable taste in music with your twitter chums. Happy listening.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

my $twitter_username = "YOUR TWITTER USERNAME HERE";
my $twitter_password = "YOUR TWITTER PASSWORD HERE";
my $lastfm_id = "YOUR LASTFM USER ID HERE";

my $period = 60 * 3;

my $lastfm_feed = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/$lastfm_id/recenttracks.txt";

my $lastfm_ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();

my $twitter_ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$twitter_ua->credentials(
    "twitter.com:80",
    "Twitter API",
    $twitter_username => $twitter_password
    );

my $last_update = 0;

while (1) 
{
    my $lastfm_response = $lastfm_ua->request(GET $lastfm_feed);

my ($lp, $title) = get_lastfm_recent($lastfm_response->content,$last_update);

if ($title)
    { 
        my $request = POST "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json", [status => "Listening to $title"];
        $twitter_ua->request($request);
        $last_update = $lp;
    }

sleep $period;
}

sub get_lastfm_recent
{
    my ($content, $last_update) = @_;

my @content = split '\n', $content;

foreach (0..$#content)
    {
        my ($timeplayed,$rest) = $content[$_] =~ /([0-9]+),(.*)/;
        if ($timeplayed > $last_update){
            $rest =~ s/\342\200\223/-/g;
            return ($timeplayed,$rest);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

Hey Kids! You didn't think I'd leave you wondering what the creator of this wonderful script likes to listen to?