I include Latin phrases in my e-mail signature at work. It’s a fun little thing I do just to make people interested.

So I decided to make a signature that would include a random Latin phrase in every e-mail I send. Thankfully, Evolution makes this easy.

First, I make a text file which I call sigquotes.txt , and stash it in my home directory, under a folder for personal items. I put one quote per line.

Next, I have to write a little ditty to grab a random line from that file and output the results. I used PHP for this, but almost anything could have worked. I dump the following into sigrand.php :
<?
$quoteFile = "/home/icanhaslinux/personal/sigquotes.txt";

$fp = fopen($quoteFile, "r");
$content = fread($fp, filesize($quoteFile));
$quotes = explode("\n",$content);
fclose($fp);

srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
$index = (rand(1, sizeof($quotes)) - 1);

echo "________<br>LightningCrash<br>Resident Unix Witchdoctor<br><br>";
echo $quotes[$index] . "<br>";
?>

Easy enough. I had problems getting the php itself to run as a script, so I had to make another short script to launch the PHP file. I put the following into sigrand.sh :

/usr/bin/php5-cgi -q /home/icanhaslinux/personal/sigrand.php


I chmod +x sigrand.sh and go on my way to the next step.

I fire up Evolution, go to Edit->Preferences. I go to Composer Preferences and click on Signatures. Then I click on the “Add Script” button, name it Random Latin, navigate to /home/icanhaslinux/personal, and select sigrand.sh as my signature script.

That part is done. Now to make it default for my outgoing e-mail. From the Preferences page, I click edit on my e-mail account. On this page, I have a drop-down box where I can select my signature for this account. I select Random Latin, of course. I then click OK and Close.

Now, to test it out, just fire up a new e-mail.

Until next time!
-LightningCrash

EDIT:   It’s been requested that I make clear what license this code is issued under. I consider the code snippets on this article to be public domain and not subject to licensing. Use the code in this article as you see fit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 11:32 am and is filed under evolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.