I was looking through [[http://petitiononline.com|PetitionOnline]] and I [[http://www.google.com/custom?domains=www.PetitionOnline.com&q=reservation&sa=Search&sitesearch=www.PetitionOnline.com&client=pub-5090005701884356&forid=1&channel=4432003626&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%230000FF%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A%23333333%3BVLC%3A660099%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BLBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BALC%3A0000FF%3BLC%3A0000FF%3BT%3A000000%3BGFNT%3A666666%3BGIMP%3A666666%3BLH%3A50%3BLW%3A350%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.PetitionOnline.com%2Fimages%2Fpol_google_logo.gif%3BS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.PetitionOnline.com%2F%3BFORID%3A1%3B&hl=en|found]] more than 20 petitions regarding reservations. What a waste — this way our votes will just get divided. Besides, who knows where these votes are going to? There has to be a better way of making ourselves heard more directly right?

So I quickly hacked a simple shell script that sends an email to the President, the HRD Minister, the editors of some news papers etc. The script should work on any regular Unix-like workstation.

Download: [[http://floatingsun.net/code/be-heard.sh|be-heard.sh]]

Run it as: ”bash ./be-heard.sh”

It works for the version of ”mail” installed on my machine. Some older versions don’t support the ”-a” option. In that case, just edit the file and delete the ”-a” option. I’m working on an alternative version in Python which will hopefully be a little more portable.

When you run the script, it will ask you your name and email address — these will be used to compose the email. Feel free to change the text of the email in the script. If you have recommendations for adding any more email addresses, please let me know.

I hope all of you will download and run this script. If you feeling more adventurous, you might want to run the script periodically. Of course, that way you risk being classified as spam by the recipients, but thats the trade-off of getting noticed — its your call. SPREAD THE WORD!!

Since the bash script was giving a lot of problems on older software, I hacked up an equivalent Python script. This should, hopefully, be a little more compatible with systems. The only requirement is standard Python installation, and a local sendmail process (which you will usually have on a Unix-like workstation).

Download: [[http://floatingsun.net/code/be-heard.py]]

Usage: python be-heard.py ‘Your name’ ‘your email’

**Note that your name and email address should be entered within single quotes**