opinionated fortune cow.

The cows.sh script pipes the result of fortune into cowsay . Now the fortune cookie is passed through sentiment analysis, if the compound result is positive then the cow has a cheerful expression, if negative then the cow has a sad expression.

The first run of the cows.sh script writes s a python script that calls nltk and a virtual environment that installs nltk, that is needed for running the sentiment analysis step. All this goodness is put into directory ~/.opinionated-fortune-cow

In the end it looks as follows, when the cow is happy

 ________________________________________
/  In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao \
| gave birth to Space and Time.          |
| Therefore, Space and Time are the Yin  |
| and Yang of programming.               |
|                                        |
| Programmers that do not comprehend the |
| Tao are always running out of time and |
| space for their programs. Programmers  |
| that comprehend the Tao always have    |
| enough time and space to accomplish    |
| their goals.                           |
|                                        |
| How could it be otherwise?             |
|                                        |
| -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of         |
\ Programming"                           /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             :) ||----w |
                ||     ||
nltk score: 42 '(from -100..100) state: 'good' eye: oo tongue: :)

Or the cow may look a bit sad, like this:

 ________________________________________
/ Power is danger.                       \
|                                        |
| -- The Centurion, "Balance of Terror", |
\ stardate 1709.2                        /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (!!)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             :( ||----w |
                ||     ||
nltk score: -53 '(from -100..100) state: 'bad' eye: !! tongue: :(

However most of the time the cow will likely remain indifferent:

 _________________________________________
/ Reading is thinking with someone else's \
\ head instead of one's own.              /
 -----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (..)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             -- ||----w |
                ||     ||
nltk score: 0 '(from -100..100) state: 'neutral' eye: .. tongue: --

The cow might get excited about something, then she is very happy:

 _________________________________________
/ If a team is in a positive frame of     \
| mind, it will have a good attitude. If  |
| it has a good attitude, it will make a  |
| commitment to playing the game right.   |
| If it plays the game right, it will win |
| -- unless, of course, it doesn't have   |
| enough talent to win, and no manager    |
| can make goose-liver pate out of goose  |
| feathers, so why worry?                 |
|                                         |
\ -- Sparky Anderson                      /
 -----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (OO)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             :) ||----w |
                ||     ||
nltk score: 94 '(from -100..100) state: 'very good' eye: OO tongue: :)

Or she might be very very sad.

 ________________________________________
/ A scientific truth does not triumph by \
| convincing its opponents and making    |
| them see the light, but rather because |
| its opponents eventually die and a new |
| generation grows up that is familiar   |
| with it.                               |
|                                        |
\ -- Max Planck                          /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (~~)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             :( ||----w |
                ||     ||
nltk score: -80 '(from -100..100) state: 'very bad' eye: ~~ tongue: :(

 ________________________________________
/ A man would still do something out of  \
| sheer perversity - he would create     |
| destruction and chaos - just to gain   |
| his point... and if all this could in  |
| turn be analyzed and prevented by      |
| predicting that it would occur, then   |
| man would deliberately go mad to prove |
| his point.                             |
|                                        |
| -- Feodor Dostoevsky, "Notes From the  |
\ Underground"                           /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (~~)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             :( ||----w |
                ||     ||
nltk score: -86 '(from -100..100) state: '' eye: ~~ tongue: :(

Installation

You need cow and fortune

• brew install cowsay
• brew install fortune

or

• apt-get install cowsay
• apt-get install fortune

You also need to have python3 and bash

what i learned from this.

if you look at the texts produced by the fortune program, then these look quite different to the training set of the vader sentiment analysis module that is used in nltk ; now any model can work only if applied to a similar data set as that used during training; obviously.

However this project helped me to get practice with python3 virtual environments , and that is probably a good thing. A vitual environment has a bin/python script, this is runnable and runs a python interpreter within that virtual enviroment. The virtual environment can have it's own isolated packages, and that is a cleaner way to handle package dependencies in python.