My twitter name is a bit long. I was wondering if there were any good, shorter ones out there. This is a naive way of finding out, but it gets banned by twitter pretty quickly.

possible_usernames.py

#example response: {"valid":false,"reason":"taken","msg":"Username has already been taken","desc":"That username has been taken. Please choose another."}

permissableChars = list("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_1234567890")

import json
import urllib2
import itertools

possibleUsernames  = []

for i in range(4,5):
	options  = itertools.combinations(permissableChars, i)

	for o in options:
		uname = "".join(o)
		url = "https://twitter.com/users/username_available?username="+uname
		response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
		data = response.read()
		values = json.loads(data)
		print uname, values
		if values["valid"] == "true":
			print "\n\n\n WE GOT ONE!"
			print uname, values
			possibleUsernames.push(uname)