[bsagert]

>"I just want to write a little Twitter API script in 5 minutes"

In that case you would use Out-of-band/PIN Code Authentication. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth_overview.

For Pythonistas, my little Twitter API script uses tweepy.py. Thanks to http://jmillerinc.com/2010/05/31/twitter-from-the-command-li... for the steps involved. As an exercise, you could scrape the required PIN with beautifulSoup or similar code to eliminate one step.