Get Out of a Dull Meeting

[hardburn]

You're sitting at a table with your cow-orkers while the head beancounter goes through his drone about how the bar on the chart for last quater is clearly larger than the bar for the quarter before, and you're starting to wonder if you can slip a certain almond-tasting chemical into the beancounter's coffee.

No worry. You covertly slip your 802.11-enabled PDA out of your pocket and browse to your web server, where you've kept the CGI below for this very situation. Not long after, you receive an SMS on your cell telling you about some emergency or other. You glance at your phone, bolt out of the room, and take an early lunch.

This CGI is for use under mod_perl2, but it shouldn't be hard to modify for regular CGI use.

The send_sms() routine gets a string containing the message to send, and returns true on success, false on failure. It's coded to use Sprint's web form for sending the message. You'll have to change it for your provider. See also: WWW::SMS.

The constant MESSAGES is an arrayref containing the messages to send. Be sure they are <= 160 chars (SMS limit). You can set which message to send with the 'emg' parameter ("emg=0" is the first message, "emg=1" is the second, etc.). The first message is used by default.

You'll need to replace the TO and FROM constants with your phone number.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use constant TO        => 'xxxx';
use constant FROM      => 'xxxx';
use constant MAX_CHARS => 160;
use constant PAGE  => 'http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/textmessaging/co
+mpose';
use constant AGENT  =>
    'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041118 
+' .
    'Firefox/1.0';
use constant MESSAGES  => [ # Each message must be <= 160 chars (SMS l
+imit)
        'Run away',
];


sub send_sms 
{
        my $msg = shift;

        use WWW::Mechanize;
        my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new;
        $mech->get( PAGE );
        $mech->submit_form(
                form_name  => 'composeForm',
                fields     => {
                        phoneNumber     => TO,
                        callBackNumber  => FROM,
                        message         => $msg,
                        characters      => MAX_CHARS - length($msg),
                },
        );

        return $mech->success();
}


{
        use Apache::RequestUtil;
        my $r = Apache->request;
        my %in = $r->args();
        my $msg_num = $in{emg} || 0;

        send_sms( substr( MESSAGES->[$msg_num], 0, 160 ) ) 
                or die "Couldn't send message\n";

        $r->content_type( 'text/plain' );
        $r->print( MESSAGES->[$msg_num] );
}

Update: Added ikegami's change to make sure send_sms() never gets a message over 160 chars.

Update (2): Added readmore tags.

[Ovid]

Beautiful :)

I once had an button on a spreadsheet that was programmed to quietly send "Call me" instant messages to my friends. When a certain annoying coworker would start yelling about his work, I'd click the button and shortly have to leave to help a customer who "called in an emergency."

Sometimes non-geeks underestimate us.

[ikegami]

send_sms( substr( MESSAGES->[$msg_num], 0, 160 ) ) will ensure you didn't go over the limit accidently.

[hardburn]

Thanks. Updated.

[elwarren]

This is great, I have been using the email interface for Sprint up until now. Sometimes email gets caught up in the queue and is not delivered immediately, I'm interested to see if this would be faster. Plus, with some hacking, we could track message delivery as well, which you can't do with the email.

My version sends the email as soon as the page is hit/cgi is executed. I use the browser on the cellphone to hit the page, but I don't want to waste time trying to key in a message.

I suggest adding a sleep call in there so that it's not completely obvious that you paged yourself :-)

[disciple]

Or set it up before hand to send the message at a specified time. Then when in your meeting, if all is well you just ignore it, otherwise get the heck out of there. No, I am not providing code because I am at work and I've been slacking off too long already. ;-)

[radiantmatrix]

No need for CGI. Simply modify the parent code to run as a command-line script, and pop this in before your meeting:

$ at 14:22 perl page_me.pl

Change 14:22 to the time of your choice. We love the UNIX at command, we does. ;-)

[kwaping]

Here's the same code, adapted for use with Verizon's VTEXT service. UNTESTED as server code, but now tested and working from the command line!

Edit: Tested by commenting out server code, ran from command line. Made appropriate changes. The previous version didn't work, this current version should!


Read more... (3 kB)