Your machine beeps you (through your Tam-Tam^TM pocket receiver)

You can send messages to a Tam-Tam pocket receiver for free if you do it using Internet, at least until the end of '96 (you may wonder how do the guys make money, but after all, these are not your business). In order to do this, a message with the right format must be sent to their Web server.

I wrote a very simple PERL script to send a message from a Unix workstation. For example, you type tam-tam john "Hello john", and John's receiver gets the message. Another possibility:

make -k | tam-tam john

And the result of the compilation is sent to John. Silly isn't it ? A last one:

$ cat ~/.forward
\tronche
"| grep -E '^(From:|Subject:)' | tam-tam tronche"

And I'm notified of my incoming mail, even if I'd prefer not to hear about it... But I'm quite sure you'll find many more interesting usages.

The script

What you need

A Unix machine (you'll need telnet and whoami)
Internet connectivity

How to get it ?

Just copy the script at your place, perform a chmod 755 tam-tam (assuming you saved it under the name tam-tam), et voilà.

Features

You can type either tam-tam target message, or tam-tam target, and the message is read from the standard input. If the target is purely numerical, it's taken as the number itself, else a lookup is performed in the $HOME/.tamtam-calepin file, which must be a sequence of lines of the form:

name	number

The name and the number must be separated by tabs (\t). Example:

john		12345678
mum		87654321
marlene		00000000

The script tags every message with the login of the sender at the end.

Caveats

The thing is only a first try written in 2 hours (including analyzing the protocol used by their server), so don't expect much of it:

There is no handling of the errors that may occur
I keep the display of the telnet messages, at least we get an idea of what's going on.
No check is done to enforce that the message isn't too long.
Repeat and delay aren't implemented (I can't see any usage with a program at the other end, anyway).
If the guys from Tam-Tam change the protocol of their server, everything will blow up !

What if I use Windows or a Mac ?

I don't care.

The script is written in PERL. Since it calls fork many times, I'd be suprised if it runs under anything except Unix, but I must admit I haven't tried. It'd be much more portable if I'd used an HTTP communication library, but I'm lazy...

Credits

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon asked me to write this program.

DISCLAIMER

Tam-Tam and I haven't any relation with each other.

Christophe Tronche, ch@tronche.com

Your machine beeps you (through your Tam-TamTM pocket receiver)