About the only usable outbound communication supported by the server is email, but my phone is not email capable (well it is, but not for work emails!).

So a colleague mentioned using MSN chat or Skype chat to send comments, and that set me wondering…

Skype has a COM library which can be used to interface with the Skype application. (A reinstall of Skype with the Extras Manager option ticked was needed to get the library installed.) The Skype4COM library allows you to send SMS. Outlook of course allows you to apply rules to incoming mail messages, and one of these allows you to run some code in a VBA module (the run a script option).

So put it all together and we have:

1. A script on the customer’s server will monitor another script’s progress. If it detects a particular condition it will generate an email sent to my work email account.
2. Outlook has a rule to look for specific text in the email subject (for example “ERROR”).  If it detects a suitable email, it will run a piece of VBA.
3. The VBA will call skype and send the SMS message

Installation of outlook VBA code

1. Add the code below to an outlook module
2. Add a reference to the Skype4COM object in the module.
3. Create a button in outlook that is linked to the macro SendTestSMS
4. Create a rule in outlook that searches your incoming mail and will ‘run a script’ if it finds something. the script to run is the SendSMSRule VBA macro.

Running the solution

1. Have outlook running and make sure that macros are enabled.
2. Click the button you created in step 4 above and enter your phone number. The VBA app will remember your phone number, but you will want to send a test SMS, because you will probably have to ‘allow’ outlook to access Skype the first time after starting outlook.  Skype will ask you for confirmation.
3. If Skype is not running, it will be started for you by the VBA code.
4. Have some credit in Skype for sending sms!
5. Wait for email’s to arrive.

The VBA Code

Public Sub SendTestSMS()
    Dim strMsg As String
    Dim strContact As String
    Dim strPhoneNumber As String

    strPhoneNumber = GetSetting("SendSkypeSMS", "PhoneNumber", "Data", "")

    strContact = InputBox("Make sure you allow Outlook to use Skype when prompted in Skype." & vbCrLf & _
                            "You will probably have to do this for every session" & vbCrLf & _
                            "Enter your mobile number (+44123456789)", "Enter Phone Number", strPhoneNumber)

    SaveSetting "SendSkypeSMS", "PhoneNumber", "Data", strContact

    If Len(strContact) = 0 Then
        Exit Sub
    End If

    strMsg = "A test message from Outlook"
    subSendSMS strContact, strMsg

    strPhoneNumber = GetSetting("SendSkypeSMS", "PhoneNumber", "Data", "")
    MsgBox "Sent a text to: " & strPhoneNumber
    SaveSetting "SendSkypeSMS", "PhoneNumber", "Data", strPhoneNumber

End Sub

Public Sub SendSMSRule(Item As Outlook.MailItem) 'Outlook will give us the mail item that matched the rule
    Dim strPhoneNumber As String

    strPhoneNumber = GetSetting("SendSkypeSMS", "PhoneNumber", "Data")

    If strPhoneNumber = "" Then
        MsgBox "You have to send a test SMS message so that I know what your phone number is!", vbCritical
        Exit Sub
    End If

    subSendSMS strPhoneNumber, Item.Subject

End Sub

Private Sub subSendSMS(strRecipients As String, strMessage As String)
    Dim objSkype        As SKYPE4COMLib.Skype
    Dim objSMS          As SKYPE4COMLib.SmsMessage

    Set objSkype = New SKYPE4COMLib.Skype

    If Not objSkype.Client.IsRunning Then
        objSkype.Client.Start
    End If

    objSkype.Attach , True

    Set objSMS = objSkype.CreateSms(smsMessageTypeOutgoing, strRecipients)

    With objSMS
        .Body = strMessage
        .Send
    End With

    objSkype.Convert.SmsMessageStatusToText (objaStatus)

KillObjects:
    Set objSMS = Nothing
    Set objSkype = Nothing
End Sub

Basically I wanted to be able to use my DV camera to take single frames, which could then be rolled into a finished video.

A little shell script follows, which does just what I need, using dvgrab and ffplay.

#!/bin/bash
# script to take a shot with DV camera

count=1
calldir=`pwd`
wrapdir='wraps'

function help_me
{
echo -e "HELP!"
echo -e "h - shows this help!"
echo -e "s - takes a shot"
echo -e "p - shows a preview of all the shots so far"
echo -e "w - writes the shots to a wrap file in ./$wrapdir"
echo -e "q - quits\n"
}

help_me

if [ ! -d $calldir/$wrapdir ] ; then
mkdir $calldir/$wrapdir || exit
fi

while [ "$ans" != "q" ]
do

echo -e "I'm waiting for instructions:(h|s|p|w|q)"
read -sn1 ans

if [ "$ans" = "h" ] ; then

help_me

elif [ "$ans" = "s" ] ; then

echo -e "grabbing a frame"
dvgrab --every 25 --duration 1 2>/dev/null
echo -e "grabbed $count\n\a"

count=$(($count+1))

elif [ "$ans" = "p" ] ; then

echo -e "Preview"
cat $calldir/*.dv | ffplay -
echo -e "Preview ended"

elif [ "$ans" = "w" ] ; then

echo -e "Wrapping up"
echo -e "Creating in in $calldir/$wrapdir"
echo -e "Enter filename for wrap:"

read filename

cd $calldir/$wrapdir || exit

cat $calldir/*.dv | dvgrab -stdin --format dv2 $filename 2>/dev/null

clear

# reset count after wrapping file
count=1

echo -e "Tidying up last wrap: deleting $calldir/*.dv"
rm $calldir/*.dv

echo -e "Preview wrap"
ffplay $calldir/$wrapdir/$filename*
echo -e "Preview wrap ended"

cd $calldir || exit

elif [ "$ans" = "q" ] ; then

echo -e "Quitting...\n"
exit

fi

done

Last time I tried Audio on linux I found it to be a sorely disappointing affair. That was some 6 to 12 months ago.

On my old Windows box I had an E-mu 1820, but when I bought it I didn’t know that Creative didn’t like to help out by open sourcing their drivers. (How many people have bought M-Audio cards now, knowing that they can get Open Source drivers for it!) On my old Windows box I thought that card was going to stay, until week before last…

I had had some recent successes with getting jack and pulseaudio playing nicely. I had had a play with Ardour and loved it. So I bit the bullet and gave it a go.

I now have glorious multi channel playback and recording via my E-mu audiodock, so I have taken the opportunity to throw together a few recordings of my poetry. The first couple were straight recordings with a bit of reverberation added for ambience.

Virility

The Tree I Wish I’d Been

The most recent is a full on four and a half minutes of sequenced sound and samples

A Rude Awakening

If you are viewing this on the site you’ll see the above links as little embedded mp3 players, courtesy of the very smart wpaudio plugin.

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.

Just came across this useful looking data while looking for Haringey Central Library. Visions of people “lost in carparks”. Is this a prank? or is it a determined effort to come to the aid of people who never seem to be able to get out of carparks without going round twice?

The real answer may be that it is deliberate data or errors to act as a fingerprint so that any infringements of rights can be traced…

Technorati Tags: car park, google maps, google, GPS, Haringey

A modern librarian, you see,  is more of a study help and technical support assistant than anything else.  Less modern librarians – the ones I have known anyway – are generally pretty pleased to be able to help you too, though maybe not so speedy at aligning paragraphs in word (that has got to be the most asked question near a public computer). 

My new role in support for a (principly) library domain software company is much the same, although the posers put to us are more akin to “why is my authority control button not working?”.

Anyway – in my new found role, being the supporter rater than the supported, I am beginning to think that both ends of the phone-line have misunderstood each other.  Maybe I work for a drastically different sort of company, I’m not sure – this is the first company I have worked for where I am not cleaning the toilets or emptying waste bins – so my perspective is perhaps a little naive. But… I am starting to wonder why the customer perceives a tension between us. 

As a customer once myself, I have found that the support of people who know more than me is valuable.  I have brought a server to it’s knees with seemingly innocuous 6-lined SQL queries.  I know what it is like to ring someone and admit that actually I think it was me that set that script going that is hogging the server’s resources.  I have been the one who uploaded a file full of the wrong sort of carriage-returns and stopped anyone being able to login.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit all the above when my employer likely reads this.  But I think it is this openness and ability to admit mistakes – and be willing to learn from them that allows me to improve.  Whatever my job title.

But what else did I as a customer do?  I trawled the company’s website in search of little titbits of information that would allow me to gain a greater understanding of how the thing worked.  I read enough to be able to write scripts that created thousands (and I mean thousands) of loan rules governing who could have what, where and for how long.  I asked questions on the forum.  I joined in queries on the email list.

Within Talis there are exciting moves toward a platform that will allow the creation of applications that will use founding principles (if there are such a thing set in stone) of the semantic web.  It opens a whole new set of doors and opportunities, and it makes those who think about supporting those applications – both those built by Talis and those built by others on the same platform – think about the future.  It’s web based – it could easily be global – So how do we support it 24 – 7?

This is where we come back to being a librarian, I don’t work in a library any more, but the library is still in me.  If companies are going to offer the 24 – 7 global support that the customers might require, then they are going to have to offer the following:

• findable resources – i.e. the content is not just searchable.
• step by step guides / how to’s – knowledge broken down into little specific easy to digest pieces
• and perhaps most of all solicit, capture, encourage and incorporate the experiences of the user. They use the thing more than the developers ever will.  They know how it works for them.

The mistakes I have made in the past, are mistakes that I can warn other’s of today.  The things I have fixed in the past are the things that – if I capture them – will help somebody else tomorrow. 

That’s 24 -7 support, and, much as it galls me to say…, Have you ever rung the Microsoft helpdesk?

Powered by ScribeFire.

Today I have been having another look at QR-codes, and the reader that you can download to your phone.

Why not generate them for your library? It could be a very simple impementation,

• Encode a link (URL) for each subject area (class search maybe) that you have and place them around the library (there is the small caveat that your online catalogue should render readably on a small screen device ).
• Or perhaps have an encoded phone number printed on the datelabel, so that people on trains who suddenly realise their book is overdue can renew by phone. (Not limited to trains of course!)
• Or add them to the bottom of all your posters so that there is a web page offerring more event information or competition entry details.

This is SO easy, and you can make a mobile users life more interesting!

Tell me if you are doing this already?

So with feelings of dread – I set about trying to see just how much of a mess my hard disk was in. Case open – seemed to be spinning – so something was happening…

Ok let’s try a linux boot CD, see if we can see anything from there… nope.

Ok lets try a parition magic boot disk and see what we get? success, I can see the drive and I can see the partitions. I run a few checks which all report OK. next step then is to get a new drive – then I should in theory be able to copy the partitions into the unallocated space and – fingers crossed – all should be well.

I bought a new disk, got it home, opened it. Doh! should have read the label on the box more carefully, I had a SATA not a PATA drive (I had never noticed that IDE had been renamed!). Took it back, got the IDE drive, popped it in the machine, fired up partition magic and – after several hours copying the partitions the data is all there and good. Now I just have to write a new master boot record for the drive and all will be well.

Oh yeah, and I had to set a flag in windoze registry to allow LBA-48 so that windoze would see all 320GB of the new drive.

Must clear my schedule… now, where’s my text editor…

Here’s wot I got… getlibraries LibMap – sounds better!
A multi-library google map – the map in action on a real page!

Firstly, there’s one javascript file which when called from a web page using an xhtml script tag will form a query with your parameters and send it to the TPA SPARQL endpoint. the result is fired and recieved at the same time using Dynode style cross-domain scripting method (I didn’t use the dynode script, just the essense of the technique). The Parameters that you can set within the .js file are as follows:

• key = Talis Api Key
• identifier = identifier of a libraries collection (with more than one library*) from the Silkworm directory.
• xsl = the URL to the XSL stylesheet explained next.

*At the moment the script will not cope with a single location, but I’m working on that.

Secondly, there’s one XSLT file which is submitted along with a SPARQL request to the Talis Platform Api (TPA) SPARQL endpoint. This reformats the RDF output into a javascript file that encapsulates the data as a JSON object, invokes a new map container and iterates through the JSON object, showing details for all libraries found by the SPARQL query.

Thirdly – and lastly, there is a small amount of code to go IN your web page, whatever your webpage may be. first is a script tag, which points to getlibraries.js. the second is a DIV tag with an id=”map” attribute. You can also set the height and width attributes to define the size of container that Google Maps will use. More instructions are in the .js file.
And that is it!

the getlibraries.js script writes another script tag that calls the data from the TPA. The javascript file can be edited to include your TPA key, the silkworm identifier for your library and the location of your copy of the XSLT file.

1. Put the code in your page
2. Edit the js file
3. Put the js and xsl files on your server
4. Job done!

I don’t for a moment think it worthy of the Mashuing Up The Library competition, but give it a go and let me know!

A note on browsers – I have tested this in Firefox 1.5.0.4 and in IE 6. It would be interesting to know if there are any problems with other browsers?

Download here… getlibraries.zip

Technorati Tags: AJAX, silkworm, talis, google maps, MUTL06, talis platform, tdn