cww.blog!

I've spent the past couple hours writing a script in Perl that will do some pretty cool stuff. Doing this today is a direct result of having to send a text message to my mother on Friday, asking her to define the word allotrope, which was used in the book I was reading at a coffee shop.

The Perl script is integrated with my email system in such a way that when you send an email to a certain address within the denterprises.org domain, the email system passes it on to the Perl script for processing. The script is capable of figuring out whether you want a weather report or the definition of a word, then works out your answer, and sends a text message back in response. The possibilities for quick reference information are endless, and I imagine any time I'm on the road and need a piece of information that my computer could look up for me, I'll add that feature when I get back home.

I've decided to call the application something very creative: Mobile Reference Application. Actually, I just chose that because it came to me quickly, and I wanted something with a short acronym.

You, too, can have access to this system. To prevent abuse, it works on a whitelist-only authorization scheme, so you'll need to send me an email saying you want to be able to use my service, and I'll add you to the whitelist and tell you how to use it. Be sure to include the email address of your mobile phone in the email.

Also, it feels good to have done something technical after having done nothing related to engineering (aside from reading the first bit of that book Friday) in about three weeks.