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by Russell Beattie.
Original Post: Coffee Alert!
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So I stopped by a corner coffee-shop on the way to work this morning and picked up a tall French Roast to go, only to find out that one of my coworkers had actually made coffee already! We decided that a solution to this problem needed to be found, so we decided to create an SMS Coffee Alert.
At first we used our Location Alert Engine to do it, which was like smacking a fly with a sledgehammer. So using SimpleWire's API, I whipped up a quick 20 line script in Java which can be called from bash script available to everyone in the office who uses Linux (that includes me now). The longest part of the process was figuring out a bug in my MessageFormat code (I was using {1} instead of {0} in the message in the .properties file). I love writing those quick functional scripts in Java.
So now we just open a terminal and type: "coffealert.sh Russell" and it'll sends out a text message to everyone who's added their phone number to the shared .properties file: "Russell has made coffee! No need to drop $3 on a latte on the way to the office."
I love working at a mobile company. Now we just need to hook this up to the coffee maker itself... Both ways. My coworker Joel just said "What I really want is to send an SMS and have the coffee maker start brewing..." Heh. We started thinking about all the extra MIDP phones we have strewn about... SMS-> MIDP -> Sockets -> Hacked Coffee Maker... Stay tuned.
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