[kw-pm] Jabber, Asterisk and Net::Jabber Fun

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

I tend to play music loud when I'm in my living room with the laptop on my 
lap.  I usually can't hear the phone ring, or if I am watching TV or 
otherwise near somewhere where a screen exists, I don't like to get up to see 
who's calling or dig around for the cordless phone, only to find the 
battery's dead anyway and make the mad dash to the kitchen phone.

I also don't have a phone line at home.  All my calls are through Asterisk and 
VOIP, which leads to some interesting convergence.  :-)

I finally got around to making a little utility I've been wanting for a while 
now: something which pops up and lets me know who's calling so I can decide 
whether to get my lazy butt up  and answer it, or if I should just leave it 
ring.

Enter astbot.pl.  At 97 lines it's just a wee thing, but it does one thing and 
one thing well: notifies me of who's calling.

Features:
- Stays out of sight in my Jabber Roster until a call comes in
- Puts the CID information in its online status message
  (I have my Jabber client, Psi, pop up whenever someone comes online)
  (Doing it this way doesn't LOG the caller ID info in my jabber client)
- Written in Perl (natch.)
- Tries to format the incoming phone number into something intelligible.

Basically I have Psi set to do MSN-style popups whenever a contact comes 
online.  The window that comes up is unobtrusive and hangs around for about 5 
seconds before disappearing again. When a call comes in, Asterisk runs the 
script which makes the bot come online (with the CID info in its status 
message) then drop off again.  That's it.

http://www.mixdown.ca/~andrew/astbot

Net::Jabber really is quite spectacular.  You could write a really amazing 
remote control bot with this.  I just barely scratched the surface of what it 
can do.

-A.