About two days ago I was having a discussion with my friend David about snow delays. He came up with a great idea, which I wish was a reality. He thought it would be awesome if he could use his computer as his alarm clock, but a step above that. Instead of having to wake up all groggy to check if school is canceled, he wants an alarm clock which would delay the alarm if for say we had a two hour delay. Or, the alarm might not go off at all if school would cancel.
This got me thinking. The local TV station around here, WFMZ, has a personal school delay/closing email list. That email could be used to control the alarm clock. Writing an alarm script is just about one of the most basic things you can do; the only hard part would be parsing the email. I’m thinking I could write this in Java if I knew how to connect to a POP server, search for a particular message, and then search within the message for the delay time.
Obviously this program wouldn’t be used every night; just on the nights that are potential delays/closings. Now there could be a few draw backs to the program. One draw back could be potential pranks. If a person knew that another individual was using the software, they could send a fake email triggering a delay in the alarm. Another potential draw back would be a failure in the program, causing you to be late to school. Both of those issues could be easily overcome if coded correctly, so I’m too concerned about it; just want to bring attention to it.
Any ideas on any existing software that would accomplish this or on how to get POP mail with Java? I’d really like to do this, and I think it would be a great asset to just about anyone in the service area of WFMZ. If I write this program I’m sure I could contact WFMZ and tell them about it, and possibly get this put on their site. Maybe even make a few dollars for doing this. 
2 Comments
Unfortunately, in Windows this can be slightly difficult, but in *nix, it can be relatively simple. Java is too bloated to do something like that I think. In Linux (and most Unixes) you can make use of shell scripting. E-mail is plain text, thus you can make use of regular expressions, awk, grep, etc on it to parse the email out. All by using the mail function which pretty much displays email.
Now onto the potential pranksters. This is also simple. When you say create the account with WFMZ, you can have a digital fingerprint in the email itself, sorta like a digital handshake. The prankster won’t know it. Unless he reads your email. So to make it better, add a salt to it, and also make it previously used signatures are then invalid.
Good luck!
Oh…of course then once everything is set, variables are then updated if needed, it can then trigger the alarm. Now, since OS X is BSD based, you can perhaps do this in Cocoa, Apple’s GUI programming interface. So, if we ever switch we can get this done!
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