Fun with Perl
September 3, 2006
In my quest to become the ultimate uber-perl hacker, I thought it would be a cool idea to implement my own own perl based Big Brother pager. The pager we use now is a little app called bbtray that sits in the systray and fires off a popup window every so often giving you the overall color status of the crap you are monitoring (usually its looking at the main bb page).
My biggest beef with this app is that it when it pops up, it takes focus away from anything your working on. I wanted to make something that sits in the systray like bbtray but show status changes through a tooltip popup or something less intrusive and is coded in perl.
After hacking on this for a little bit this is the progress I have made:
- Connecting to the bb main page
- pull all the html from the page
- Parse out all the systems we are monitoring and what their color status is and print it
The second part that i am working is building the GUI using Win32::GUI modules. So far from playing around and reading the documentation
- I figured out how to minimize the app to the systray
- setup a timer
- create a button the fires a web browser page to the bb main page when clicked
After playing around with GUI some more I will have to get everything squished together that is usable. Once i get the full app complete i’ll post the source for all to see and you guys can check out how bad my code is 
January 22nd, 2007 at 5:09 am
wow - this is totally what I’m looking for….
How did you make out?
Got any code you want to share?