[MacPerl] cron and RealAudio

[pudge@pobox.com (Chris Nandor)]

Now that I have a cable modem (yes!) I am doing my part to suck as much
bandwidth as I can, forcing the telcos to make it even better, until the
point where I can suck the entire contents of Inside Macintosh from
Cupertino to my desktop in a matter of seconds.

So I listen to RealAudio every day while I work.

There are some live programs I like to listen to every week.  I listen to
the Alan Keyes show (a conservative talk show host, no, I am not trying to
start a political discussion) and Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home
Companion.

I recently installed Cron on my Mac and this morning I thought, as I
watched the clock for the program to begin, I should have Cron launch it.
So I wrote this script.  Every weekday morning at 10:05 a.m., this script
will run and start my RA program.

Of course, it won't work if I happen to be using MacPerl at the time, but
c'est la vie.  Note that the URL of the program changes every day, so I use
Date::Format::time2str() to adjust it accordingly.  Mac::Apps::Launch is on
CPAN or on my web site.

Then I just set Cron to launch the script at the right time.

#!perl -wl
use Mac::AppleEvents;
use Mac::Apps::Launch;
use Date::Format;
use strict;
my($appid, $file, $form, $evt, $rep);

$appid = 'PNst';  #id for RealPlayer
$file   = "$ENV{TMPDIR}alankeyes.ram";
$form = '%m%e%y';

open(F, ">$file") || die ($!);
print F 'pnm://206.72.64.71/' . time2str($form, time()) . '.rm';
close(F);

LaunchApps([$appid], 1) or warn ($^E);

$evt = AEBuildAppleEvent('aevt', 'odoc',
  typeApplSignature(), $appid, 0, 0, '') or die($^E);
AEPutParam($evt, '----', 'TEXT', $file);
$rep = AESend($evt, kAEWaitReply()) or die $^E;
AEDisposeDesc($evt);
AEDisposeDesc($rep);
unlink($file);

__END__

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey=('B76E72AD',[1024,'0824 090B CE73 CA10  1FF7 7F13 8180 B6B6'])
#==               New Book:  MacPerl: Power and Ease               ==#
#==    Publishing Date: Early 1998. http://www.ptf.com/macperl/    ==#



***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch