Bots

[drewcrawford]

Notifo introduced bot support, I'm interested in collecting some use cases for how you might be interested in using bots to automate small, simple tasks. Phonepipe brings simple, scriptable commandline power to notifo, and I'm interested in adding simple, scriptable bot support either to phonepipe directly or as a seperate module. Note: these will NOT all be baked in to phonepipe, I'm just collecting ideas for real-life things people might want to do so I can figure out how to best support them. Here are the things I've thought of:

• Use phonepipe to pipe incoming text from notifo. i.e. phone -b botname | echo prints whatever you send to botname via notifo to the console
• Remote reboots?
• Handle errors in lengthy operations remotely. The canonical example of this is the "abort/retry/fail" dialog in a multi-hour copy operation. Sometimes I will drag around TB of data in Finder and go for a walk. When I come back, it will have moved two files before displaying a "This file is in use... continue?" dialog.
• Ask a machine what its IP or ether is
• Watchdogs: "/usr/bin/apache has been using a lot of CPU for the last 15min. Reply with 'restart' to kill and restart."
• Talking to headless servers or boxes like my Drobo or router.
• Play/Pause iTunes
• Set up a remote-triggered alarm to scare the neighbors

[RyanBalfanz]

This sounds promising.