Developer Challenge: Make SageTV "Tweet"?

[wayner]

Anyone have any advice on using the various Twitter via email services? I have signed up for NutShell mail which is supposed to send your tweets to your email but it looks as if it sends them on a scheduled basis - ie. every few hours or so.

What I want is to receive an email immediately when I have a system message only, not on a schedule. There seem to be a bunch of other services, TweetByMail, TwitterMail, TweetyMail, etc. But many of these are more for sending Tweets via email and I only care about receiving the System Messages from my Sage Server in my email inbox.

[Slugger]

Most of these apps are restricted by a cap on the number of Twitter API calls that it can make per hour. I don't think you're going to find a 3rd party app that will do instantaneous emails because all of these apps have to poll the API periodically to find new tweets and I doubt any 3rd party app has the resources to poll constantly for each user that signs up. The best you'll get is within a minute of a tweet, but, as I say, I doubt any 3rd party app has the kind of resources to poll every minute for every user and so you end up with services that will email your tweets, probably in batch, every few hours.

Your best bet is to write your own app that polls every min or two and sends new tweets as email. The Twitter API is quite easy and I don't think it'd be very hard to do it.

[wayner]

Thanks Slugger. If you are not a Twitter-a-holic then maybe Twitter is not the best way to be sending out system error messages - maybe it makes sense to do that directly to email.

By the way, if you do want to stay with Twitter for these types of messages and you use WHS then there is a WHS add-in called @WHSTweet that will send out Tweets when your WHS Network Health Status changes.

[Slugger]

Alternatively, I could be convinced to add email support to SageTweet once I get the tweets working properly. Might have to rename the plugin, but email would be fairly easy to add if enough people wanted it?

[wayner]

One vote in favour from me. Twitter is neat but email is more likely to get your attention for critical messages such as a tuner failure. More and more people have SmartPhones so most people, at least most geeks (aka Sage power users), will have access to email on their phones. And given the way that SMS is priced in North America, particularly here in Canada, email is cheaper (which makes no sense since email is likely more bytes being sent down the wireless network but that is a different issue).

[Slugger]

Snapshot 514 now available... here's the subversion commit message.

Lots of fixes:

* Fix low space monitor, it now works (fixed integer overflow bug)
* Allow deletion of Twitter IDs and client rows (make first column blank then save to remove row)

Keep the feedback and bug reports coming...

[wayner]

For the low space monitor - how is GB defined? Am I correct to assume that it is consistent with Sage so if Sage is telling me (via the free space indicator at the top of the screen) that I have 505GB free then if I use up another 6GB and I have the warning kick in at 500GB then I will get the message?

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

For the low space monitor - how is GB defined? Am I correct to assume that it is consistent with Sage so if Sage is telling me (via the free space indicator at the top of the screen) that I have 505GB free then if I use up another 6GB and I have the warning kick in at 500GB then I will get the message?

My hope is yes, but isn't the free disk space bar at the top of the screen (I use and am thinking of SageMC when I say this) a third party app (either done by SageMC or SageMC uses another plugin to provide it)? Assuming that it is, then I can't say how they're making their calculations, but I can tell you what I'm doing:

1. I ask SageTV for the amount of free space it has via the Global.GetTotalDiskspaceAvailable() API call

2. I convert the GB setting set on the settings panel to bytes by multiplying it by 1024^3

3. If the number from step 1 is lower than that of step 2 I tweet a low disk space warning.

[wayner]

By the way - to upgrade is it ok to just unzip the new jetty folder over the existing one with everything still running? I think that is what I did with yesterdays update and everything was fine.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

By the way - to upgrade is it ok to just unzip the new jetty folder over the existing one with everything still running? I think that is what I did with yesterdays update and everything was fine.

Absolutely. And the ability to do that is why I love jetty!

[farfromuman]

Originally Posted by wayner

One vote in favour from me. Twitter is neat but email is more likely to get your attention for critical messages such as a tuner failure. More and more people have SmartPhones so most people, at least most geeks (aka Sage power users), will have access to email on their phones. And given the way that SMS is priced in North America, particularly here in Canada, email is cheaper (which makes no sense since email is likely more bytes being sent down the wireless network but that is a different issue).

I use Growl + Trowl to get instant Push messages on the Iphone but one of the forwarding options in Growl is to email. You could run these on your server or any other computer.
What would be really neat is to get native Growl support from Sage and bypass Twitter all together.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by farfromuman

I use Growl + Trowl to get instant Push messages on the Iphone but one of the forwarding options in Growl is to email. You could run these on your server or any other computer.
What would be really neat is to get native Growl support from Sage and bypass Twitter all together.

Ok, so you got me to go and google Growl. I find out it's the OS X messaging system, but then some more reading leads me to find that there's a Windows port. But either way, it's just another means to an end. I even found the Java API to talk to a Growl server, but unfortunately it has zero documentation what so ever so that immediately turns me off of it. How can one release a public API with zero documentation and expect a high rate of usage?

But I digress... my conclusion: I use Twitter, Twitter has an API that is well documented so this plugin will use Twitter (and possibly direct email notifications - still undecided).

I don't use Growl, but I might have been willing to integrate support for it if the API had some docs - it doesn't so I can promise I won't be spending time tracing API code to figure out how to use it - I get enough of that mind numbing nonsense at work!

What I will probably do, is a little redesign/refactoring of SageTweet and set it up such that adding a new notification system is just a matter of someone writing a subclass of the notification system. I can't promise I'll actually do this or do it in any timely fashion, but if I do decide to add email notification support then I will reorganize things so that adding additional notification systems (be it Growl or anything else someone may want) would be a (relatively) simply task of writing a subclass of my messaging class then writing an input panel to handle settings, etc. Then if someone wants to add support for something else they can simply submit a patch with their additions.

EDIT: If (emphasize if) I decide to add support for more notification systems other than Twitter, then all this redesign/refactor will definitely come after the current version of things is deemed stable and released as v1.0.0.

[wayner]

It looks like the Low Disk Space tweet does now work - however it appears to be slightly inconsistent with the Disk Space bar in SageMC. I set the warning to go off at 498GB - when I looked at the free space bar in SageMC it showed 506GB free - about a 1% error. When the error came in there was not an active recording in progress. This could however just be a timing issue as something else could be using or freeing up space on my server as it is running WHS but there shouldn't be any backups running right now.

And it doesn't appear to be the difference between the binary and digital definitions of a GB since 2^30=1,073,741,824 which is a 7% diff.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

It looks like the Low Disk Space tweet does now work - however it appears to be slightly inconsistent with the Disk Space bar in SageMC. I set the warning to go off at 498GB - when I looked at the free space bar in SageMC it showed 506GB free - about a 1% error. When the error came in there was not an active recording in progress. This could however just be a timing issue as something else could be using or freeing up space on my server as it is running WHS but there shouldn't be any backups running right now.

And it doesn't appear to be the difference between the binary and digital definitions of a GB since 2^30=1,073,741,824 which is a 7% diff.

I don't know how the bar does it, but here's my best guess:

I ask SageTV for the amount of free space via a Sage API call. I'm assuming, though the Sage API docs aren't clear on this, that the API call accounts for the SageTV setting that says "always keep X GB available on the recording drive". My guess is that the SageMC bar is getting it's free space number from the Java File API call, which would give the actual amount of free space on the drive and would not account for the Sage "keep this many GBs free" setting.

Just a guess, and I have no plans to investigate matching up these numbers. The results I'm getting in SageTweet, I feel, are more than acceptable unless you feel I'm missing something obvious here?

[wayner]

No issues Slugger - I am totally fine with how it works. I don't plan on cutting it too fine - once I get below about 400GB it is time to buy a new drive, especially since 1.5TB drives have gotten so cheap since 2TB drives have been introduced.

By the way, timg11 has written an app to send emails when you get a system message: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=324

[wayner]

Believe it or not, IBM just tried to patent something like this! http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/...l?ana=from_rss

[Slugger]

Development of SageTweet has ceased** and is being replaced by SageAlert. The current beta version is 0.0.3.526 and is available for download at the project web site. The post linked to above describes in great detail what's going on with SageAlert so I'll let you migrate over there, but for SageTweet users, here are the key things you need to know:

• SageAlert does not currently support client aliases (but it will)
• SageAlert does not support selective client viewing notifications, but instead notifies what any local client is watching (but this feature will return)
• SageAlert supports Twitter notifications, and allows notification of events to multiple accounts
• SageAlert also supports notification to Growl servers
• SageAlert will eventually also support email notifications (but it doesn't yet)

** I've stopped developing SageTweet, but the source code remains in Google Code for anyone who may want to pick it up if SageAlert isn't getting the job done.

Please head on over to the SageAlert thread and post any questions/bugs/etc. there.

[wayner]

Slugger - I think you mentioned this somewhere but what should I do to delete SageTweet? Just delete the Sagetweet files in the jetty/contexts and jetty/webapps folders? I seem to have both SageTwitter and SageTweet files in both - I assume they should both go?

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

Slugger - I think you mentioned this somewhere but what should I do to delete SageTweet? Just delete the Sagetweet files in the jetty/contexts and jetty/webapps folders? I seem to have both SageTwitter and SageTweet files in both - I assume they should both go?

Yeah, just delete the context file first then delete the war file in the webapps folder and that's it.