"hupjack" <hupjack_nospamtoday_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<ZYmdnUWwnNfnXxfdRVn-hQ@comcast.com>...[color=blue]
> I finally joined the millions of cell phone users out there. I'm the 2nd
> phone on what is now a family share plan. (Our two cell phones use minutes
> from a central 400 minute peak time pool.)
> Looking at the verizon wireless website, minutes used are displayed only as
> two different totals for our 2 phones. Dialing in from a phones to check
> remaining minutes, the minutes are presented the same way, broken down by
> each phone but not available as a combined total. I would like to see the
> combined total of our minutes displayed so we can at-a-glance see our
> month's remaining minutes without doing any math. I wrote verizon a letter
> and told them as much, but rather than hold my breath, I want to take
> matters into my own hands and write a script that does the job.
>
> I assume with relative ease, I should be able to write a script that goes to
>
https://www.verizonwireless.com/vzwa...erve/loginform authorizes it's way
> into the website, copies the number of peak minutes for each phone (it's
> just two text fields), take them offline, add them together, and displays my
> used minutes out of 400 (i.e. 245/400) on my desktop at my request.
>
> I doubt I'm the only one around that would like such a script to cure their
> family share plan remaining minute confusion. I've taken a course in C and
> can probably stumble my way through writing a script with a few pointers.
> One thing I was wondering was whether there were any generic data capture
> scripts available that I could tweak. Like a script for which I could just
> sub in the website, login, password, and point to the data I wanted it to
> grab. I had asked a friend with more coding background than me, and he said
> what I wanted was totally doable with a Perl script. He also said I could
> go to rentacoder.com. I had never heard of that before.. Pretty cool
> website.. neat idea.. Contracting out a coding job.. Getting bids.. I
> suppose I could post a request and see how much people want for the script.
> But I'd like to do it myself though, take pride in a job well done, and not
> pay anything :-) I'm sure there are plenty of scripts out there that do the
> same thing I'm after.
>
> I certainly appreciate all the help I can get :-)
>[/color]
Note: I am reading this from comp.lang.perl.
I see two options.
1.If you are trying to do it on your desktop pc then write a desktop
program which sends an http request to the login script through your
internet connection.
This is probably better done in C.
2. If you are trying to do it from a server.
This is better as you can view the data on desktop, internet or even
WAP.
This is the option where you would use perl.
If you want to try option2 then I advise you to firstly get a server
with CGI/Perl support if you haven't already done so. Common
alternatives to CGI/Perl are javaee or dotnet.
Whatever option you choose when you call the login program(by http
request),you'll need to use the POST method to send your username and
PIN in the http request header, with the appropriate information for
your username and PIN.
Then the login program will probably return a whole page load of html
from which you will need to extract your information. But I don't know
what this login program returns or if there are alternative login
programs.
Note: You are jeapordising the security of your PIN number if you do
this.
I cannot see a way to do this securely without having some kind of
decryptor on verizons server.
HTH.
Paul
