News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

July 28, 2006

geekery

Running the AIM BudgetBot on your Mac

Posted Jul. 28, ’06, 11:33 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Geekery

Ever since I heard about the AIM BudgetBot, I knew I wanted to install it on my media server at home, which is online all the time. Yesterday after I got home from work, I installed the file onto my Mac. Not knowing much about Perl, it took me a few tries to get it to work, but here’s what I did.

You can follow most of the instructions as they’re written.

However, where it says

my $budgetscript = 'c:/path/to/your/budget/script/budget.pl';

Obviously these are instructions for a PC crowd. So to Macify this path, change the C:/ nonsense to this:

my $budgetscript = '/Users/username/fixedbbot/budget.pl';

Make sure that your fixedbbot directory exists on your startup volume. If not, change /Users/username/etc/budget.pl to /Volumes/DriveName/Users/username/etc/budget.pl.

Finally, where Lifehacker says:

To start the BudgetBot, at the command line type ./budgetbot.pl. If you’ve taken care of business, your BudgetBot should now be online.

You need to open the budgetbot.pl file in BBEdit or its free cousin, TextWrangler. From there, click the #! pull-down menu and choose “Run in Terminal.”

If all goes well, you should be in business. Try texting your bot from your cell phone and see what happens.


2 Comments

Jeff said:

Thanks for doing the instructions in a mac-friendly format. I definitely need to get this going soon!

August 7, 2006 12:58 PM
Andrew said:

I don't know if I completely missed something or what, but this thing doesn't ever track my balance. I can send something like "100 d" and it will say my new balance is $100, but if I send "bal" it says my balance is 0.00.

August 27, 2006 4:54 PM

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