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Running the AIM BudgetBot on your Mac

Posted by Cyrus Farivar | Friday, July 28, 2006 11:33 AM PT

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.

Comments (2)

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

August 07, 2006
12:58 PM PT

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.

Andrew
August 27, 2006
4:54 PM PT

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