tofu.org a big wad of tofu

On Friday before the long New Year's holiday weekend I thought I'd help out Christine by hacking her computer to remind her of her open RT tickets by reading the subjects out loud in her headphones every hour. The effect is quite hilarious. I just keep playing dumb and she keeps guessing why it's happening. :)

I've been sitting on this one for a long time. I tried to do it to the most recent FNG about a month ago, but forgot to install all the prerequisites, so he got some cron errors in his email then found my name in the script. I couldn't play dumb for long. Fortunately, Christine didn't hear about that attempt. Finally I found a time when no one was around and I could crack her computer without notice. I set up the cron to run hourly on Mon, Wed, and Fri, so it would be someone intermittent.

This went on for quite a while and she just decided to live with it. So, then I decided to step it up a notch and ran some cat5 from my office over her cube and started espeaking her name in a creepy wisper voice. :)

I started to feel bad for her when she asked her neighbors if they heard it and when they said no. She started wondering if she was cracking. I decided to push it over the limit today (02/08/08) so other people would hear it and she would finally decid to look for the source of the sound rather than doubt her sanity any longer.

To get this to work you must have the rt command line utilitiy installed and a ~/.rtrc with a username and password in it.
Here's the script:

#!/bin/bash
################################################################################
# ticketannounce.sh - Dale Bewley
# Tue Jul 31 13:42:19 PDT 2007 - PJ's Last Day
################################################################################

queues='support foo bar'
e_opts_header='-s 100 -v en-scottish -p 90'
e_opts_line='-s 150 -v en-scottish -p 20'
owner=`whoami`

for a in 50 100 150 200; do
    echo "Attention!" | espeak -a $a $e_opts_header;
done

echo "Stand by for queue summary." | espeak $e_opts
sleep 1

for q in $queues; do
    echo "$q queue. Un-owned tickets." | espeak $e_opts_header
    rt ls "queue='${q}' AND owner='nobody' AND (status='open' OR status='new')" \
    | sed -e 's/^/ticket /'\
    | espeak $e_opts_line

    echo "$q queue. Your tickets." | espeak $e_opts_header
    rt ls "queue='${q}' AND owner='${owner}' AND (status='open' OR status='new')" \
    | sed -e 's/^/ticket /'\
    | espeak $e_opts_line
done