Thursday, August 13, 2009

BSFLiterm

A few months ago, Shelby asked me to modify a program to meet his needs. He handed me the source for the command-line AIM client BSFLite and asked me to add a feature that would take in messages from a user, and execute them on the command line. The reason for this was that he was able to use AIM with his phone, and he wanted to be able to access his netbook even when he didn't have it nearby.I in turn wrote some additions to the code that enabled the program to do just that, and renamed it 'BSFLiterm'. This modified version accepted commands from only one user, specified in the config file, and ran the command on the system, but did not return any output to the user specifying the command. I sent him the source, and things were left at that.

Today he brought the project up again, asking for a few new features:
-Growl output on Mac OS X
-Returning of the command line output to the user who issued the command

So a few hours later, I've got the code working, along with Libnotify support for you Linux users.

I plan on fixing the code up a bit more to make my additions more secure, and then I'll release the source and a possible linux binary up. Maybe we can get Shelby to post the Mac OS X binary for it as well. Expect these to be up within the next day or two at most.