Yesterday I had some fun – I went to lunch with some fellow CSHers and I ended up bringing up the topic of a Voice version of the CSH Member Profiles (a database of house member contact information). Well, after lunch, I came back – did some hunting around online and found out that VXML is the place to be! Luckily, there is a free service that hosts (or points to) VXML programs – giving you a phone number to call to test them. So, five hours later, I whipped up a Perl program that lets you navigate and search the member database and find additional member information. A very handy tool if you don’t have a computer right in front of you and yet you still need to contact a fellow house member. I’m not going to post the usage information here (house members can find it on our news server) to try and keep it private – but I hope to, at least, release some of the source publically for people to use and view. For now, however, it’s back to the calendar program – the next release is set for the 15th!
John Resig