The Future Was Here by Jimmy Maher

Author:Jimmy Maher [Maher, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262300742
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

6.2

Nag Plus’s calendar

Even when we are not actively inspecting or updating the calendar, Nag Plus continues to run, minimized quietly in the background. Like most processes, it spends the vast majority of its time sleeping when in this minimized state, thus freeing the CPU to focus on other tasks. It does, however, ask AmigaOS to wake it once every minute. When this happens, it checks if any “nags” are scheduled for that minute. If not, it simply goes back to sleep; if so, it announces the nag by popping up a textual alert on our screen and optionally playing a sampled sound or speaking the text of the alert in a synthesized voice using AmigaOS’s unique “translate.library” or both. At 3:00 PM, we receive a nag that it is time to call someone named Thomas West. We have configured Nag Plus to fire a custom ARexx script of our own devising when we right-click over a calendar entry like this one. Nag Plus passes to this script the text of the entry in question, whereupon the script looks in a certain directory on our hard drive—the one where we keep the notes we make during calls—to see if a file named after the client in question exists. If so, the script starts our word processor, ProWrite, loads the file, places the cursor at the bottom of it—ready for us to make further notes during our call—and returns control of the computer to us.

If the notes file does not exist, however, our script’s job becomes somewhat more complicated. It instead starts Superbase (if that application is not running already) and searches our company’s mailing-list database for a client with the name in question. If the name is found, the client’s relevant information—title, company, address, the all-important phone number, and so on—is extracted, and ProWrite, if not running already, is started. Our script creates a new document in ProWrite to serve as our notes file, inserting into it as a header the client’s information (figure 6.3).

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