photo credit: bcostin

PLEASE NOTE: This  article has been updated as of December 30, 2008.  This now works with a Mac or Win32 computer (and Linux computers with libnotify installed or readily available, such as those running Ubuntu) and has been updated to reflect that fact. Also, please note that previous versions may have failed on devices/phones with more than two lines – this is (hopefully) fixed as of version 0.7.

If all of the following are true:

You have a Macintosh computer with OS X installed, or a PC with any 32-bit version of Windows installed (basically Windows ’98 through XP), or any version of Linux with libnotify installed

You have Growl (if you have a Mac) or Snarl (if you have a PC) notifications installed (EDIT: There is now a version of Growl for Windows but at the moment I only have an experimental version of the script for that – see bottom of this page for more information.  It MIGHT work with 32-bit OR 64-bit Windows 7 – feel free to test it).

You have a Linksys or Sipura VoIP adapter on your local subnet or home network and receive calls over it

You would like to see Growl, Snarl or libnotify popups on your computer when a call comes in, showing the caller’s name and number, along with the line that the call came in on and the time and date the call arrived (in case you are out when the call comes in)

You have previously run Perl scripts on your computer, OR are reasonably good at following instructions and problem-solving

AND you are willing to run a script that comes with NO WARRANTY whatsoever (if it breaks, you can keep all the pieces)

Then download this file (now at version 0.92), unzip it and read the Instructions.txt file in the folder appropriate to your computer.

This script is being offered under the GNU General Public License, so if you want to modify it to work on other platforms, you can do that under certain conditions (see the Instructions.txt file for details). Mainly, I’d hope that you’d contribute the modifications back (and please leave a comment on this article if you do that).

I don’t have any kind of regular web page up for this yet, for one thing it’s very rough (very little error-checking) and for another I’m very tired, having spent way too many late nights trying to get this to work. So this post will be more terse than most of my posts, but I think most everything you need to know is in Instructions.txt (and for Mac users, the “How to run at login.rtfd” file) inside the .zip file. Feel free to repost this information to other forums if you think anyone else might be interested.

For those Mac users that wish this were an app: I understand that there is an app called Platypus that allows Perl scripts (and any other types of scripts) to be converted to OS X app bundles. However, what it does not seem to include is any way to specify the command line options, or to load any missing Perl modules. So for now, this script will probably only be usable by those with sufficient knowledge to run a Perl script on their Mac. If I were a bit more knowledgeable, I’d build a preference pane to go in System Preferences, and then have the script read that for its configuration options. But I still have no idea how to make an app install missing Perl modules, particularly when OS X does not come with “make” installed until and unless the Developer Tools are installed (adding something like 3 GB of stuff that is mostly useless to non-developers to your hard drive!).

EDIT: I read somewhere that you can install make without installing the bloated Developer Tools package if you instead install Fink. Then, from a terminal prompt, you can type fink -b install make and supposedly that will do the trick. However, I am told that Fink has not been updated for Snow Leopard, but there is a make package in Rudix that should work with Snow Leopard (mind your paths – Rudix installs make in the /usr/local/bin directory and by default CPAN expects it in /usr/bin, so you may want to adjust the path during CPAN setup, or make a symbolic link in /usr/bin). Since I have not personally tried either of these I have not updated the instructions in the download to reflect this, but if it works you can skip the whole process involved in installing the Developer Tools.

Because this is a Perl script, it lends itself to custom modifications. For example, let’s suppose you have this script running on a Mac, and you are sending Growl notifications to the Mac, but you also have a home theater PC that runs XBMC and/or Boxee, and you’d like to send Caller ID notifications to it as well.  Assuming that Boxee and/or XBMC is configured to allow control via a Web interface, at a fixed IP address and port (192.168.0.150 port 8080 in this example), you could add a line such as this to the script (this is all one line; select and copy to get it all if it gets truncated on your display):

eval {get "http://192.168.0.150:8080/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=ExecBuiltIn&parameter=XBMC.Notification(Call%20from%20%22$displayname%22%2C$phonenum%20calling%20$lineid[$count]%2C15000%2C%2Fhome%2Fusername%2Fphone.png)"};

The above assumes that you have placed the icon file phone.png (shown at right — right click on the icon and save it) in the user home directory on the destination system (the one running XBMC or Boxee), and that you change ‘username’ to the actual name of the user’s home directory. Note that the icon path requires %2F in place of forward slashes (therefore %2Fhome%2Fusername%2Fphone.png really means /home/username/phone.png) and this refers to the icon directory and filename — if you choose not to use an icon then leave that part out, along with the %2C that comes just before it.  If you are running XBMC or Boxee on the same system that’s running the script then you should be able to replace 192.168.0.150 with localhost or 127.0.0.1. The above line should be inserted just above the comment line “# Make output string in chosen format” near the end of the Perl script. Keep in mind that this won’t work if you don’t enable control via Web server in XBMC or Boxee, and make sure the port number matches the port in your added line.  Depending on the skin you use, this is generally accomplished by going to Settings, then Network (and in Boxee, then Servers). Then check “Allow control of XBMC via HTTP” (in XBMC) or enable the Web server (in Boxee) and verify the port number is correct.

Starting in Version 0.7 there is a minimal logging function, allowing all detected incoming calls (whether answered or not) to be saved to a text file and/or a comma-quote delimited file. I probably could support other simple formats, but don’t even think about asking for anything more complex (like a rather humorous friend of mine who asked for MySQL integration – considering that he knows how little knowledge I have about Perl programming, and that I have even less knowledge about databases, I’m sure he thought it extremely amusing to make that request). The one thing I really don’t like about offering these scripts in Perl is that it requires the user to know how to install modules from CPAN (or an alternative source if using Win32), but I barely know how to do this stuff in Perl and don’t know any other languages (well, except for QBASIC under MSDOS, but that’s even less compatible across platforms than Perl!).

Starting in Version 0.9 you can use a plain-text file of number-name substitutions, so (for example) if calls from a particular number always display a cryptic Caller ID name, you can change them to say “Uncle Bob” (or some other name if Bob’s not your Uncle, or it’s someone else’s number!). Read the sample config file to see the file formats. Note that the plain text file of number-name substitutions is a separate file, not a section of the optional configuration file, and also note that you must enter the numbers exactly as your VoIP provider sends them (in other words, if they send 8005551234 and you use 18005551234 or 800-555-1234 it will NOT match!).

Starting in Version 0.91 you can use a plain-text file of number-path/file substitutions, so (for example) if calls from a particular number are always from Uncle Bob, you can display Uncle Bob’s picture as the icon whenever a call arrives from that number. Read the sample config file for more information. Note that the plain text file of number-path/file substitutions is a separate file, not a section of the optional configuration file, and also note once again that you must enter the numbers exactly as your VoIP provider sends them.

Version 0.92 sets a rather short timeout on page fetches (still much longer than should be necessary to get the data), in an attempt to resolve a problem where very occasionally the script would just go into a coma, not exiting cleanly but still using memory and CPU cycles, without doing anything useful. I have been running this version for over six months now and have yet to see the script go into a coma, as it often seemed to do in previous versions.

(EDIT added September, 2010:) NOTE regarding EXPERIMENTAL version to work with Growl for Windows.  You should still download the main archive to get the instructions and such, but if you’d prefer to use Growl for Windows rather than Snarl, you can try this experimental version of the script. If you do try it, please let me know if it works as expected (and thanks to Andy Singh for his help with getting this working under Windows 7). Please read the Perl source code to find the module requirements (mentioned on or near line 15 of the script) as they differ slightly from the Snarl version.