Note: This is outdated. Paradise have switched to a new billing system that this script does not work with. I have developed a Firefox extension which shows your usage in the status bar instead, but it's not ready for general consumption at this point. Email me if you want to beta test :)
What is it?
This script is for use with Paradise.Net's cable modem traffic charging facility. It will login to your account on the member section of their website, then pull down your usage stats, and display them as a web page with nice progress sliders. The advantage is you don't have to log into the paradise traffic system to do a quick check (which is very slow, for those who haven't used it). It also gives you stats, such as how much traffic you should have used by this point in the day, and this point in the month. It's a perl script, run by a cron job at some frequency (eg. once every couple of hours) and writes an HTML file somewhere that you can serve up with apache, or just open locally. The graphical sliders are from the phpsysinfo project, since I'm no good at graphics stuff!
Sample
If you want to see it in action, have a look at the output from mine here.
Getting the source and installing it
If you'd like to run this script for your account (and you have a UNIX variant, or are able with perl on windows), here's the steps:
2. Make sure perl and wget are installed, and wget is on the path
3. Open the perl script and change the username and password fields to match your paradise account and password, then set the path you want to save to (or choose "stdout" option if you want to pipe the output out, but this cannot be used direct to the web since no content-type header is written!). You also need to configure where the resources folder lives, which contains the graphics files. This can be a relative or absolute path, and will usually simply be "resources".
4. Chmod the script to make it executable, if desired
5. Run it from the shell, to make sure it's working. There's not really any error handing, so just cross your fingers.
6. If it works, then set up a cron job to run it periodically.
Need help? Feel free to email me. See the contact details page.
The future
If you like this, please let me know! It'd be nice to know I'm not the only one using it!
I have a partially-complete C++ version using the Qt cross-platform framework. It sits as a tray icon in KDE (maybe even windows one day) and will show you the sliders and stats if you click on it. It's far from complete, but I'll put it here when and if I finish it.
