K Answering Machine
Last updated on July 31, 1998 for KAM 0.4
 
 
 
Screenshot
 
Screenshot Version 0.4

 

Disclaimer

I'm a terribly sarcastic person, so if anything sounds strange (apart from this disclaimer ;-) it's probably not true or supposed to mean the opposite. All right, here goes...
 

Description

K Answering Machine (kam) is a frontend for the vbox package (ISDN answering machine). It displays your voice mail inbox and allows you to play and delete messages.
 

Requirements

 

Download Latest Version

Get   kam-0.4.tgz
 

Users?

I wrote KAM for personal use and while I'm perfectly content with it (thinking about it I'll probably buy myself a beer tonight) I'm still curious if there are actually any users of KAM out there. There's gotta be someone, somewhere?

Let's see: There are maybe 50000 German SuSE users (just guessing ;-) 10% of them with ISDN. That leaves 5000 potential users. 70% of those have a real answering machine and consider it rather questionable to have a machine running all day just to answer phone calls. That leaves us with 1500 potential environmentally unaware computer nerds of whom possibly 50% use KDE. Of those 750 people 30% compile KDE applications themselves, leaving 225 persons. 10% check the KDE pages regularly and had a chance to come across KAM. 90% of the remaining candidates thought "Poor spelling. Besides, I ain't got no camera.". So we've got 2.25 users. One is me. Assuming an average weight of 75kg, there must be a 93.75kg guy using KAM. Come on out!
 

Documentation

There is an LCD showing the number of new calls. There are seven buttons: play, stop, delete, check, config, hide, and quit, which do what they say they do. Note that "Delete" only deletes a selected message, while play will play the first one if nothing's selected. "Check" will check for new messages (there's also a configurable timer to do this). Then there's a volume slider and a listbox showing what's in your incoming folder.  "Hide" will hide the main window and leave only the docked window in the panel. The state of the main window is saved between session.

Versions 0.3 and above also sport a checkox "Do Not Answer". This will allow you to temporarily turn off your answering machine.

On first startup the program defaults for "/var/spool/vbox/(username)/incoming" as the incoming folder. You can change this via the config button. "kam" will save this setting in a resource file (standard KConfig object, ".kde/share/config/kamrc").

You can double click on a message to play it, or you can press "p". "s" will stop playing a message, "d" deletes a selected message, "k" configures, "c" checks, "h" hides, and "q" quits. The right/down and left/up cursor keys select the next/previous message (but only after selecting a message - see "Known Problems" below).

The volume slider defaults for 3, which should be OK for most setups. Since this value is given to the "vboxplay" command (vboxplay <filename> <volume>) a new setting will only apply to subsequent messages. If you are missing "vboxplay" on your system, look for "auplay". "vboxplay" is actually a script that calls "auplay" (on my system with vbox 1). You can change the play command in the source code or just symlink from "vboxplay" to "auplay".
 

Known "Problems" (did I hear "bugs"?)

 

Notes

"kam" is named after "mam", the "Motif Answering Machine", which is included in the vbox package.

Most bugs are actually features.

Those that are not features are bit errors caught during upload.
 

Future Versions

 

Changes

Version 0.4 (July 31, 1998) Version 0.3 (July 27, 1998 - this was not made public) Version 0.2.2 (May 5, 1998) Version 0.2.1 (April 10, 1998) Version 0.2 (March 16) Version 0.1 (March 8)  

Author

Kam is brought to you by Sven Schmidt.
 email: sven.schmidt@cern.ch
 http://leonardo.physik.uni-mainz.de/~sas