MattCohn's right in that Gaim is the program you want to use, but the good news is your don't even have to gut the code!
Gaim supports perl plugins, which can even act as AIM Bots. So, what you could do (quite easily in fact - download Gaim, unpack and read the doc on Perl modding in one of the source code subdirectories) is write a bot that stays online, listens for your commands, and then executes them on your machine.
However, you may want to be careful as someone could easily execute malicious code on your computer!
If you look through some old volumes of Scientific American, they have some pretty cool projects in the re. One that caught my eye that I remember was a gravity interferometer that you can measure slight changes in earth's gravitational field with. Pretty snazzy.
At Georgia Tech Microsoft has recently begun a deal where any student who has taken the third CS class or higher automatically gets free access to a website where he can download two copies of each of the latest Windows OSes and many fully licensed copies of developer software. As far as I know this is free to school and comes with no strings attached. Smart move by Microsoft I say, as this seemed much more attractive and simple than the deals mentioned in some of the above posts.
has a friend who named their child Zoe Ophelia Erickson (actually I can't remember the last name, the important thing is it's an "e"). So, the kid's name is recursive a la GNU. Pretty painful huh?
Slashdot Mirror
MattCohn's right in that Gaim is the program you want to use, but the good news is your don't even have to gut the code! Gaim supports perl plugins, which can even act as AIM Bots. So, what you could do (quite easily in fact - download Gaim, unpack and read the doc on Perl modding in one of the source code subdirectories) is write a bot that stays online, listens for your commands, and then executes them on your machine. However, you may want to be careful as someone could easily execute malicious code on your computer!
If you look through some old volumes of Scientific American, they have some pretty cool projects in the re. One that caught my eye that I remember was a gravity interferometer that you can measure slight changes in earth's gravitational field with. Pretty snazzy.
At Georgia Tech Microsoft has recently begun a deal where any student who has taken the third CS class or higher automatically gets free access to a website where he can download two copies of each of the latest Windows OSes and many fully licensed copies of developer software. As far as I know this is free to school and comes with no strings attached. Smart move by Microsoft I say, as this seemed much more attractive and simple than the deals mentioned in some of the above posts.
-Miles Stoudenmire
has a friend who named their child Zoe Ophelia Erickson (actually I can't remember the last name, the important thing is it's an "e"). So, the kid's name is recursive a la GNU. Pretty painful huh?