My name is Francesco Fraulo. I am a software Tester for ITNM here at IBM. I will mainly be blogging about the installer for ITNM and OMNIbus, but every so often I will talk about new and interesting ways to use our products, like today.

The sheer number of sporting stuff going on got me thinking. Could OMNIbus be used as a way to keep track of it all? The short answer is not easily, it is not like there is a “Sky Sports News” probe for such a thing. However, the more I thought about the problem, the more I wanted to find a way to solve it. Then I remembered that I wasn't the first person to think of this. My colleague Guy Thorne had done some great work at a recent event developing a prototype Twitter Probe. He thought it would be interesting to make and could lead to something that would be useful for our customers. A tool that can keep track of mentions of a company or a product on all the various social media out there would be very useful these days. Largely as it seems that people will flock to the web at the first sign of trouble, and will usually do so before going through official channels.

So I had my inspiration to use Twitter but the problem of implementation was a poser. I had to work out a way to get the information from the outside world and put it into an Objectserver. This posed a challenge, the design of OMNIbus allows it to accept input from a variety of sources, but asking it to look at websites was probably asking a bit much. My first thought was to use an external tool to take an RSS feed or something similar and to then parse it into a log file, so I made a little script to do this in Windows. It was a bit clunky, but it got the job done.

The script grabs the RSS feed for a user from Twitter using wget, extracts the relevant information and inserts it into the Objectserver via a simple SQL statement. I learnt a lot while writing that script, mainly that doing something like this in a Windows batch file was asking for trouble.

 

Here is the Windows script I mentioned above for you to try out. Feel free to comment on it. The script requires Wget, an open source version is available from http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/

Some suggested Twitter feeds. Euro2012stream, Opengolf2012, Nfl, NBA, London2012, Wimbledon

echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

REM ########################################################################
REM
REM       Licensed Materials - Property of IBM
REM      
REM     
REM      
REM       (C) Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All Rights Reserved
REM      
REM       US Government Users Restricted Rights - Use, duplication
REM       or disclosure restricted by GSA ADP Schedule Contract
REM       with IBM Corp.
REM
REM Twitter Sporting Device
REM
REM Developed by Francesco Fraulo
REM Version 0.1
REM
REM ########################################################################

IF [%1]==[] GOTO ERROR
IF [%2]==[] GOTO ERROR
IF [%3]==[] GOTO ERROR

REM Use Wget to fetch the latest tweet.

:FETCH
wget.exe "http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=from:%1&rpp=1" -O "sports.txt"

REM Go through the XML and extract the tweet time and contents.

FOR /F "tokens=12,17 delims=<" %%a in (sports.txt) do (

set TTime=%%a

set Tsubject=%%b

set TAlg=%2
set TWho=%1

REM Strip out the characters that cause errors
set Tsubject=!Tsubject:'=!
set Tsubject=!Tsubject:^&amp;=and!
set Tsubject=!Tsubject:^&=!
set Tsubject=!Tsubject:^)=!
set Tsubject=!Tsubject:^(=!

call :INSERT
)

REM Wait for a user specified amount of time and start again.

@ping 254.254.254.254 -n %3 >nul
goto FETCH

:ERROR
echo "Usage: twitter.bat <name of twitter account> <Alert group> <time to wait between fetches>"
GOTO:eof

REM Insert the tweet into the Objectserver using isql.bat.

:INSERT
echo insert into alerts.status (AlertGroup, Summary, Identifier,Node,Severity,Agent^) values ('%TAlg%','%Tsubject:~6%','%TTime:~13%', '%TWho%', 4,'Twitter Device'^); >output.txt
echo go >> output.txt
echo. >> output.txt
call isql.bat -S NCOMS -U root -P netcool -i output.txt
set Tsubject=
set TTime=