Control Hubs: Bringing It All Together - Smart Home Automation with Linux and Raspberry Pi - page 249

Figure 7-4. The server's CD player being controlled through the web
The audio mixer follows the same idea as the CD player and simply calls out to the underlying Bearskin command,
although its settings and parameters are configured by zinc/system/mixer.inc and zinc/conf/mixer.conf ,
respectively.
There is an MP3 jukebox that allows you to explore the various directories under a given root, set at initialization
with the following:
$appman->AddApplet(new Warp_MP3Play_Applet("MP3 Player", "media/mp3"));
If the folder name (second argument) begins with a / , then the path is absolute to the filesystem, whereas
a relative path (as such shown here) means it's relative to the web server itself (but not relative to the Minerva
directory). The MP3 jukebox can either play the music on the server itself or be streamed across the Internet to the
browser. (Follow the hints in Chapter 5 regarding media access to prepare this.) The consideration of the root folder is
important here if you want to support streaming, since it can work only if the music directory is accessible by the web
server, that is, it is underneath the Apache root server directory, such as /var/www/sites/homecontrol . To this end,
you may need to create a symlink to your music collection and enable FollowSymLinks in the configuration.
The TV guide uses the data downloaded every night by the Minerva user. It generates a large block of PHP
code that stores program information for every show over the next three days inside $MINBASE/etc/users/public/
tvresults.inc . This can be parsed out by the Bearskin commands such as tvonnow default and tvreport default
public or processed by the applet directly.
In addition to the list of all programs held by the public user, the daily crontab is able to search user-specific
criteria and generate a customized schedule. It does this with a search string provided as a comma-separated list of
terms, on a single line, in a file such as $MINBASE/etc/users/[username]/tvsearch/list . The tvsearch directory
also may optionally contain two extra files. One is called e-mail and is the e-mail address to which this list is also
sent; the other is sms , which is the SMS phone number to which a shortened form is sent. If the file in question doesn't
exist, then no message is sent.