Bigpond Watcher v3.0
"What the Telstra usage meter should have been"
Download Installation Problems My license Coders Section
This program was written by Peter Revill, is open source and is
inspired by Mr Simon Wright's description of the Telstra usage meter, or at
least what we thought it would be at the time:
"A
trusted source within Telstra has confirmed that the software will only be
available for Windows and Macintosh but will provide usage updates every 10
minutes.
The software will not count actual data transfer on the user's
PC, but rather will draw down usage information from a central Telstra server to
ensure what is reported to the user matches what is billed."
My program does the above, however it is not endorsed by Telstra.
What does it do?
This program is what the BigPond usage meter should have been: It
sits in your application tray, and whenever you want to see your usage, just
right click it, and click display usage, and up pops your usage instantly with
no problems.
It now even disconnects you if your reaching a dangerously high level of usage
(2995 megs), but this is an OPTION, so you dont have to enable it. It
also means you're free to browse websites knowing you have someone watching
over you to hopefully make sure you dont go over the 3 gig limit (I wont be
held responsible if it does, as each computer setup differs from another, but
this has worked for me)
Features will be added and removed at whim of the furious dictator Peter Revill.
All hail Peter, and his glorious Empire. (Kiddin..)
How does it work?
The Program is written in VB (Visual Basic), reasonably well documented, and very easy to code with. All it does, is sit back and use the web browser object of Visual Basic to login and occasionally check Telstra's usage page to see what your usage is. Then by using a simple split then search function it finds the line it is looking for, formats the data and displays it to the user!
Download the current version here
Download the executable file here (for Windows NT, 2000 & XP users)
REPORT ALL BUGS TO arevill@bigpond.net.au
Access Violation Errors:
These are nice and
easy to deal with, simply click "ignore" and that should be it.
If the install insists to restart to update some files
and even after restart still insists to restart again:
Nice and easy to fix, do you have WinZip, WinRAR or another .cab file
extraction utility? Yes? Good!
simply extract all the contents of the .cab file included in the main zip of
my program into a directory of your choosing, and run bigwatcher.exe
Problem solved!
(If you require one of the aforementioned programs, you can grab a trial version
of WinZip from here)
This program can be used freely by everyone, The source code is GPL with one minor twist: All employees of Telstra, Telstra.com, BigPond, BigPond Advance and any employed associates with the above companies MUST seek written permission from Mr Peter Revill before distributing executables or source code to their customers. (This is to stop Telstra using MY software that I wrote and passing it off to all their customers as their own work, I will strike a deal with them if they wish to distribute my software) The other condition is when you make changes and then distribute the executable, you must email me with details on where I can download the source code so I can see what changes you made (I might think they suck, but I just want to see them, I wont tell you to take them down or anything, the changes YOU make are your business, I just want to know what changes you have made)
This program's OK, nothing special though:
Give me some time! Very soon it will be able to display whenever it changes, display whenever it goes beyond 50 meg, run at startup which obviously I am working on, will display current usage when you hang your mouse over it. and a few other neat little tricks. Plus it will connect to the service status page and report any errors it finds (of course, that is slightly useless if your net is down, but perhaps you are on dialup and Telstra have not acknowledged your problem.)
Does it work with program X-YZD or connection BZ42?
It "should" work no problems, but i make no guarantees either written or implied
Download the source in the download section!
Well My coding friends, it appears I leave the best till last, ay? Coding with my program should be reasonably easy, if you'll read my license you see its Pretty Much GPL licensed, please submit all changes to my email, arevill@bigpond.net.au in clear text, with lines that notepad will be able to recognize, and tell me what its meant/does, if I like them, I'll include them, and put you up on the page as a contributor. Even bug reporting is nice, but be detailed! New features are good too. I'm not very stringent on coding standards, if I can read it, its good enough, make sure you list the name of any controllers etc. I might need in order to use your code, and MAKE SURE you tell me the name of your objects. I will be very.. aprehensive at introducing any more dependencies, its already got tons of dependencies as it is.