script to track the laptop status

I know this is lame, but I'm dying for my laptop to ship and tired of refreshing the order status page. If you have Perl installed ( www.activestate.com), you can run this to check the order status (i.e., In Production) and the estimated ship date.

Copy the code below to a text file named "getStatus.pl". Change the customer_number and order_number to those for your order and run it.

Code:

use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use LWP::Simple;
$|= 1;

$sleep_minutes = 10;
$order_number		= "999999999";
$customer_number	= "999999999";

my $url = 'http://support.dell.com/support/order/details.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&order_number=' . $order_number . '&validate=' . $customer_number;

sub check_status {
	print "\n\n";
	print "Check the status of your laptop every $sleep_minutes minutes\n";
	$time = localtime();
	$content = get($url);

	my $root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($content);
	@elements = $root->find('a', 'span');

	$status = "UNKNOWN";
	$date = "UNKNOWN";
	$status = $elements[39]->{_content}[0] || "UNKNOWN";
	$date = $elements[45]->{_content}[0] || "UNKNOWN";

	$root->delete();
	undef $root;
	undef $content;
	print "******************************************\n";
	if($status ne 'In Production') {
		print "\n\n++++ IT SHIPPED! ++++\n\n";
	}
	print "Status:     $status\n";
	print "Ship Date:  $date\n";
	print "Checked at: $time\n";
	print "******************************************\n";
	print "\n\n";
}

$minutes_till_check = 0;
print "Checking the status of your laptop\n";
while(1) {
	&check_status();
	sleep 60 * $sleep_minutes;
}

 

Very cool. Somebody has too much time and is very anxious!

 

With the amount of time a person would have waiting on dell they could code a new OS