I've been playing with my email filtering scripts, my e-fax account, my hiptop, and ImageMagick all night... it all started with some email conversations i've been having with ScottHeif and the guy from fotolog.net...

I'm thinking about setting up something so that I can submit content to a blog via my e-fax phone number, either as a faxed image, or as a voicemail message left on my e-fax voicemail.
(perhaps I'll do this on a seperate blog, so that this can continue to hold semi-organized thought, and I'll leave the circus-like experimental posts to another forum)

Part of the problem with this is that i lose my e-fax number, since I don't want faxes from my accountant automatically get posted to a blog. That led me to think about ways i could flag inbound content as "this is for posting", even though it's NON-TEXT input data (either abstract fax-bits in the form of a TIFF file, or abstract sounds in the form of a .WAV file).

With the audio, I'm considering analyzing the audio file into a frequency-histogram-type thing, and try to recognize DTMF (touchtone) beeps (actually, they're two-note chords). There may be some DTMF detector programs out there already, and "sox" can mangle a file into pretty much any form i want.... I then considered simplifying it by thinking about detecting pulses (beeps, whistles, thumps) in the time-domain alone... sort of a "knock three times" password scheme. i don't need to interperet anything more complicated than a pre-defined password of a certain number of loud noises, seperated by a certain (relative to one-another) length of quiet periods. So that "dunt-dahdah-dunt-dunt" means "post this"... come to think of it, I know for a fact that there's ham-radio programs out there that'll recognize and decode morse-code. hmm.

Anyhoo... turns out that my e-fax account tries to interpret the DTMF beeps as commands for its service, so those are out... I didn't feel like messing with decoding morse-code tonight, so i moved to imaging.

I want a way so I can say "if you see this symbol on the page, it's for the fax-blog"... I'm limited by scripts I can find, and the Perl and unix-shell-scripting programming languages, which is all I can say I can write production-ready code in right now.

Because it's getting late, i've ended up with something that takes an inbound fax image (in whatever form), and converts it into a 200x200 matrix of black or white pixels (regardless of its input size). I then convert *that* into lines of spaces and x's.

so this input image becomes this text output.

I then mashed that text into more Perl which can fairly easily look for spaces and x's in fuzzy patterns... I tested by looking for three vertical bars, precedeed on the left by several inches of whitespace. It works!

It's been awhile since i've devoted so much brainpower and valuable tv-watching time to something so utterly unimportant. I've missed that.