Alarm when the food is on the table!

OK, admit it! I'm one of those spoiled brats who still get the food served by mum!
That's indead lovely, but there's always the same problem, I'm sitting in front of my computer listening to loud music, and I can't hear when they shout at me from downstairs when the dinner is on the table.
And today I also got my old P120, working again, some evil virus made it confused, but today i reinstalled windows etc, so now it's working propely again.

Now I got this crazy idea that I should write a program, wish basicly tells me when food is availible!
How could that be done? I would like to move the P120 downstairs, connect it to our homenetwork, and then write a program wish can send a message to my computer...

I haven't learn DirectPlay or something like that yet, so I just want to know if there's some easy way to do this?

Otherwise I will have to continue to eat cold food! :-)

Option #1:
Depending on what version of windows you guys have you can always use "net send". You could setup a shortcut for them to click and it display a messagebox on your computer with a short msg saying food is ready.

Option #2:
You can learn how to use sockets and write a simple application that sends you a packet whenever food is ready. You would need client/server type setup I suppose.

Option #3:
You can start making your own meals.

To do this in MSVC++ was what I had in mind...

what will be the quickest way to solve this problem?

Buy a cookbook or MSVC++book?
Hm...

Code:

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system("net send computer1 Dinner Time!");

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>> system("net send computer1 Dinner Time!");

That is assuming you are on an NT Kernel based Operating System, and i dont think a p120 can have NT, 2K or XP on it.

I suggest you search on google for "Beej's Guide To Network Programming" it is a great tutorial on sockets.

Hey FearOfTheDark, I just wrote a couple of quicky programs to do what you need. Hope it helps. Email me if you would like the source and such. Binaries are included. One is server which runs on your computer and one is client which is run from the message-sending computer.