Wicd is an open source wired and wireless network manager for Linux which aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings.
"Our new project attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they're looking at."
I realize that there is another application out there very similar to this (isightcapture) but I needed to write this functionality myself so I could figure out how it needs to work for iAlertU.