I've started writing a bot that attaches to my Mythbackend. I'm calling it mythbot. It allows me to check on my recording status through commands like tuners, upcoming, jobs, info. It's written in php and uses xmpphp. XMPPHP does have performance problems. It needs a one liner to fix performance problems.
Update: The code is now hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/toddejohnson/mythbot