impostor version 0.0.1 has been released!

• by Mike Mondragon
• http://impostor.rubyforge.org/

Makes automatic posts to the following forum applications:

• Web Wiz Forums (WWF) 7.9
• Web Wiz Forums (WWF) 8.0
• PHP Bullitin Board (phpBB) 2.0 (2.0.22)

SYNOPSIS:

# config yaml has options specefic to wwf79, wwf80, phpbb2, etc.
# read the impostor docs for options to the kind of forum in use
# config can be keyed by symbols or strings
config = YAML::load_file('conf/impostor.yml')
post = WWW::Impostor.new(config)
message = %q{hello world is to application
programmers as tea pots are to graphics programmers}
# your application stores forum and topic ids
post.post(forum=5,topic=10,message)
# make a new topic
subject = "about programmers..."
post.new_topic(forum=7,subject,message)
post.logout

Changes:

0.0.1 / 2008-02-02

• 1 major enhancement
  • Birthday!

by Mike Mondragon
http://impostor.rubyforge.org/

Dave Myron of Contentfree wrote a great Gem that he’s
named Blackbook. The Gem is hosted in the
Contentfree collection on Ruby
Forge. Blackbook imports
contacts from a number of sources and currently supports AOL Mail, GMail, Hotmail,
Yahoo! Mail, and contacts from CSV file. Blackbook exports the contacts that have
been collected as XML and VCard formatted text or as an Array of Hashes
with :name and :email keys.

mms2r version 2.0.0 has been released!

• http://mms2r.rubyforge.org/
• http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?group_id=3065

Upcoming!

• A Mobile Rails PeepCode PDF book is in the works with Luke Francl
• A Mobile Rails RailsConf 2008 topic was submited with Luke Francl … we are still awaiting to find out if we’ve been accepted to present.

DESCRIPTION:

MMS2R is a library that decodes the parts of an MMS message to disk while
stripping out advertising injected by the mobile carriers. MMS messages are
multipart email and the carriers often inject branding into these messages. Use
MMS2R if you want to get at the real user generated content from a MMS without
having to deal with the cruft from the carriers.

If MMS2R is not aware of a particular carrier no extra processing is done to the
MMS other than decoding and consolidating its media.

Contact the author to add additional carriers to be processed by the library.
Suggestions and patches appreciated and welcomed!

Corpus of carriers currently processed by MMS2R:

• Alltel: message.alltel.com
• AT&T/Cingular/Legacy: mms.att.net, txt.att.net, mmode.com, mms.mycingular.com,
  cingularme.com
• Dobson/Cellular One: mms.dobson.net
• Helio: mms.myhelio.com
• Hutchison 3G UK Ltd: mms.three.co.uk
• LUXGSM S.A.: mms.luxgsm.lu
• NetCom (Norway): mms.netcom.no
• Nextel: messaging.nextel.com
• O2 Germany: mms.o2online.de
• Orange & Regional Oranges: orangemms.net, mmsemail.orange.pl, orange.fr
• PXT New Zealand: pxt.vodafone.net.nz
• Sprint: pm.sprint.com, messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile: tmomail.net
• Verizon: vzwpix.com, vtext.com

Changes:

1.2.0 / 2008-01-23 (Skwisgaar Skwigelf – fastest guitarist alive)

• added support for pxt.vodafone.net.nz PXT New Zealand
• added support for mms.o2online.de O2 Germany
• added support for orangemms.net Orange UK
• added support for txt.att.net AT&T
• added support for mms.luxgsm.lu LUXGSM S.A.
• added support for mms.netcom.no NetCom (Norway)
• added support for mms.three.co.uk Hutchison 3G UK Ltd
• removed deprecated #get_number use #number
• removed deprecated #get_subject use #subject
• removed deprecated #get_body use #body
• removed deprecated #get_media use #default_media
• removed deprecated #get_text use #default_text
• removed deprecated #get_attachment use #attachment
• fixed error when Sprint content server responds 500
• better yaml configs
• moved TMail dependency from Rails ActionMailer SVN to ‘official’ Gem
• ::new greedily processes MMS unless otherwise specified as an initialize
  option :process => :lazy
• logger moved to initialize option :logger => some_logger
• testing using mocks and stubs instead of duck raped Net::HTTP
• fixed typo in name of method #attachement to #attachment
• fixed broken downloading of Sprint videos

• http://mms2r.rubyforge.org/
• http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?group_id=3065

Synopsis

I’ve been in a writers block for useful bits of information to post on my blog. I guess I’ll give a summary of things I’ve seen and done lately and perhaps that will inspire others.

Work

I started my own S-Corp. to work freelance out of over the summer. I was motivated to do so after attending the The Business of Rails session at RubyConf 2007. And I’ve gotten a lot of great tips on how to be a business person in Rails from the Google group Ruby on Rails meets the business world

I started consulting through Contentfree over the summer. They are a Rails consulting shop and have been working on a startup for their Eachday photo and memories sharing site. Its been great to working with Dave Myron there. Dave is one of the best coders and software designers I’ve ever worked with and I’m not saying that just to get more work!

RubyConf

I went to RubyConf 2007. It was fun. I played a lot of Werewolf (see #53) in the evenings. Sadly, it felt like the close knit party was/is over in the Ruby community since all the momentum that Rails has brought to Ruby is bringing in the masses (I’m in that group, one of “those guys”). My guess is that RailsConf 2008 is going to feel like a JavaOne, and RubyConf 2008 will feel like RailsConf 2007 with to many tracks.

#fauna

At RubyConf I got to meet the people I’ve met in the #fauna channel on irc.freenode.net. I think some of the greatest Ruby code and ideas I’ve been exposed to are from people in that channel. Shout outs to adamblock, agile, evn, lifo, heaveysixer, loincloth, defunkt, and others.

Evan Weaver

Evan is a genius and pretty cool dude.

Pratik

Pratik is a genius and is very active on RailsCore contributions. He says Just Say No To Named Spaced Models so I guess you should ignore this post: Rails Models in a Namespace

Chris Wanstrath

Chris is a genius is full of ambition Ambition Google Group

ditching Typo

I’m probably going to ditch this Typo blog when I can make time to do it. I’ll either go with an another Rails based blog called Mephisto or Evan Weaver’s Bax blog which uses scripts and Apache SSI and is hidden on fauna’s SVN on Ruby Forge: ‘svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/fauna/bax’

like Ozimodo

I’ve been thinking about doing a Camping based tumblelog. I even paid a designer to make a template for it. I’ll blog about that latter. It will be like Ozimodo and probably steel code from it.

imPOSTor

I’m sitting on a Gem called imPOSTor that will post comments to forums such as phpBB and Web Wiz Forums . I’ll probably release within the month. It has been working inside a production grade private Rails app for over a month so I think its ready to be released. “The imPOSTor library is used to automate the act of posting comments and data to forums such as phpBB and WWF. impostor encapsulates the work of posting to these forums using a common (ruby) interface.”

MMS2R

I’m about to finish the next major version of MMS2R (2.0) . I think I’ve found the best architecture for it be maintained for the long haul. Each release of MMS2R is named after a character in the Metalocalypse cartoon.

Speaking of MMS2R Luke Francl and I submitted a MMS + Rails proposal for RubyConf 2008 called “Mobile Messaging with Rails”. Luke and I are also writing a PeepCode book about Rails+MMS+Mobile phones.

There is a cool gem called Festival TTS for Ruby . What it does is take text, pass it into the The Festival Speech Synthesis System , then transform the WAV from Festival into an MP3. festivaltts4r provides a programming interface to use its functionality in an application. The project includes a Flash media player so that you can use festivaltts4r easily in a Rails application. Listen to their example Rails application. To use the Flash player you need to check out the project as a plugin to your Rails app like so:

mms2r version 1.1.7 has been released!

http://mms2r.rubyforge.org/

DESCRIPTION:

MMS2R is a library that decodes the parts of an MMS message to disk while
stripping out advertising injected by the cellphone carriers. MMS messages are
multipart email and the carriers often inject branding into these messages. Use
MMS2R if you want to get at the real user generated content from a MMS without
having to deal with the cruft from the carriers.

If MMS2R is not aware of a particular carrier no extra processing is done
to the MMS other than decoding and consolidating its media.

Contact the author to add additional carriers to be processed by the
library. Suggestions and patches appreciated and welcomed!

Corpus of carriers currently processed by MMS2R:

• AT&T => mms.att.net
• AT&T/Cingular => mmode.com
• Cingular => mms.mycingular.com
• Cingular => cingularme.com
• Dobson/Cellular One => mms.dobson.net
• Helio => mms.myhelio.com
• Nextel => messaging.nextel.com
• Orange (Poland) => mmsemail.orange.pl
• Sprint => pm.sprint.com
• Sprint => messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile => tmomail.net
• Verizon => vzwpix.com
• Verizon => vtext.com

Changes:

== 1.1.7 / 2007-08-25 (Adam Nergal, friend of Skwisgaar, but not Pickles)

• Added suport for Orange of Poland Orange mmsemail.orange.pl (Zbigniew
  Sobiecki)
• Cleaned up documentation modifiers
• Cleaned out non-Ruby code idioms

http://mms2r.rubyforge.org/

mms2r version 1.1.4 has been released!

• mms2r.rubyforge.org

1. DESCRIPTION:

MMS2R is a library that decodes the parts of an MMS message to disk while
stripping out advertising injected by the cellphone carriers. MMS messages are
multipart email and the carriers often inject branding into these messages. Use
MMS2R if you want to get at the real user generated content from a MMS without
having to deal with the cruft from the carriers.

If MMS2R is not aware of a particular carrier no extra processing is done
to the MMS other than decoding and consolidating its media.

Contact the author to add additional carriers to be processed by the
library. Suggestions and patches appreciated and welcomed!

Corpus of carriers currently processed by MMS2R:

• AT&T => mms.att.net
• AT&T/Cingular => mmode.com
• Cingular => mms.mycingular.com
• Cingular => cingularme.com
• Dobson/Cellular One => mms.dobson.net
• Helio => mms.myhelio.com
• Nextel => messaging.nextel.com
• Sprint => pm.sprint.com
• Sprint => messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile => tmomail.net
• Verizon => vzwpix.com
• Verizon => vtext.com

Changes:

1. 1.1.4 / 2007-08-07 (Dr. Rockso)

• AT&T => mms.att.net support (thanks Mike Chen and Dave Myron)
• get_body returns nil when there is not user text (sorry Will!)

• mms2r.rubyforge.org

MMS2R was not showing any tests in its firebridge entry because I had a non-dependency for a rcov task that I had included in the MMS2R gem’s Rakefile

This is what Eric says on firebrigade:

Depend on what you need so that your tests will work. For example, if you have an rcov task, but you don’t want to mark it as a dependency, wrap it in a rescue block. Tinderbox is friendly enough to add Rake or RSpec as a dependency if you forgot it, but other than that, you’re on your own.

This is how to rescue the LoadError exception around the require statement for rcov in the Rakefile :

begin
  require 'rcov/rcovtask'
rescue LoadError
end

and this is how I rescue the NameError exception in the rcov task:

begin
  Rcov::RcovTask.new do |t|
    t.test_files = FileList['test/test*.rb']
    t.verbose = true
    t.rcov_opts << "--exclude rcov.rb,hpricot.rb,hpricot/.*\.rb"
  end
rescue NameError
end

update

07/04/2007

Actually MMS2R is not being tested on the firebrigade currently. The problem stems from a bug in Gems 0.9.4 where MMS2R being dependent on Hpricot and Tinderbox getting a Gem::RemoteInstallationCancelled exception (line 106 of lib/tinderbox/gem_runner.rb) that Eric transforms into a Tinderbox::ManualInstallError

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/tinderbox-1.0.0/lib/tinderbox/gem_runner.rb:108:in `install’: Installation of mms2r-1.1.2 requires manual intervention (Tinderbox::ManualInstallError)

        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/tinderbox-1.0.0/lib/tinderbox/gem_runner.rb:265:in `run’

        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/tinderbox-1.0.0/bin/tinderbox_gem_build:9

        from /usr/local/bin/tinderbox_gem_build:16:in `load’

        from /usr/local/bin/tinderbox_gem_build:16

Eric says its an known bug in Gems 0.9.4 and should bug them about it!

update

08/01/2007

Eric says that “automatic platform selection to RubyGems” will be fixed on his vacation

We had an informal Birds of a Feather Friday evening for the MMS2R gem at RailsConf . There are 10 people in this picture but 12 or 13 showed up total!

We talked about:

• overview
• recent changes/features
• pending changes/features
• Rails projects that are using the gem
• ingestion of email/mms into a Rails application

Luke Francl whom has been contributing to MMS2R is presenting at Ostrava On Rails the first Ruby On Rails conference in the Czech Republic.

Luke will be speaking about mobile integration with Rails:

• MMS to email
• fetching email with Rails
• MMS2R