Plasticx Blog

We had the first ever meeting of Kitsap.rb tonight. Eric E. took the initiative and started it up. He says by looking at the turnover of Ruby books at the Barnes & Noble in Silverdale, WA he knows there are other closet Ruby-ist in Kitsap County.

I talked about how TDD changed my life, and about how autotest has
helped me connect with my inner child, and about how if you have been a naughty developer zentest is your therapist.

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

mms2r version 1.0.7 has been released!

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

Changes:

== 1.0.7 / 2007-04-27 (Senator Stampingston)

• patch submitted by Luke Francl
• added a get_subject method that returns nil when any MMS has a default carrier subject
• get_subject returns nil for ‘’, ’Multimedia message’, ‘(no subject)’, ‘You have new Picture Mail!’

This is the combined experience from my previous entry Typo 4.0 + Apache2 + MySQL + Gentoo and Chapter 27 Deployment and Production / Agile Web Development with Rails and Capistrano: Automating Application Deployment

What I am illustrating here is how to maintain a Typo blog. What I mean by maintain is that you are creating your own
source repository for your instance of Typo. This will allow you to patch the application with fixes and your own
modifications. You will also integrate Capistrano into your repository so that you deploy your updates with ease.
Also, I show you my implementation of a Mongrel init.d script on Gentoo that will ensure Mongrel starts back up on
server reboot.

Cellphone Multimedia Message Service (MMS) messages that your cellphone sends are really just email formatted text. You can send MMS to other cellphones or to a real email address. I wrote a post about using the Rails receive method in ActionMailer::Base to process email decoding email attachments with ActionMailer::Base receive If you just want to process the mail but don’t need the hook into Rails then just use the TMail class’s parse method directly

mail = TMail::Mail.parse(raw_email)

I’ve been processing MMS emails via TMail recently and have found the cellphone carriers often modify user generated content (text, videos, images) to include advertising for their services.