just an asterisk

11 Responses to “The Open Questions Page”

1. Bill Says:
   
   
   December 14th, 2009 at 6:49 am

   So ab, you must have heard about the new Google phone – Android. Even though it’s not available yet there are some people who have them – Google employees. I like the idea that you can buy the phone over the internet and sign up for service with any provider. I’m up for renewal with my provider to get a new phone at a discount if I sign a 2 year contract. How will Google compete? Any thoughts yet?

   Bill

2. Jason Says:
   
   
   March 5th, 2010 at 2:39 pm

   So I am an aspiring blogger these days and I was wondering if you could recommend a plugin or two for compiling site visit statistics?

3. Steve R Says:
   
   
   March 6th, 2010 at 4:08 am

   Didn’t get a reply about newlines in CLGemail, so decided to do it myself. Here’s the result:

   Imports System
   Imports System.Net.Mail

   Public Module Module1
   ‘Original CLGmail was posted on justanaskterisk.com
   ‘ modified 2/2010 by SR to allow choice of separator characters
   ‘ and newlines in the body of the message and add some
   ‘ error checking and recovery
   ‘ invoke as
   ‘ CLGmail +username+password+server+port+emaildest+Subject+body
   ‘ where the “+” used to separate the fields in the command
   ‘ line is any command-line legal character (such as +#^)
   ‘ that won’t occur in any field except the body (where it will be
   ‘ replaced by a newline (LF or CR/LF).
   Sub Main()
   ‘get instance of system.net.mail.smtpClient (which does the work
   ‘ of sending the encoded email)
   Dim SmtpMail As New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient

   ‘set up variables before use
   ‘give initial null values to make compiler happy
   Dim username As String = “” ‘including the @domain.com (e.g. user@gmail.com)
   Dim password As String = “” ‘case sensitive
   Dim emaildest As String = “” ‘message receipient’s address
   Dim Subj As String = “” ‘Subject of Mail
   Dim Body As String = “” ‘Message
   Dim Server As String = “” ‘Server Name; smtp.gmail.com for gmail
   Dim Port As String ‘ normally 587 for Gmail
   Dim commandparts() As String = {“”, “”} ‘array to hold command line parts

   ‘set up defaults
   Dim splitchar As String = “,”
   Dim thiscommand As String = Command() ‘default to command line parameters
   Dim lastcommandpart As Integer = 2
   If thiscommand.Length < 5 Then
   thiscommand = "+SMTP command not provided yet"
   End If

   'Enclosed within Try-Catch block to process errors
   Try
   'we need 7 parameters to send mail (#0 to #6)
   Do Until lastcommandpart = 6
   'allow user to abort if parameters not available
   If thiscommand.Length < 5 Then
   Throw New System.Exception("SMTPmail bad parameters")
   End If
   'make first char of data string the split character
   splitchar = Left(thiscommand, 1)
   thiscommand = Mid(thiscommand, 2)
   'we know lf can't be in command line, so use it to ignore body for now
   thiscommand = Replace(thiscommand, splitchar, vbLf, 1, 6)
   commandparts = thiscommand.Split(vbLf)
   lastcommandpart = commandparts.GetUpperBound(0)
   ' if number of parts 6, allow user to fix
   If lastcommandpart 6 Then
   thiscommand = InputBox(“Expected 6 parts but found ” & CStr(lastcommandpart) & vbCrLf & “SMTP string?(lf-splitchar,0user,1paswd,2server,3port,4to,5sub,6body”, thiscommand)
   End If
   Loop
   ‘put command parts into individual variables for clarity of reading
   username = commandparts(0)
   password = commandparts(1)
   Server = commandparts(2)
   Port = commandparts(3)
   emaildest = commandparts(4)
   Subj = commandparts(5)
   Body = commandparts(6)
   ‘split body into lines if required
   Body = Body.Replace(splitchar, vbCrLf)

   ‘Set the SMTP object’s properties
   Dim mycredentials As New Net.NetworkCredential(username, password)
   SmtpMail.Host = Server
   SmtpMail.EnableSsl = True
   SmtpMail.Port = Port
   SmtpMail.UseDefaultCredentials = False
   SmtpMail.Credentials = mycredentials

   ‘send the message
   SmtpMail.Send(username, emaildest, Subj, Body)
   ‘ if it works, we’re all done
   Catch ex As Exception
   ‘if there was an error, tell calling program about it
   MsgBox(“Delivery Failure: ” & ex.Source & ex.Message)
   MsgBox(“SMPTP data was:” _
   & vbCrLf & “username ” & username _
   & vbCrLf & “password ” & password _
   & vbCrLf & “Host(server) ” & SmtpMail.Host _
   & vbCrLf & ” Port ” & SmtpMail.Port _
   & vbCrLf & “emaildest ” & emaildest _
   & vbCrLf & “subject ” & Subj _
   & vbCrLf & “body ” & Body)
   End Try
   End Sub
   End Module

4. ab Says:
   
   
   March 6th, 2010 at 4:51 am

   Sweet. Thanks for sharing. I’d be happy to update the real one with yours (as soon as I get a chance to test). Would you like to contribute to it officially?

   ~ab

5. ab Says:
   
   
   March 6th, 2010 at 4:54 am

   Hi Jason,
   I’d be happy to recommend WP plugins for stats. For just the basics, I use WP.com stats (created originally for wp.com). For advanced stats, I use Google Analytics (I know it’s not a plugin but it’s amazing) combined with Headspace, a SEO plugin. Headspace puts my google analytics code in all the right places. I have also dabbled with StatPress, which I find a bit confusing but very powerful.

   Hope that helps!
   ~ab

6. Hugo Says:
   
   
   April 18th, 2010 at 2:41 pm

   Hello,
   it’s possible to use CLgCAL as standalone in command line?
   like:
   c:\CLgCAL.exe user pass subject

   is possibel, please, could you explain me how to do it? I think i’m doing something wrong because its always crashing. Not sure what i’m doing wrong.
   If i use win+G shourtcut, on the pop up text, I type the event and everything works fine, if I use ms-dos and CLgCAL.exe alone, it’s not working, maybe i’m passing the wrong parameters.
   can you give me an exemple please.

   Thanks!

7. ab Says:
   
   
   April 18th, 2010 at 4:07 pm

   Hi Hugo,
   The format is CLgCAL.exe username _ password _ statusupdate. To be honest, I can’t remember why I added the extra spaces (” _ ” rather than “_”) but once you put it in this format, you should be able to use the command line without issues. I hope this solves your problem, let me know if it works!

   ~ab

8. Hugo Says:
   
   
   April 19th, 2010 at 2:07 am

   Hello,
   that worked perfect!
   Is the .exe open source? If yes, can you share the source please?
   If not, no problem, i understand.

   Thanks for your help!

9. ab Says:
   
   
   April 19th, 2010 at 7:08 am

   Sure Hugo – here is the source. It’s super easy and this is really all you need.

   Imports System
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Collections
Imports System.ComponentModel
Imports Google.GData.Client
Imports Google.GData.Extensions
Imports Google.GData.Calendar
Module main
Public Sub Main()
Dim vars() As String
Dim myService = New CalendarService("Cal")
Dim myEntry = New EventEntry()
Dim postUri = New Uri("http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/private/full")
vars = Command.Split("_")
Dim username As String = vars(0)
Dim password As String = vars(1)
Dim quickadd As String = vars(2)
myService.setUserCredentials(username, password)
myEntry.QuickAdd = True
myEntry.Content.Content = quickadd

   myService.Insert(postUri, myEntry)
End Sub
End Module

10. Dave Says:
    
    
    May 22nd, 2010 at 9:55 pm

    Hi there, I’ve recently gotten into a variation of todo.txt called “task” (see here: http://taskwarrior.org/projects/show/taskwarrior/) a command line task application which keeps all your tasks in one text file including project headings, tags etc.., syncing across computers with dropbox. I have a cell phone with sms and email ability and would love to be able to send a one-line entry to my text file while I’m away from a computer, e.g. “t add get bigger pump pro: pond +home”. I’m not smart enough to install/use fetchmail, and was envisioning appending a text line via email or sms to some sort of online text file, then pulling out all the lines with a script and sending them to a terminal (using autokey – I’m on Ubuntu, otherwise I’d use autohotkey) to enter them into the todo.txt file once I was back at my computer.

    How would you approach such a task?

11. ab Says:
    
    
    May 27th, 2010 at 8:23 am

    Hi Dave,
    As I understand your question – you want to email or text in a task and then have it updated on your linux txt file. You say you would use Autohotkey, but can’t because of linux?

    Have you tried python? If I were to attempt this, I’d probably write a python script to check a gmail account, grab the most recent email, take the subject line and append it to my text file…

    Ignoring the “do this every X seconds/minutes” part of the code, the basic idea would be something like:
    
import imaplib
import re
import string

    account = "justanasterisk"
    password = "password"
    m = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com', 993)
    m.login(account,password)
    #login to the mailbox
    m.select('INBOX')

    #now that you have the inbox selected, get the first message's header:
val = m.fetch(startstr, '(BODY[HEADER] FLAGS)')
header = val[1][0][1]
subre = re.compile(r'Subject:.*\r')
subre2 = subre.search(header)
subject = subre2.group()
#now that you have the subject, append that to your text file
myfile = open("todo.txt", 'w')
#this line is probably wrong:
myfile.write(subject) #CHECK THIS BEFORE YOU TRY IT...


    Let me know if you actually try this, I’d be curious to see if it works :)

    Good luck!
    ~ab

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