Screenshot:

If you’re not familiar with SMS Server Tools it’s a really great utility for sending text messages from your PC (I use the term generically) it works on (almost?) all UNIXs and Windows too. It works by having folders which it monitors for text message files and then sending them via the phone. It was very easy to set up just download the source, make, make install, edit the config file and away you go.

I set it up so I could send myself text alerts when I get new emails. I did have it set up last year on my Gentoo machine and I used a bash script to process mail passed from Kmail. This time I’m using my Mac Mini and OS X with Apple’s Mail and a bit of applescript.

The biggest difference between the way Kmail and Mac Mail does things is that Kmail would run the bash script each time a message matched a given rule. Mail passes a collection of messages to the applescript that match the rule.

SMS File Format

The SMS files are just plain text files with unique file names;

To: 447xxxxxxxxx

Message Text goes here

Notice how the phone number you’re sending the message to is international format without the leading + and that there is a blank line inbetween the number and the message text.

The Applescript

This is the applescript I’m using to send the messages. I don’t have much experience with Applescript so anyone who can see a better way of doing things (especially the writing of the file) then I’d appreciate some feedback.

using terms from application “Mail”
on perform mail action with messages theMessages
repeat with theMessage in theMessages — loop through the messages sent by Mail
–Extract the desired details
set theSubject to subject of theMessage
set theSender to extract address from (sender of theMessage)
set MessageRecipients to get recipients of theMessage
set firstRecipient to item 1 of MessageRecipients
set toAddress to ((address of firstRecipient) as string)

–Create the randomly named file
set dir_prefix to “~/sms/”
set the_file to do shell script “mktemp ” & dir_prefix & “tempfiles/XXXXXX”

–Output the message
do shell script “echo To: 447xxxxxxxxx > ” & the_file
do shell script “echo >> ” & the_file
do shell script “echo From: ” & quoted form of theSender & ” >> ” & the_file
do shell script “echo To: ” & quoted form of toAddress & ” >> ” & the_file
do shell script “echo Subject: ” & quoted form of theSubject & ” >> ” & the_file

–Move the text message to the spool directory
do shell script “mv ” & the_file & ” ” & dir_prefix & “outgoing/”
end repeat
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

You can download the script from here. You will need to change the directory variables to suit your setup and you’ll need to replace the mobile number with the one you wish to send the messages to. I decided to edit my /etc/smsd.conf to define the spool folders to be in my home directory.

I recently decided I wanted to set it all up again, this time on my Mac Mini. I was trying out different phones and settings but I couldn’t get the N95 or an old Motorola V series phone to do anything even after plugging them both in!

I suspected that the phones had been left alone for so long that the batteries had discharged to such a state that the phones could not charge them anymore. I did a bit of searching on Google and someone suggested using an old USB cable to charge the battery a bit before charging it normally.

I immediately scrounged round my room looking for an old USB cable to hack up and found a Motorolla one. Here’s what to do;

1. I got some pliers and stripped the phone end off, then stripped the wires back.
2. Make sure the RED and BLACK wires do not touch each other!
3. Plug the USB cable in and connect the wires to the battery terminals as follows;
   • Touch the BLACK wire to the NEGATIVE terminal of the battery
   • Touch the RED wire to the POSITIVE terminal of the battery
4. Hold the wires to the battery terminals for about 20 - 40 seconds (This step may need to be repeated to attain enough charge for the phone to take over)
5. Plug the battery back into the phone and plug in the charger as normal

This worked for both my Nokia BL-5C battery and my Motorolla BC60 battery (this one took a few goes) now I’ve got them both charging. I’m going to hang on to my hacked up USB cable who knows when it may come in useful, that and I don’t like throwing computey stuffs out.

So if I ever get spam then I know exactly where it’s come from because each company / person has their own email address alias. It’s easy to stop them too, just delete the alias and no more spam! Not only that but the company or person who either spammed or allowed you to be spammed has just lost some credibility with you.

I got a Lloyds TSB phishing email this morning. I expect that you know what phishing emails are all about. I wasn’t fooled for an instant but I was interested in how they expected to trick people. The contents of the email were poorly coded HTML with images that were sourced from the lloydstsb.com site itself and an ugly link that blatantly was not kosher.

The email was sent to ‘undisclosed recipients’ a flaw in my plan you might think, not a problem, a quick look at the headers revealed that the email was sent to underu@mydomain.co.uk (I like to use aliases that are the company names themselves). This was the email alias I set up for www.underu.com the underwear site for men, when I shopped with them in the past.

I don’t know how my email address got from them to the attacker and I’m away from home at the moment. When I get back I’ll be in touch with UnderU and ask how my email address and who knows what other information could of been abused. I’ll update the post if / when they respond.

I was storing two timestamps (as a UNIX timestamp) in the database. One designating the date-time the user logged into the application and the other the date-time of the last activity the user performed. Because I was using UNIX timestamps, which are just the number of seconds sine the UNIX epoch, I subtracted one from the other and used that difference as the input to the PHP function date().

I couldn’t for the life of me work out why the date function was saying that I was logged in for an hour longer than I should have been and it was driving me crazy. It turns out that the reason was that my timezone locale setting in PHP is ‘Europe/London’ and that this causes the date function to adjust for British Summer Time (GMT + 1) thus when I used my timestamp difference in the date() function it translated the difference into a readable format but also added an extra hour.

The solution is to use gmdate() which is identical to the date() function except that the time returned is in Grenwich Mean Time format.

This morning after I finally found it I checked my Premium Bonds holder’s number to see if I’d won (better luck next month). I thought to myself wouldn’t it be nice if I could tell Opera to check my holder’s number for me without having to go find it once a month.

The way I did it was to edit one of Opera’s custom search records. In the old versions of Opera you had to find and edit ’search.ini’ but the newer releases have a search editor built in. You can find it under preferences (Ctrl+F12 on Windows or Cmd + , on Mac) search should be the third tab. Edit or add a new search engine and give it whatever name and keyword you like then expand the details section and set the address to;

http://www.nsandi.com/products/pb/haveYouWon.jsp

A quick look at the source code for that page reveals that the form is submitted via post so you’ll need to check the ‘Use POST’ checkbox. The next choice you have is whether or not you want to always check a specific number, like me, or whether you want to be able to enter different numbers.

I chose to always check the same number which means I gave my holder’s number to opera and it will be stored in plain text on my computer. I’ve traded off the possible risk of someone accessing my holder’s number against not having to remember it when I check my premium bonds. You should make your own mind up.

Query strings:

• To always check the same number
  • holderNumber=XXXXXXXX&null=%s
  • Where XXXXXXXX is your holder’s number
• To check a user supplied number each time
  • holderNumber=%s

%s is what opera uses in query strings to represent the input of the user. In the Google example above the terms ‘Premium Bonds Checker’ would have been represented by %s in the query string. holderNumber is the name of the form input (textbox) that the user would normally type their holder’s number into.

The first query string tells the premium bond checker to check your supplied holder’s number. There must be a user supplied input to these searches though (represented by %s) otherwise they wont work so a second parameter in this case ‘null’ is set to the user submitted string. The second query string tells the premium bond checker to check whatever holder’s number you supply.

How to use these methods:

Use the custom search like you normally would typing in one of the following depending on how you decided to set your custom search.

• Checking a defined number
  • nsi xyz
  • where nsi is your chosen search engine key and xyz represents any non-blank input
• Checking a supplied number
  • nsi XXXXXXXX
  • where nsi is your chosen search engine key and XXXXXXXX is your holder’s number

Now you have a quick and easy way to check your premium bonds without hassle, enjoy!

The solution is to use PERL:

• To convert Unix style line endings to Windows style
  • perl -p -e ’s/\n/\r\n/’ < unixfile.txt > winfile.txt
• To Convert Windows style line endings to Unix style
  • perl -p -e ’s/\r$//’ < winfile.txt > unixfile.txt

The use of single quotation marks in both command lines is important because it prevents the shell from trying to evaluate anything inside.

That’s it. A simple way to quicky convert line endings letting you get on with the job.

The other week I found the NASA site for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory through someone else’s blog (cannot remember who though). Anyway I think it makes a good bookmark especially the real time images and movies.

I thought they were neat and so might you.

Turns out, that you can force Internet Explorer (and other browsers) to parse your cascading style sheets strictly by using a strict doctype definition. I used the one below for my project;

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>

This was news to me, but welcome, because now I can center my divs in a cross-browser compatible way and move on to other problems like why background images for input elements aren’t loading on https pages (please let me know if you know why).

Oh and if you’re interested in more information http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ has a useful table of which doctype definitions trigger what behaviour in the popular browsers.

What I really liked is there’s a linux livecd available so all you have to do is burn the disk image stick it in and aside from a few simple commands to boot the cd correctly it loads and starts Gparted.

The main screen looks like this:

You select a drive from the drop down menu in the top right hand corner and the current partitions are displayed with their colour coordinated filesystems. Here my windows partition is first (green) then Gentoo (purple) and finally my swap. Used space appears yellow and free space is white. Select a partition to edit then click on ‘resize / move‘ to see the following dialog:

Its a simple matter of choosing how you want to resize the partitions using the graphical sliders. Once you’ve set up your changes click apply and it’ll go and do all the hard work for you and display its progress as it works.

I used it to repartition space from an ext3 file system with Gentoo on it to a partition with an NTFS file system containing Vista. The whole process took a few hours and I hadn’t defragmented either of the drives or backed up any of my data. I strongly recommend that if you use this utility that you take adequate precautions to backup your data. Or if you’re feeling lucky just roll with it.

As it happens I didn’t lose any thing and Gentoo booted just fine afterwards. Windows, however, was a bit more troublesome. It complained at boot and made me put my installation disk in to ‘repair windows’ which was fine and after a reboot and chkdsk it was fine.

There was a note on the Gparted livecd about not being able to shrink Vista and it sometimes working and sometimes not and a set of instructions for using command line utilities to do the job. I didn’t shrink windows I expanded it but it worked for me.

Have fun