Send a Text Message To Your Cell Phone From E-mail

Posted on by rchapin

This might be old news but I came accross this today and wanted to make a note of it for myself for future reference.

All that you need to do is address the message to the phone number @ the service prodivers designated domain that they use to convert and forward the message content to your mobile device.

What I see interesting in this is being able to send txt messages from a system or service that encounters an error that requires human intervention.

For example, if you want to send a message to someone on a Verizon phone, you would address the e-mail to:

5551230987@vtext.com

Send your message as normal, and they will get it as a SMS.

All of the providers follow the schema of the 10-digit phone number followed by the @ and then the domain for the provider.

Following is a list of the domains used by the major providers.  If you don’t see your provider in the list the search string I used to find each was “send a text message to a cell phone from email [name-of-provider]”

  • Alltel: @message.alltel.com
  • AT&T: @txt.att.net.  To send multimedia messages use @mms.att.net
  • Bell Canada: @txt.bellmobility.ca
  • Boost Mobile: myboostmobile.com
  • Cricket Wireless: @sms.mycricket.com.  To send multimedia messages use @mms.mycricket.com
  • Metro PCS: @mymetropcs.com or @metropcs.sms.us
  • Qwest: @qwestmp.com
  • Sprint: @messaging.sprintpcs.com
  • T-Mobile: @tmomail.net
  • U.S. Cellular: @email.uscc.net
  • Verizon: @vtext.com
  • Virgin Mobile USA: @vmobl.com

Setting Up Android SDK and Plugin in an Existing Install of Eclipse

Posted on by rchapin

To set up an existing install of Eclipse to do some Android development do the following:

  • Go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and look for and download the ADT bundle for your OS (in my case I was using Fedora Core 18 at the time)
  • Unpack it as the user that is going to be running Eclipse and/or after you unpack it make sure that your user has read/write/execute permissons for the files in this directory (obviously, you don’t need execute permssion for non executables).  To make things easy, I just created an ~/sdks directory and unpacked it in there.
  • Fire up eclipse and go to Help/New Software.
  • Add the following repository: https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
  • Check off both the Developer Tools and NDK Plugins.
  • After those plugins install go to Window/Preferences/Android, and click the ‘Browse’ button next to ‘SDK Location:’, selecting the /path-to/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20130917/sdk.  When setting this up you might get a dialogue box that indicates that the version of the Android SDK Tools and/or Android SDK Platform Tools is not compatible with the version of the adt-bundle you are attempting to use.  In my case, I was prompted to update it via the Android SDK Manager and was able to download an updated version.

If you have an existing project that you are working with you might have to update the project.properties to update the sdk level number.

You might see an error like:

Unable to resolve target ‘android-17’ until the SDK is loaded

If so, update the ‘target=android-17’ property in the project.properties file to match the value of ‘Platform.MinPlatformToolsRev’ in the /path-to/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20130917/sdk/tools/source.properties file.

In my case, I updated the project.properties to:

# Project target.
target=android-18

Getting the value ’18’ from the source.properties:

Platform.MinPlatformToolsRev=18

Showing Hidden Files and Folders Under Mac OSX

Posted on by rchapin

By default the Mac hides a number of different Folder as well as any file or folder that starts with a “.” character.

To show all of these files/folders in the Finder open a terminal and enter teh following commands:

$ defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

$ killall Finder

The Finder should restart and you should be able to see all of the files and folders on the machine.

Do Not Use Symlinks in Jetty’s webapps Directory

Posted on by rchapin

I set up a development instance of Jetty on my local machine and have been happily coding, compiling and deploying via a shell script.  The script copies the war from my user’s target directory to the jetty users’s home dir changes the permissions and then moves it to the /webapp dir creating a symlink to the name of the .war that is referenced in a number of config files.

This was working just fine until I did a merge with another developers code and a significant portion of it changed that Jetty had problems determining whether or not is should dump it’s local cache of .class files and configs and got into a very funky state.  Unfortunately, not one in which it was obviously funky, but where, all of the sudden I could not look up defined DataSources in JNDI.

Ultimately, after looking through many other different things, I decided to delete the symlink and, rename the .war in the /webapps dir.

Bingo, worked right away.

Getting Markdown Viewer To Display HTML Formatted Markdown Content in Firefox Under Linux

Posted on by rchapin

I recently installed the Markdown Viewer 1.3 in Firefox 23.0 under Fedora Core  18.  When I went to open a .md file in the browser it prompted me to download it.

To configure Firefox to display the markdown in the browser do the following:

Edit the ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default/mimeTypes.rdf file.

If there is not yet an existing RDF node for ‘text/plain’ add it, and add “md” as a file extension.

<RDF:Description RDF:about=”urn:mimetype:text/plain”
        NC:value=”text/plain”
        NC:fileExtensions=”md”
        NC:description=”Text Document”>
    <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource=”urn:mimetype:handler:text/plain”/>
</RDF:Description>

Internet Explorer Not Deleting Session Cookies

Posted on by rchapin

If you are trying to delete session cookies, those cookies with an expires or max-age value of -1 or no value set for that property, in Internet Explorer, you will probably notice that deleting them from the controls in the browser, does not actually delete them.

Evidently, the IE cookie implementation only writes persistent cookies to the file system and maintains the session cookies in RAM.  Moreover, when telling the browser to delete the cookies, it only deletes the cookies from the file system and does not delete them from RAM.

To delete session cookies in IE, you will need to restart the browser.

Use CookieSpy to View and Manage Internet Explorer 9 Cookies on Windows 7

Posted on by rchapin

I am doing some client-side testing of IE 9 on Windows 7 and need to be able to view cookies and their associated data.

The F12 developer tools is insufficient for this task as using the Cache/View cookie information selection only shows the cookies for the current domain that you are browsing in the current tab.

Moreover, when going to Internet Options, General Tab, clicking on the Settings button under ‘Browsing History’, and then clicking on the ‘View files’ or ‘View objects’ button does not show the cookie files.

I ended up installing CookieSpy and with it am able to easily view and manage the cookies for all of the (supported) browsers on the machine.

Automate the Download of Windows VMs for Testing IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10 and IE11 with ievms

Posted on by rchapin

I am working on some client-side Javascript and I need to be able to test it in all of the currently extant versions of Internet Explorer.  A collegue of mine pointed me to the ievms project by Greg Thornton (xdissent) that automates the download of multiple Windows vms provided by Microsoft to facilitate testing in multiple versions of IE.

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

To get it working under Fedora (RedHad, CentOS):

   . The script requires unar but is not readily available for FC18.  I found a page that indicated 7za provided by p7zip works to unzip the large VM files.
   . cd /
   . Installed p7zip:
      . # yum install p7zip
   . Modified the ievms.sh:

# Check for the `unar` command, downloading and installing it if not found.
check_unar() {
    if [ “${kernel}” == “Darwin” ]
    then
        hash unar 2>&- || install_unar
    else
        #
        # Commented out to use 7za instead
        #
        # hash unar 2>&- || fail “Linux support requires unar (sudo apt-get install for Ubuntu/Debian)”
        echo “using 7za . . . “
    fi
}

    log “Checking for existing OVA at ${ievms_home}/${ova}”
    if [[ ! -f “${ova}” ]]
    then
        download “OVA ZIP” “${url}” “${archive}”

        log “Extracting OVA from ${ievms_home}/${archive}”
        #
        # Use 7za instead of unar
        #
        # unar “${archive}” || fail “Failed to extract ${archive} to ${ievms_home}/${ova}, unar command returned error code $?”
        7za e “${archive}” || fail “Failed to extract ${archive} to ${ievms_home}/${ova}, unar command returned error code $?”
    fi

© 2005 Ryan Chapin