Ian Lewis' Blog

I just set up Plagger to send me e-mails to my cellphone and gmail when there are updates to my replies rss feed on twitter. This took way longer than anticipated because of how long it took to install and configure Plagger properly.

First installing it took a long time. I installed it via cpan and Plagger has a huge number of dependencies. Many of the dependencies are not set properly so cpan fails to install it more often then not. I had to force install the IO::Socket::SSL package because the tests failed. I didn't need TLS for mail and it's an optional package so I'm not sure why I needed SSL in the first place.

Once plagger was installed there isn't a terribly large amount of info about how to set it up. You basically have to create a config.yaml file in the same directory as the plagger executable or create a yaml file with any name and specify the location with the -c flag.

The yaml files configuration are easy to read but what options are available for each plugin is a bit obtuse without any examples to look at. There are some but it took me a while to find them since they aren't listed on the plagger cookbook which is linked to from the homepage. To find out what options are available to each plugin you'll either need to read the examples or the bottom of the plugin's source code files to get a description of what it does and it's options. I'm also not sure what all of the types of plugins do but I gather than Subsription plugins are plugins for reading RSS feeds and incoming data, Publish plugins are for publishing RSS feeds, email, html etc., and Filters are for parsing and/or modifying the data.

I used three Plugins to achieve what I wanted to do which was to get e-mail sent to my gmail account and my mobile. I used the Subscription::Config, Filter::HTMLScrubber, and Publish::Gmail plugins. The config plugin pulls from an rss feed and caches the results. It only passes on changes to the feed to other plugins. The Gmail plugin is essentially a SMTP/SMTP TLS plugin which sends e-mails when it gets updates from the subscription plugins. Unfortunately the version of the plugin that installed with cpan had a bug as it called the MIME::Lite::extract_addrs function which is not present on the machine where I was running plagger. I needed to update the Gmail.pm plugin file to the newest version in plagger's svn. That version includes a fix around like 214 to call the extract_full_addrs fuction if the extract_addrs fuction doesn't exist.

Next, my mobile doesn't support html mail very well so I had to scrub the HTML from the RSS feeds with the HTMLScrubber plugin. Unfortunately though the Gmail plugin sends e-mails as text/html encoded so I needed to further modify the Gmail.pm file to mail as text/plain around line 90.

After that the template file that is used to generate the e-mail, gmail_notify.tt, was missing so I needed to get that from svn as well and I put it in my .cpan/assets/common directory and added that directory to the templates search path in my config.yaml. The contents of the template are also html so I needed to edit the template to remove all the html tags.

After that I just put config.yaml in the same directory as my plagger executable and added a line to execute plagger every 10 minutes to my crontab. This also had it's glitches as plagger prints debug and info messages to stderr so you can't just do "plagger > /dev/null" you have to have something like "plagger > /dev/null 2>&1" so that cron doesn't email you with plagger info messages every 10 minutes.

Anyway, after a few hours of messing with it, it finally worked. Here is the config.yaml I used.

I read today on the Official Google Blog that Google documents has offline support using Google gears but unfortunately it's perhaps not released to me yet. Unfortunately it sometimes takes time for new versions to get out to everyone and it takes even longer before they are supported in different languages other than English.

One thing that many people might not realize is that features often take a good amount of time to be released in other languages other than English. My Japanese version of Gmail still doesn't support greasemonkey scripts. I think that feature was released many months ago. Google Reader in Japanese still doesn't support showing your the shared items of your contacts or Google gears. Another feature that was released many months ago. Google docs tends to be pretty decent about getting the newer versions released in Japanese but Gmail has been particularly lacking. I hope they continue that with this new version.

I just set up my e-mail settings with Mercurial so that I can e-mail patches via my Gmail account. I have Debian installed on my machine which has exim installed by default so it was pretty easy to set up. I'm not terribly versed at setting up mailing agents so I basically followed these instructions on the Debian Wiki. After getting that set up it's easy to set up Mercurial to use exim4 since it's a drop in replacement for sendmail.

To set up Mercurial to use exim I followed the instructions on the Mercurial Wiki:

email::
...
method;;
    Optional.  Method to use to send email messages.  If value is
    "smtp" (default), use SMTP (see section "[smtp]" for
    configuration).  Otherwise, use as name of program to run that
    acts like sendmail (takes "-f" option for sender, list of
    recipients on command line, message on stdin).  Normally, setting
    this to "sendmail" or "/usr/sbin/sendmail" is enough to use
    sendmail to send messages.

  Email example:

    [email]
    from = Joseph User <joe.user@example.com>
    method = /usr/sbin/sendmail

So here is my very simple ~/.hgrc file:

[ui]
username = Ian Lewis <IxxMLxxxx@gmail.com>
[email]
from = Ian Lewis <IxxMLxxxx@gmail.com>
method = /usr/sbin/exim4

Simple. Now I just enable POP for my gmail and I can use hg email and it will go through my gmail account. Now only if the Mercurial guys would fix this issue so I can send the patch email with the correct encoding.

I came across this website called Zoho which has a lot of interesting web apps like Google's web apps. Google has Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Zoho has docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Google has Google notebook. Zoho has a notebook. Google has gmail. Zoho has Zoho mail. Google has... well you get the idea.

All that stuff is well and good but the thing that caught my eye was the Zoho creator and the Zoho DB & Reports. Granted, Google has it's own things like a neat little chart api(on the right) but nothing like Zoho's DB and integrated report creator that I know of. Google Base seems built for an entirely different purpose. Granted that the Zoho DB and Reports are not going to rival any enterprise reporting software but would provide you with an easy to use reporting tool for small to <the step above small (not medium)> sized databases.

Anyway, the possibilities seemed interesting for an online set of integrated applications like Zoho has. Especially the DB, App creator, and Spreadsheets but I'm sure you could think of powerful ways to integrate the other things like TODO and e-mail. The problem is that Zoho hasn't integrated these (yet?). The Zoho creator, though billed as a way to "Create Database Applications", is not integrated with the DB. When you create an app, and with it, a form and a view in the creator, the database and tables don't show up in the database app. *scratches head* Isn't integrating these two obvious? It would be cool to have an application with a database that you could then load in Zoho Database and create reports etc. But alas, the creator is a stand alone.

The integration issues combined with bugs in the creator when saving data, when saving text other than english, and when accessing using a Japanese phone, all are pretty much show-stoppers for me using it. It seems like it's so close, but missing some critical pieces. They may be adhering to the release early, release often philosophy and they are definitely sticking to the "release early" part. I just hope they stick to the "release often" part.

I've used Gmail for my personal mail for almost 2 years now. But I had never had a phone where I could access the internet from the cell phone until I came to Japan. So I was delighted to know that Gmail has a mobile feature that allows me to read e-mails from the cell phone.

However, it's not all Samurai's and Green Tea here in Japan because Gmail doesn't work on Japanese mobiles. In fact almost none of Google's services work on the cell phone. Google has a news reader that you can access from your mobile phone as well. But that doesn't work either. The simple search seems to work ok but any service where you need to log in fails and Google doesn't support Japanese phones.

Each service complains that you need cookies enabled in your browser in order log in. Though cookies are enabled in the browser and other Japanese sites like Mixi have no problems logging you in.

I tried searching the internet for possible causes and solutions to the problem and I came across a few websites but nothing seemed to work. This site seems to suggest that at first there is a possibility that it would fail but if you login again it would work. But nothing seemed to work for me and gmail seems to spend you to a page that isn't for mobiles.

I suppose all of this could be my phone's lousy browser implementation but lots of phones in Japan seem to have the same problem. I suppose the lack of resources in Japanese, not supporting Japanese phones and not having services useful to Japanese (like train schedules etc.) is why people in Japan tend to use Yahoo and not Google. Yahoo just serves Japanese people better. And besides the messenger has cuter smilies