Monthly Archives: March 2010

Notifo kicks ass.

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Saw Notifo on Hackernews and fell in love. It solves all my irritating headaches when making web apps (mainly that I need access to notifications and can’t do it without a simple free app installed).

I made a quick PHP class for using with Notifo. Give it a whirl if you want to.

Notifo PHP Class (Version 1.01, thanks to Ethan and Michael!)

Be sure to include it; then try this:

$a = new Notifo();
try {
$a->subscribe_user(‘username’);
$a->send_notification(‘username’, ‘message’, ‘title’, ‘URL’);
}
catch(Exception $e){
echo “You had an error; {$e->getMessage()}”;
}
Be sure to catch exceptions, there are bound to be quite a few when you get up and running.

LOL: Implementing “Margins” on an old Docomo phone.

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Docomo phones don’t recognize margins and are irritating as hell to program for.

The odd thing is that they do recognize table widths.  As a result, you can make the following horrible code (that “DOEZ THE JOB”)

<BODY>
<table>
<tr>
<td width=”(left margin)”></td>
<td>(whatever)</td>
<td width=”(right margin)”></td>
</tr>
</table>
</BODY>
Hey don’t look at me; I haven’t used Tables since y2k.

Email Validation in Google App Engine

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My current project is building a mobile website for Japanese cellphones that can stand about 10-20k hits within an hour without getting completely trashed.  Admittedly, this isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to do, but Google App engine makes it a lot easier.  In the process, I had to brush up on my Python, and in particular, email validation.

The obvious way to deal with email validation is to use google’s “mail.is_email_valid” function.  Unfortunately, this seems to return true as long as you have a string, as it mentions on Aral Balkan’s helpful post on the subject.  I had to dig a little more to find out how to use mail_re; here’s the code for anyone curious.

from django.core.validators import email_re
print (email_re.match(‘test_email@fakedomain.com’) != None)
print (email_re.match(‘bademail’) != None)
Seems to work properly.

N00b problems with Appengine

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This problem was stupid, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who is going to run into it :o uch:

Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 3

If you are getting the above message after the output you intended, it is because you are using “print” instead of “self.response.out.write”.   :sick: :o uch: :grr: