My First Android App - Way2SMS 1.0

Since ASE came out, I really wanted to try out developing some apps with it. But as python ASE sucks compared to the Java API, in many ways, I had no option but to use Java API. Fortunately, this application is simple enough :p

Before using this application, please make sure that you have a free way2sms account. You need to enter these details in the text boxes provided on the main screen along with the mobile number of the receiving person and the SMS message.

Here are few things you may want to know
1) 140 character limit per SMS
2)  Some sort of Internet connection is mandatory
3) Aren't the above enough ? :D

Download the latest version (1.0.5) from HERE

Update 26/08:

Fixed force close bug which was seen when the network access is slow

Update 28/09:

Version 1.0.2: Updated the application to take care of the POST parameter changes in way2sms website. Earlier versions won't work now!

Update 12/01/11:

Version 1.0.3: Added support for picking numbers from phonebook. Multiple numbers can be entered either manually or by pressing contact picker multiple times (seperate each number by a comma ',' if you're entering'em manually).

Update 02/02:

Version 1.0.4: Fixed the bug which causes the messages to mobile numbers starting with either 0 or +91 to fail. (Thanks to Vivek for letting me know about this through comments!)

Update 12/02:

Version 1.0.5: Updating app as due to changes in way2sms website, v1.0.4 stopped working. (Thanks to sugan & anon.)

BeautifulSoup for web scraping

Ever wondered how you get so many spam e-mails to your inbox with in minutes of posting your e-mail address on a popular website/blog? Most of those spam e-mails are sent to you by bots, whose job is to search(scrape) the web pages for text that match the signature of e-mail addresses. This is accomplished by using powerful scraping tools. One such tool is BeautifulSoup

Forget e-mail spamming for a moment, there are a lot of other things that you can do with these tools. e.g Scraping ebay.in's facebook community 'wall' for all the posts. The following python code shows how this can be done with the help of BeautifulSoup.

If you observe the source code for web page, you'll see that each and every post on the wall is under the tag span class="UIStory_Message. So we have to parse the page for finding out all the 'span' tags, which have the 'class' attribute set to 'UIStory_Message'. The method 'bs.findAll', shown below, does exactly that. Also we may want to print the names of the post's author before every post. From the HTML source, you can see that these names are available as text under the tag span class="UIIntentional_StoryNames". This tag is just before our post tag span class="UIStory_Message. As we already have references to all the post tags, we can find out the name tags by calling 'findPreviousSibling' and the name is available one level deep, under the 'a' tag. Finally, we can call 'getText' method to get the name of the post's author.


If this is confusing, please see the official BeautifulSoup documentation

#!/usr/bin/env python
__author__ = "Kasi Viswanadh Yakkala"
 

import os
import re
import sys
from urllib2 import urlopen
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def ebayin_fb_parse():
    frontpage = urlopen("http://www.facebook.com/ebaydotin?v=wall").read()
    bs = BeautifulSoup(frontpage)
    fbstories = bs.findAll(name='span', attrs={'class':'UIStory_Message'})
    for s in fbstories:
        fbprofile_name = s.findPreviousSibling(name='span',attrs={'class':'UIIntentionalStory_Names'}).a.getText()
        print fbprofile_name,':'
        try:
            print s.getText()
        except:
            print s.find(text=True)

# HOW TO USE
""" Main Function """
if __name__ == "__main__":
    ebayin_fb_parse() 

Truly Inspirational song from Sirivennela

This song is a true master piece from Sirivennela Sitaram Sastry Garu. I listen to this song very often and find it to be very inspiring. I bet nobody other than Sirivennela garu could write such a beautiful song. Thanks to my good friend Karthik, who originally found this video and shared it.

Sending free SMS from your PC

If you have a way2sms.com account and want a quick way to send an SMS without the hassle of logging in to the website, you can take a look at the python script that I posted at snipplr

I have provided the necessary instructions on how to use the script in the above page. I sometimes use it for sending important reminders/notes to myself. The best thing with way2sms SMS service is that the message at the receiver side will still be shown with your number as the sender! However, here is the worst part if I may say so, way2sms puts a signature at the end of your SMS. Without this signature, I don't think they can do online business!!