Commenting on Text Email ...

The last post was posted via email from my phone. And boy, is my thumb tired. </rimshot>

Today, the mobile phone is a data center, with the talking taking a minor part. I got religion on texting at Disneyland, when I tried to hook up with the rest of the family. We had agreed to meet at the statue of Mickey and Walt at the center of the park. Unfortunately, that's when everyone else in the world, including the Parade, planned to be, too. We tried to call, but connections were sketchy and everything was loud, so we couldn't hear. So, I texted them, they replied, and we met up.

Since then, I've had texting as the core of my mobile data center.

I'm a Verizon user. I haven't really tried the others, so I don't know the details. I do know that sending your cameraphone pictures to your email is a better bet than using their Pix site.

If you have mail on a UNIX machine you have procmail on, even better:


:0
* ^From: xxxxxxxxxx@vzwpix.com
{
:0 c
| ~/Procmail/handle_cameraphone_shots.pl
:0
mailfromphone
}


That's all it takes to pipe your pics into a program to unpack 'em. (They're MIME attachments. Like I said, it's all just email.)

And what's in handle_cameraphone_shots.pl?


use MIME::Parser ;
my $parser = new MIME::Parser ;
$parser->output_under('/home/jacoby/www/Cell/') ;
my $entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN) or die qq{parse failed\n} ;
$entity->dump_skeleton ;


I'm a Perl geek, but I am sure something similar is possible in Python, Ruby or your other favorite dynamic language.