Month: January 2011

Today Amazon announced AWS Simple Email Service (SES) beta.  SES is a great addition to Amazon Web Services, with it an organization can send marketing, transactional, subscription or system notification messages without have to manage their own messaging infrastructure.  And just like all other AWS services it’s pay-as-you-go – even free in some instances.

Soon as I received the announcement from Amazon I immediately set out to give it a try.  Since I normally use Windows that’s what I used for this.  I ran into a couple of minor problems but was easily able to resolve them and now I’m sending email through SES like a mad man. . .

• Sign-up for SES
• Install Perl
• Install XML-LibXML via Perl Package Manager (instructions below)
• Download AWS SES scripts
• Setup “credentials” file (see below for details)
• Get verified: ses-verify-email-address.pl -k creds.txt -v test@powercram.com
• Send email: ses-send-email.pl -k creds.txt -s "Test One" -f test@powercram.com test@powercram.com

Prerequisites
Sign-up for SES.  If you already have an AWS account you’re one step closer, if not you’ll have to start there.

SES uses Perl scripts, therefore you must have Perl installed on your Windows machine.  I installed ActivePerl Community Edition.  Soon as that was done I ran the first SES script to get an email address verified but ran into my first problem – c:perlbin didn’t get added to my path by the installation (for some reason it added c:perlsitebin) so I had to do that manually (if you don’t know how to do this you probably shouldn’t be here anyway. . . )

Amazon Simple Email Service Scripts
Download the SES scripts and save to a useful location – I used d:awsses.  This download includes the following SES scripts:

• ses-get-stats.pl – retrieves statistics about Amazon SES account usage
• ses-send-email.pl – send email using Amazon SES
• ses-verify-email-addresses.pl – verify email addresses to be used with Amazon SES

Next problem – when I ran ses-verify-email-address.pl --help I received the message: “Can't locate XML/LibXML.pm in @INC (@INC contains: C:/Perl/site/lib C:/Perl/lib.) at D:AWSSESses-verify-email-address.pl line 26.  BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at D:AWSSESses-verify-email-address.pl line 26.”

After tooling around the web for a few minutes I realized I needed to manually install XML-LibXML.  This was easily done by opening the Perl Package Manager off the Start menu.  In there:

• Click the “View All Packages” button or press Ctrl+1
• Type libxml in the search box
• Right-click on XML-LibXML and select Install . . .
• Click File, Run Marked Actions or press Ctrl+Enter

Now when you run ses-verify-email-address.pl --help from the command line you can actually see the help for this command.

Credentials File for SES Commands
All of the SES scripts or commands require authentication to AWS, which makes sense.  You can save your credentials (both AWSAccessKeyId and AWSSecretKey) to a file, creds.txt and pass that to each script with the -k <filename> command.

Example credentials file:

Verify Email Address for SES
In order to send any email you must add & verify at least one email address to which you have access.  The verification is a two-step process.  First run the command: ses-verify-email-address.pl -k creds.txt -v test@powercram.com.  Amazon will send an email to that address with a link to click to finalize verification.

NOTE: Until you are granted production access to Amazon Simple Email Service you can only send to verified addresses. Click to Request for Production Access to Simple Email Service.  They say it may take up to 24 hours, but my access request was granted in about 30 minutes – now I can send to any address!


View List of Verified SES Addresses
By running the command ses-verify-email-address.pl -k creds.txt -l you are supposed to be able to view a list of verified addresses, however when I run this nothing is returned.  I did discover though that using the --verbose switch, ses-verify-email-address.pl -k creds.txt -l --verbose, I am able to view a list of verified addresses:

<listverifiedemailaddressesresponse xmlns="http://ses.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-12</p><p>01/">
 </listverifiedemailaddressesresponse>
<listverifiedemailaddressesresult></listverifiedemailaddressesresult>
    <verifiedemailaddresses></verifiedemailaddresses>
      <member>test@powercram.com</member>
 <responsemetadata></responsemetadata>



Send Email With SES
Finally we are ready to send email using the command ses-send-email.pl -k creds.txt -s "Test One" -f test@powercram.com test@powercram.com.  Press Enter then you can type the body of your message.  When that’s done press CTRL+Z, then Enter.  It will hesitate for a second or two while your credentials, etc. are verified and the message is queued.  Finally, check your email.

Summary
Amazon Simple Email Service looks to be a very useful tool and is a great addition to Amazon Web Services.  In just a few minutes you can be sending email through SES, and it can be adapted for myriad purposes.  Get started today and start emailing (useful messages – NO SPAM or other crap!).

Additional Info

• SES Getting Started Guide
• Amazon Simple Email Service Developer Resources, which includes details about the service and info for each command.

This is how snow should be plowed!

Dude Builds Snow Plowing Robot – Watch more

Grep for Windows 7, Windows 2008, etc.

Grep searches one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. By default, grep prints the matching lines.

The general synopsis of the grep command line is

grep options pattern input_file_names

Grep for Windows examples

Download GNUWin32 Grep.

Does Facebook really have more than 500 million “active” users?

According to data from digital-legacy planning firm Entrustet, a big portion of these users will soon no longer be considered “active,” by any reasonable measure. The company compared Facebook usership data with average death rates from the Center for Disease Control, and discovered that this year, around 480,000 Facebook users may pass away in the U.S., and 1.78 million worldwide. These figures are only likely to grow year to year, especially as Facebook expands pass the 600 million user mark.

So many profiles now fall out of the range of an “active” user. Beyond the deceased, there are endless duplicate accounts–Entrustet found that 150% of 20- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. are on Facebook–not exactly a plausible tally. What’s more, a recent Gartner report estimated that in the coming years, roughly one in every ten of your friends on Facebook and other social networks will be nonhuman, meaning they’ll be “social bots,” automated profiles created by brands and organizations to engage consumers.

Read entire article.

While there are thousands of Firefox add-ons there are a few I can’t live without; in fact, I install most of these on almost every computer I touch.

• Video DownloadHelper – DownloadHelper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites.  Very useful for downloading videos from YouTube or other video sites.
• Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2 – ElasticFox is a Mozilla Firefox extension for managing your Amazon EC2 account. Launch new instances, mount Elastic Block Storage volumes, map Elastic IP addresses, and more. NOTE: Elasticfox is no longer officially supported by Amazon.  But, thanks to Genki Sugawara Elasticfox-ec2tag lives on and is actively developed.
• New Tab Homepage – A very simple tabbed browsing extension that loads your homepage when you open a new tab. If you have multiple homepages, the first is chosen.
• Session Manager – Session Manager saves and restores the state of all windows – either when you want it or automatically at startup and after crashes. It can also automatically save the state of open windows individually.
• Tree Style Tab – This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. New tabs opened from links (or etc.) are automatically attached to the current tab.
• Web Developer – The Web Developer extension adds various web developer tools to a browser.

Honorable mentions.  These are other great Firefox add-ons.

• Firesheep – A Firefox extension that demonstrates HTTP session hijacking attacks.
• Live HTTP Headers – View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
• MeasureIt – Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.
• Tab Slideshow – Cycles through tabs as a slideshow.
• Sothink Web Video Downloader for Firefox – A simple, clean and easy-to-use FREE Firefox extension for video download and Flash download. Supports Windows/Mac/Linux operating systems and the latest Mozilla Firefox 3.
• User Agent Switcher – The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of a browser.

I’m on a quest to remove crapware from my Droid X, and while I haven’t figured it out exactly yet I wanted to post a little more information about programs like City ID.

See How To Remove City ID (and other crapware like Blockbuster, Skype and VZ Navigator) From Droid X (and other Android phones) for detailed instructions.

City ID is a product of Cequint, Inc., who have partnered with Verizon to cram it down our throats; along with other (cr)app that can’t be removed.  Just search for “remove city id” or “uninstall city id” and you’ll find millions of results – most of which are people (just like me) complaining about this crapware.  I especially liked this one, “How to remove City ID ???” on the Verizon Wireless community portal in which users are ripping Verizon, and all they had to say was, “Unfortunately you can not remove any of the apps pre-installed on your device. I apologize for the inconvenience. Hope this is helpful!”

No, it’s not helpful you dumb ass!  I want to be able to remove this crap from my phone!  And so do a lot of other people – just Google it.  I can’t imagine that any company would want this kind of negative publicity/feedback.  Just in case they aren’t aware I will be contacting each of the persons listed below at Cequint to let them know of my displeasure about this situation.  And, I certainly hope they have decided this isn’t worth the outrage and they won’t continue their agreement with Verizon.

Since it seems these thousands of complaints are falling on deaf ears at Verizon I’m going to contact principles at companies like Cequint, Inc.  I found this list of corporate officers from the Washington secretary of state:

Cequint, Inc. Governing Persons

• Rick Hennessey, President
• Robert Hart, Chairman
• Scott Weller, Vice President
• Mark Gosselin, Vice President
• John Carleton, Director
• Nimesh Patel, Director
• Scott Frodle, Secretary

It appears that in September of 2010 Cequint was acquired by Transaction Network Services.  Looks like I’ll be contacting them too. . .

Open letter to Rick Hennessey, President of Cequint, Inc., the company that produced City ID and partnered with Verizon to cram it down my throat:

Dear Mr. Hennessey,

Several months ago I purchased a Motorola Droid X on the Verizon network.  All in all it’s been a great phone and I’m very happy with it.  However, I am very displeased with the fact that a number of (cr)apps bundled with the phone cannot be removed one of which, City ID, is from your company.

I sincerely hope this tactic of forcing junkware on mobile phones that cannot easily be uninstalled is backfiring for you.  I for one will never use a product produced by your company or your parent company.  I will also spread the word to anyone who will listen not to use products from your company.  In fact, this message has been posted to my blog which receives a significant amount of traffic.

I’m sure you are aware that this tactic is not very popular.  A simple Internet search of “uninstall city id,” or “remove city id” produces thousands of results, most of which are asking how to remove this and other unwanted programs, and complaining about how it got there and that it cannot be removed. 

I have filed a complaint with the FCC naming your company and Verizon as purveyors of junk who use unethical tactics to force unwanted applications on users of Verizon phones which cannot be removed by me, the owner of the phone.  If negative publicity doesn’t get your attention hopefully the FCC will pursue this on my behalf. 

I certainly hope you consider this feedback and cease strong-arm tactics like this. 

Sincerely,

Someone who will NEVER be your customer! 

I sent the above message to the four published Cequint email addresses (above) with the subject, “Please forward to Rick Hennessey and any other exec who cares about your company image.”  I’ll post any responses here.

Not long after Droid X came out last summer I got one, breaking a years-long relationship with Blackberry.  For the most part I’ve been pretty happy (other than a few things about which I’ve written: WTF Verizon?  Droid X Punishment, Android (Droid X) Kills SonicWall TZ210, Things I Hate About My Droid X (Android), Blockbuster Android (cr)App, and Quest to Remove Droid Crapware).

See How To Remove City ID (and other crapware like Blockbuster, Skype and VZ Navigator) From Droid X (and other Android phones) for detailed instructions.

The second best thing a woman can put in her mouth to avoid pregnancy. . .