Waves

Update: There seems to be some problem when the API is being accessed from my domain. Kindly try hosting the script in your own domains.

Hi friends, if you are in India and if you are developing software prototypes which has to send SMS alerts to various Indian mobile numbers, you needn’t spend a lot to buy SMS credits at the various sites. Over the last weekend, I spent some time hacking up a quick SOAP based web service which you can consume in your programs.

Please note that you need to create an account at www.way2sms.com before proceeding further.

How to Use – Method 1:

Currently the web service is active at http://www.aswinanand.com/sendsms.php. This accepts four parameters.

Parameter Name	Description
uid	This represents the 10 digit phone number with which you have to login at way2sms. Note: This web service may not work if you try logging in with email address.
pwd	Your way2sms password
phone	One or more phone numbers to which SMS has to be sent. Phone numbers should be separated by semicolon (;). E.g. 9812345678;9933445566
msg	Message that has to be sent.

The URL – http://www.aswinanand.com/sendsms.php – can be invoked with the parameters as follows:

http://www.aswinanand.com/sendsms.php?uid=9933445566&pwd=password&phone= 9812345678;9933445566&msg=Hello+World

You can also do a HTTP POST to the same URL to send the SMS. Here’s an example:

<form method=”post” action=”http://www.aswinanand.com/sendsms.php“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”uid” value=”9933445566″ />
<input type=”hidden” name=”pwd” value=”password” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”phone” value=”9812345678;9933445566″ />
<input type=”hidden” name=”msg” value=”Hello World” />
<input type=”submit” value=”Send SMS” />
</form>

How to Use – Method 2:

The functionality is also exposed as a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) WSDL (Web Service Description Language). WSDL can be accessed at http://www.aswinanand.com/sendsms.php?wsdl. To know more about how to use this WSDL in Microsoft Visual Studio, check out this article.

Deploying on your own Server:

To deploy this SMS script on your own server, first download the source code & follow the instructions:

1. Let us assume that you wish to run the service at http://www.example.com/sms/sendsms.php. Here, http://www.example.com/ is your domain, “sms” is the folder and “sendsms.php” is the PHP script in that folder.
2. Hence, using FTP or SSH, login to your domain hosting space and create a folder named “sms”.
3. Extract the source code to the “sms” folder. If you don’t want to expose a SOAP WSDL, feel free to skip to step 6.
4. Since the SMS source code supports SOAP, you have to download the ‘nusoap’ library. Then extract the ‘nusoap’ library to the same “sms” folder.
5. Once everything is extracted, the folder structure should be:
   • example.com
     • sms/
       • sendsms.php
       • htmlparser.inc (optional)
       • nusoap/
         • class.nusoap_base.php
         • class.soap_transport_http.php
         • class.wsdlcache.php
         • class.soap_fault.php
         • class.soap_val.php
         • class.xmlschema.php
         • class.soap_parser.php
         • class.soapclient.php
         • class.soap_server.php
         • class.wsdl.php
         • nusoapmime.php
         • nusoap.php
6. Try accessing your web service at http://www.example.com/sms/sendsms.php now.

http://www.example.com/sms/sendsms.php?uid=9933445566&pwd=password&phone= 9812345678;9933445566&msg=Hello+World

or you can also do a HTTP POST as indicated above.

License Information:

The source code is licensed under “Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial”. Downloading the file(s) mean that you have agreed license terms.

Download:

Download the PHP source code here.

Other Languages:

Currently this SMS web service is available in the following programming languages:

• Java JAR Library

Hey guys! I discovered two feed proxies.

1. http://www.netvibes.com/proxy/feedProxy.php?test=1&url=__FEED_URL__
2. http://my.live.com/cfw/news.aspx?fetchurl=__FEED_URL__

Replace the __FEED_URL__ with the feed URL of your choice. Of the two feed proxies above, I like Netvibe’s proxy as the best because of the following reasons:

1. Feed output is JSON. This means that, netvibes has done all the necessary work to convert feeds of any type (RSS, ATOM, RDF etc.) into JSON.
2. If you are writing a script to examine feeds from various sites, you have only one data structure to deal with
3. Almost all programming languages support JSON. Refer to www.json.org for JSON libraries available for various programming languages.
4. JSON by itself is very lightweight and eliminates most of the overhead of XML, thereby preserving bandwidth.
5. A simple program in VB.NET to parse a JSON structure and get the required feed data in a Dictionary datatype is only about 9 lines of code. In Ruby, it will be even lesser. Compare the same with XML output. Even though feed parsers are available, you have to create your own wrapper above everything to get everything to work out properly. Reuse what you already have (DRY Principle). Netvibes has already done the bull work to convert all kinds of feeds into a common format.
6. Best of all, no authentication is necessary to access these links :D

Live.com’s feed proxy returns the actual feed output. So, if the feed you are referring to gives RSS output, this proxy returns that. The same happens with ATOM, RDF etc. Keep watching this space. I will update the post with other feed proxy URLs that I encounter. If you go across any, please mention them in the comments section.

 

Two things today:

Few days ago, I was searching for information on NTFS and found 2 amazing articles from the good old MSJ (Microsoft Systems Journal). The links are below. Do go through them when you find time. Even though the articles are old, they offer a wealth of information.

1. Windows NT 5.0 File System – http://www.microsoft.com/msj/1198/ntfs/ntfs.aspx
2. NTFS Change Journal – http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0999/journal/journal.aspx

There are lot more articles available. I will post the links as and when I read them. Nice stuff !

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As you already know, I have enabled keyboard shortcuts on my gmail account. Gmail actually shows you the list of available shortcuts right inside your mailbox, without us having to visit the keyboard shortcuts page. To access the list of keyboard shortcuts, you need to press “?” key, which is “Shift + /“. You will get the translucent black popup as shown in the below screenshot. You can press any key to close it.

Click the image to see a larger version.

After a long time, I have done a post on my tech blog. The post is about “sc.exe”

Read about it.