Making your webapp react to emails with Lamson, pt 2

This is part 2 in a series, here is part 1.

In the last section, you should have got Zed Shaw’s LamsonProject running successfully through its unit tests.

Now I’ll show you how to make what maybe the *simplest* application with Lamson that you’ll ever see. All our application is going to do is:

1. Receive emails with Lamson.
2. Pull the content from the body and subject lines using python.
3. Send the data to Google Calendar to be turned into a calendar entry using the quickAdd call, again using python.

Because Lamson is built to interact easily with Python code, this is snap.

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Making your webapp react to emails with Lamson, pt 1

(quick install instructions)

If you’re a web programmer … and if you’re not, why are you reading this? … at some point you’ve wished you could integrate email into your webapp.  Now, by integrate, I don’t mean sending emails … that’s trivial.  Any language you can think of, there’s a library that will let you fire off all the html gibberish that fills your little hearts with joy.

The challenge comes when the little light goes off in your head and you think, “How hard could it be to have my app react to incoming email?”  Maybe you’d like people to make forum posts by email, or create mailing lists ( listserv ) dynamically.

The answer used to be hard … very hard.  A nightmarish mishmash of postfix, dovecot, procmail, pipes, and the odd custom script would get you something that might, maybe, let you fire off a script when a new email came in.  Actually passing email data to your app? Forget it.  And after all that, most people would rightly wash their hands of it and say ‘let’s just poll the mail server periodically’ … ick.

Why can’t I just convert emails to HTTP POST’s sent to an endpoint on my webapp?  Oh … wait, I can, thanks to Zed Shaw’s LamsonProject.

But first, before going to the trouble of setting LamsonProject up, please be aware that there exist several semi-respectable SAAS companies trying to do this for you:

• SendGrid Parse API : Email to POST.  I’ve never heard anything bad about SendGrid ( a fair amount of good stuff ) but the it is a sideline to their main business of outsourcing your SMTP server for you.
• Email Yak : Email to XML, Email to JSON, Email to POST.  In private beta.  Don’t confuse with yak mail or yak messenger.
• Cloudmailin : Email to POST … “just like a webhook”.  In beta.

Honestly, if I had two nickels to rub together I’d probably use SendGrid, but I don’t … so here we are.  On with the show!

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Innocentive: On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog

… or an undergrad:

In a previous post, I mentioned Innocentive (wikipedia), a company that posts industrial science challenges with cash rewards for a solution.  As full disclosure, I have previously had a solution bought by Innocentive, so I am a fan boy. To put it another way, it allows anyone with the skills, degree or no, to sell good ideas for thousands of dollars and maybe do some good in the process.  Not a lot of good probably, but in the industrial chemistry world that’s maybe a better outcome than average.

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Innocentive and the Oil Spill: Don’t chase ambulances

Innocentive, for those of you who don’t know, is a company/community where science types can go to get cash awards for solving problems in science.  Innocentive likes to call this the ‘open sourcing of science’ which makes for good PR, but a closer description might be ‘outsourcing the R&D dept.’  As full disclosure, I’ve been a member of the community for several years and have received $10K for my chemistry solutions posted there … I think on balance it’s a great idea executed well.

But the trouble is, they believe their own PR and the write-ups they’ve received in the press (see list below).  Several weeks ago Innocentive created a project to collect ‘emergency response’ ideas to deal with the oil spill.  Not surprisingly, Innocentive received around a thousand and counting proposed solutions.  What they did next is surprising … they dropped all thousand ideas into the lap of BP.  Because more is always better, right?  A quick scenario to consider:

Your car engine is on fire and the only copy of your thesis is stuck inside.

A.  Your best friend comes up, details how to put the fire out and offers to help.

B.  An acquaintance comes up, lists 80 possible ways to put the fire out ( some involving things you don’t have on hand, some of which might not work ) and then asks why you aren’t using one of their ideas.

Innocentive is a great font of ideas, but it takes time to sort the wheat from the chaff, to convince companies that the new solutions might work, and to test.  Innocentive’s challenges usually last several weeks, starting from well defined and tractable problems.  After that is a testing phase that last months.  If they were working on a solution for the next oil spill, I’d applaud it as forward thinking.

If they have a working idea, put it out there … say to the media, “We’ve an idea we’ve tested and think is a great solution … but we don’t want to overburden the people out in the field who are trying their best.”  Complaining to the government that the engineers at BP aren’t taking you seriously, and then to the media (see email to Innocentive members) in the middle of a crisis when you know you can’t push a solution out the door fast enough just feels like chasing ambulances for the sake of PR.

I know everyone’s feelings are running hot about the spill, so please feel free to tell me where I’m wrong in the comments.  If people are interested, I’m also thinking about writing a more positive entry on Innocentive showing how it works well for undergrads.

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Nitrogen Triiodide: Just Don’t!

Inspired by a conflux of events: a post about demos in Mitch’s chemistry community, followed by a dangerous chemistry demo listed in About.com (below the jump), and ‘Things I won’t work with: FOOF’. I thought I’d mention a series of books near to my heart, full of exciting demos for any precocious high school student with an indulgent teacher or any teachers in the audience.

Bassam Shakhashiri’s Chemical Demonstrations : A Handbook for Teachers of Chemistry, along with vols. 2,3,4 are the absolute best demo books out there. Check them out on Google book’s preview, then buy, borrow, or steal them if you do demos.

However, there are provisos I would offer to a high school student.  For example, when using cent pieces for their copper content … don’t.  The newer (1981+) American cent coins have a zinc core.  Just grab some copper wire from a hardware store … it’s quite cheap.

All of this brings us to my point … Bassam includes in the book (never intending it for unsupervised student use) the recipe for nitrogen triiodide.

… stop …

Look down at your hands.  Pick your two least favorite fingers … now imagine them reduced to a chunky mist about 6 inches to the right of your body.  If you make nitrogen triiodide without knowing what the hell you are doing that image will become reality.  Ask one of its discoverers: Pierre Dulong ( who discovered NCl3, thanks for the kind note Ender!).

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A Chemistry Fraud Roundup

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, this post is trending high on Google searches for ‘chemistry fraud’.  I’d actually like to do a follow up on some of these cases, so if you’re interested in seeing that, have other cases you’d like listed, or know any of the participants, please contact me in the comments or at: chemistrystatistics AT gmail DOT com
- verpa , 10/20/2010

After reading about the IUCr scandal with some 70 structures invalidated followed by another one this month for another set, it got me thinking about the chemistry scandals that have come to light in the past few years.  It seems as though the number of massive frauds is increasing … or are they just getting becoming more public?  A quick review of some of the biggies ( only chemistry, mind you ):

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Getting started with VMD and NAMD

VMD and NAMD are two closely linked molecular dynamics tools from the UIUC Computational Biophysics Group.  As you can probably guess from the ‘Biophysics’ header, the emphasis for this suite is on large-scale macromolecular clusters such as proteins or even lipid bilayers, meaning CHARMM and force field models are the order of the day.

Despite the emphasis on biochemistry, there is an interesting tutorial on simulating water permeation through carbon nanotubes.  When I stumbled across that tutorial on the same day I saw a post about desalinization using carbon nanotubes, I thought ‘kismet!’.

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A bit of non-chemistry levity

After the continuing insanity of Amy Bishop as related by the media, I needed a bit of amusement.  For your … mostly my … enjoyment: ‘Crazy Water’ and ‘Flying Mules’.

Crazy Water:

Popular Science is *still* running an ad for a ‘High Bond Angle Water’ machine, which will restore your water’s puny 104 degree bond angle to a mighty 114 degrees.  With its natural vigor restored, your water will cure you of cancer and put oak in your penis, or so the ads assure me.  I won’t bother saying this is crazy, you already know that, and other people have said it better.  But, no joke, even the Yahoo Answers people all agree this is bat-shit crazy.  When people who are talking about how best to deal with a child’s imaginary gay boyfriend are 100% lined up to say that your idea is insane … it’s time to wonder just how far outside the mainstream you have gotten.

Flying Mules:

The New Yorker has a story this week describing how in 1942 the US Army attempted to have twelve mules deploy by parachute.  Six mules were actually ejected from the plane but did not survive the experience.  One can only assume the other six staged a forced takeover in the confusion and demanded to go someplace sunny with lots of hay … more power to them!

As I understand the US Army, you can’t do anything without checking with someone higher up first.  Certainly nothing involving aircraft, so at least two people had to have thought this had a non-zero chance of success.  Just imagine the mules showing up for paratrooper school … Well, I always tell my recruits that a mule could do this job better than them … what the hell.

Apparently the Brits figured out how to actually do this … the trick is to not strap a parachute to a mule!

I refuse to believe that story.

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Three Chemistry Sites for You

As another Friday rolls in, I find myself with too many interesting tidbits.  Would you care to relieve me of them?

Chemistry Tasks for the Computer Lab

The good geeks at Slashdot weigh in with their vast knowledge about all things chemical to help a high school chem. teacher decide to do with his kids.  For all the animosity that frequently appears between computer superusers and science, it’s quite good-natured  … if a bit clueless.  Still … imagine asking amature chemists what to teach in a computer class … you’d get equally hilarious answers.

Hearings on Alternate Energy Sources

An interesting post about the new opportunities in getting funding for alternative energy research.  Still, with a name like ARPA, it makes me think of DARPA.  With DARPA no idea is too alternative: Robotic exoskeleton battle suits, no problem! Sharks with lasers glued to their heads … well, we’ll toss that in the ‘maybe’s. Hopefully ARPA won’t be going in the same direction with ideas like this:  Harness the Power of Lightning.  I love Innocentive, but there are just so many problems with that idea.

Totally Synthetic

This one is in honor of an old Orgo. Prof. of mine getting back in touch.  It’s out of my league synthesis wise … where are the metals??? … but it’s interesting to see how the other half lives.  Who couldn’t love: Crambidine though it seems to have gotten them a bit riled up.  If nothing else, the sheer complexity reminds me why I go out of my way to avoid natural product synthesis.

If, like me, you need an organic refresher course, don’t miss MIT’s OpenCourseWare for Organic Chemistry.

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Two Firefox bugs: xml 4k limit , fieldset blank page

Normally, we all agree that Firefox is the best thing ever.  Well, maybe not the best thing ever, but the best thing that won’t get you locked up or punched in the face by your significant other for suggesting.  That’s never happened to you?  Your loss…

However, a series of unfortunate events today brought to my attention two obscure bugs in Firefox:

• Firefox has a buffer limit with xml content nodes of 4096 characters.  After that, it magically splits what you are expecting to be one xmlNode into two or more.  Ben Dowling explains the whole thing better and in more detail.  The mozilla ticket is here.
• Firefox will cut off a fieldset that extends past the printing page’s boundaries.  This means that if you have a large / huge
  in a webpage, when you go to print it in Firefox, you will see one page of the fields then blank pages after.  The full mozilla bug description is
  here.
• If you’ve never done a search on the bugzilla.mozilla.org system, you should.  It will brighten your day.

Both of these bugs are several years old, and kind of striking.  I imagine the xmlNode issue is buried pretty deep in the logic engine of Firefox, but seriously a two-year old printing bug?  Says the guy who doesn’t own a printer … pseudo-outrage is awesome.

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