We’ve received reports from some of our PingMe users who are also T-mobile customers that they’ve had difficulty receiving messages from PingMe on their T-mobile phone. Since none of us here at Zetetic is a T-Mobile customer there isn’t much more we can do beyond making sure that the outbound messages are actually being sent.

However, we have word from PingMe user Charles Eubanks that there is an account setting one must tweak in order to allow e-mail messages to be sent directly to your T-Mobile phone as SMS. We haven’t been able to verify this ourselves, but we’ve received a great walk-through description from Charles.

Just a quick explanation: PingMe uses your mobile provider’s e-mail-to-text gateway to send text messages to your mobile device. Not all carriers provide this option, some of them require you to enable or activate it, and some of the more nefarious ones will even charge you extra. However, for most folks it just works and it doesn’t cost any extra (beyond whatever you already pay to receive SMS messages).

That being said, this is the process for allowing email messages to be sent to your T-Mobile handset:

1. Go to the T-Mobile website and login (or register if you haven’t yet).
2. When the page loads, hover the pointer over the “My account” tab. One of the options will be “Send a text message.” Click on that.
3. On the right side of the resulting page is a box with the heading “Resources.” One of the options in that list is “Create e-mail filters.” Click on that.
4. On that page, there is an option labeled “Block all messages from E-Mail to handset.” Set this to “No.”

Once you’ve gotten that taken care of, you can create a new Mobile target in PingMe for your phone and start receiving and updating your reminders via text!

As I’ve written here before, we’re really big fans of the efficiency and simplicity of command lines here at Zetetic. We actively use them at points in the PingMe and Tempo are considering expanding our use of them, in particular to include Graphical Keyboard User Interfaces.

So, some interesting reading:

• Mozilla UI designer Alex Faaborg on the GKUI
• Introductory article on Mozilla’s Ubiquity project
• Don Norman’s article on the return of the CLI for the ACM
• Aza Raskin’s (Humanized.com / Enso developer) blog post on the return of the CLI

ANYTHING is possible in PL/SQL.

We need to make an adjustment to how Tempo handles tags in order to squash a bug that keeps popping up on some users. Basically, we’re only going to allow tags to contain letters, numbers, hyphen and underscore. Any other characters (like parentheses, +, and *) will be converted to underscores automatically.

If you enter sys+admin as one of your tags you will get sys_admin instead, which we think isn’t so bad, really. This change will be going into production tonight.

While I’m waiting for my Windows VM to reboot, just figured I’d mention that Oracle’s free tool SQL Developer totally rocks. And it supports MySQL for you geeks out there (POSTGRES 4EVA!!!!!)

It makes coding and testing complex PL/SQL fairly painless. It’s built on Java and runs on Mac OS X beautifully.