Comments on: Google Voice push notifications for iPhone

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:16:32 +0000

According to the Google App Engine documentation there is now a cron feature. I am working on porting this to App Engine, however it appears there is no current stable way to interface with Google Voice, all of the python modules i have found for retrieving messages from the service have broken repeatedly when Google changes things.

Porting the existing python modules (googlevoicenotify, pygooglevoice) to app engine is not hard, but in my tests today none of them appear to work even as standalone scripts because of changes google has made since they were written.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:47:56 +0000

It is my understanding that App Engine is restricted to running code called by a remote request and not periodically like we’re doing here, however i have seen references to “cron” like functionality and background jobs in some documentation and forums, so maybe :)

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:24:17 +0000

i’ve been encountering some issues with defaultdict and pickling in python 2.4. i’ve come across a fix for the defaultdict, but do you know how to get around the following error? i’m running a virtual-python environment because i’m trying to run the script on a godaddy shared hosting server. it works, but only once and then throws the following:

-bash-3.2$ ~/bin/python ~/html/cgi/prowlgooglevoice.py
sleeping…
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/var/chroot/home/content/…/html/cgi/prowlgooglevoice.py”, line 66, in ?
gv.check()
File “/home/content/…/html/cgi/googlevoicenotify.py”, line 173, in check
pickle.dump(self.convo_threads, out_fl)
cPickle.PicklingError: Can’t pickle : attribute lookup googlevoicenotify.defaultdict failed

also, i was hoping to use your version of prowlgooglevoice.py in order to use it in the crontab, but that’s not working either. it looks like mikeyk has done some updating to his script. any chance you could modify your version as well?

thanks for the help!

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:27:30 +0000

Any plans on porting this to app engine? That way no server would be required, and we can even have a cron run every minute …

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:32:07 +0000

Make sure you have all the correct scripts in the directory, it may not be loading the classes or functions from the other prowl script(s)

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:47:35 +0000

I am receiving the following message when running the script:

Could not load ProwlListener…exiting.
You have new mail in /var/mail/xxx

Why won’t the listener start.
crontab -l displays:

# m h dom mon dow command
*/1 * * * * “python /Users/xxx/python-gv/prowlgooglevoice.py”

Any help is greatly appreciated.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:05:24 +0000

If you are on a shared host you may not be allowed to install packages, but you should contact the host and ask them if they can install those scripts for you.

By: jon

jon — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 04:55:38 +0000

thanks for putting together these great instructions! unfortunately, i can’t seem to get this script to run on my linux-based shared server hosted at godaddy.com. i keep getting a 500 internal server error message. in particular, i can’t figure out how to install the packages needed for these scripts onto the server itself. any ideas? Thanks!

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:49:28 +0000

Thanks for the update :)

By: Mike Krieger

Mike Krieger — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:33:49 +0000

Oops, too early in the morning to comment on a thread :)

What I meant was running it in Cron this way will re-auth with Google; running it normally in Python will save your cookies. In the future, running it with Cron should also save your cookies.

Also, the new version up at github.com/mikeyk/googlevoicenotify/ adds the ability to have the script ask you for your username/password interactively, rather than needing a credentials file.

Cheers,
Mike