USPS AMS API anyone?

Has anybody worked with the USPS AMS API (Address Matching System
Application Programming Interface) before?

My objective is to verify addresses using the USPS DB and although
there are existing ruby libs for that I have two problems: I am not
directly shipping so contractually I cannot access the online API and
it is for commercial purposes so I cannot use/hack the online form. In
short, we have to pay for the bimonthly CDs with updates and access a
C based API.

So I am wondering, has anybody worked with this local API before?
Anybody interested in creating a Ruby API to access this data? If I
can’t find code already out there we could pay somebody to work on the
code and release it (after checking copyrights and all).

Thanks,