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I am not a mac fan boy. For that matter, I am not a gadget freak. I have been using a Mac for a couple of years. I very recently started using an iPod and an iPad, all thanks to Yahoo! And I am amazingly impressed by both the devices. I am sure both these devices are going to change the way I look at gadgets.
May be that is why, when I woke up this morning to the news of Steve Jobs death, I felt as if someone close to me has died. Even after all the fun we had today, somewhere in the bottom of my heart, that sorrow feeling lingers on.
RIP Steve Jobs. You have changed the way people will look at gadgets.
I use Yahoo! Calendar to keep track of my calendar events. I sync to it from Lightning/Thunderbird and iCal. And use the iSync plugin to sync it to my phone. I also use mutt over a screen session at times. During such times, this is how I update my events to Yahoo! Calendar.
- Save the text/calendar attachment from the mail to a file, say cal.ics
- Determine the UUID of the calendar event. Not the best, but one that works is given beow.
perl -n0e 's/(.*?)UID:(.*?)\w+?:(.*)/\2/gms; s/\s+//gms;print ' tmp/ical.ics
curl -i -k --data-binary '@tmp/ical.ics' -H "Content-Type: text/calendar" -X PUT \
https://caldav.calendar.yahoo.com/dav/<yid>/Calendar/<calendarname>/<uid>.ics \
-u <yid>:<password>
And here is how, I discovered this. Enable debugging in iCal, with these commands and then start iCal from a terminal. You can see the HTTP transactions between iCal and the calendar server.
defaults write com.apple.ical IncludeDebugMenu YES defaults write com.apple.ical LogHTTPActivity YES
Last week, I ran out of space on Mac. I had less than a gig left and the system started complaining that my boot disk needs cleanup. I did not know where to start the cleanup from and was looking for something similar to the Disk Usage Analyzer for Ubuntu. My search led me to Disk Inventory X and this has made my life easier.
Some of the significant points of the tool
- Displays disk usage based on directory and kind.
- Displays the size as a treemap.
- Ability to filter files based on kinds. This feature came in really handy when I sorted by name per kind, resulting in easily identifying duplicates.
The only gripe I have is that, when I delete a file from the window, it takes a while. This is probably because, the tool apart from deleting the file, also recompiles the size, location, etc.
Give it a spin, if you run out of disk space.
I have a convoluted synchronization setup.
- I use Thunderbird as my primary mail client.
- Lightning is my calendar application and is configured to synchronize with Yahoo! Calendar.
- I also have iCal synchronized with Yahoo! Calendar.
- Finally using Nokia's iSync plugin, I synchronize my calendar to my Nokia E75 phone.
- Also at times, I synchronize my phone with Ovi.com and with Nokia Ovi PC suite.
A few weeks back when I was upgrading the phone firmware, the calendar synchronization broke. I got this error message.
[Y man] There was an error getting data from the phone. The synchronization may have been canceled on the phone.
Device “Y man” synchronization failed.
This seems to be a common problem but nobody seems to have found a working solution. I tried to locate the calendar database on the phone to see if deleting it would help. But could not locate the same. Was contemplating a hard reset and restore from backup when I accidentally discovered a working solution.
Calander -> Select Any date -> Options -> Delete -> Before Date. This cleans up the calendar. A synchronization after this worked. Now you know what do when your calendar sync screws up.
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I'd love to go out with you, but I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian.
I discovered Vimperator about 3 months ago and I fell in love with it. Browsing with Firefox suddenly became so powerful and efficient. But a couple of days back, the status bar disappeared. Without the status bar, I felt crippled. Tried reading the help pages, asked around for tips, updated the extension, downgraded and what not? Nothing helped. Unfortunately, search did not help too. And finally I stumbled upon this tip in the mailing list. The status bar was disabled from the menu. How dumb? Interestingly, more than one person had faced the same problem but none had a solution. Looks like the mailing list is not archived and that is the reason why search did not help. Let us hope this blog post shows up soon in the indexes.
I have been spending most of the day upgrading my laptop from Gutsy to Hardy. When I logged into my blog today, I saw an announcement about MT4.2 and MT4.2 Pro. I have been planning an upgrade for months and I thought why not today. So after about 30 minutes of fiddling with perl modules, this post comes from MT 4.2. :-)
I received a Mac at office a couple of days ago. I have been trying to come in terms with this now. This is a huge cultural shock. Things that I have believed to work the way I know for a long time has changed completely. Need to learn a whole lot of new shortcuts.
If you have any tips and tricks, let me know.
The biggest question is should I swap caps with control or command key? My thumb hurts badly :-(
This is a test post via ScribeFire. Every since I moved my blog to MovableType, I never tried any client side blogging tool. I have been happy using the native editor. Let me see how long does this tryst with ScribeFire continues.
Here is an excellent firefox trip via Jeremy who got it via Andrei.
you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:
user_pref("editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines", 3);
to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.
Setting that value to 2 converts the newlines into spaces. Extremly useful.
OS - Windows 2000. Can anyone explain?TCP 0.0.0.0:49201 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING TCP 0.0.0.0:49201 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING TCP 0.0.0.0:49203 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING
I was breaking my head for a couple of hours trying all possibilities till I discovered this cool link.
This is the third time I am saying this today. "There are always workarounds!" :-)
After months of struggle, I have got Vmware workstation up and running. All I needed to do was to read the documentation with a cool head. I have a dual boot Windows XP and FC2. I can now boot FC2 as guest OS under Windows XP. A bit slow but is cool. You can see a screenshot of X-Chat and Ayttm running under Gnome on FC2. Am not sure what I am going to do with this now. It will be great if I get a license for a Linux host.
uptime
06:44PM up 6487 days, 18:33, 3 users, load average: 282.86, 293.57, 212.82
Processor Type: PowerPC_604e Number Of Processors: 1 Processor Clock Speed: 375 MHz CPU Type: 32-bit Kernel Type: 32-bit Memory Size: 1024 MB Good Memory Size: 1024 MB Firmware Version: IBM,TCP02007
WTF? This machine is screwed up. I cant believe that a machine can run without a power recycle for 17 years. And the machine seems to be a recent one.
From one of those forwards:
Slow but Happy
It's the 1970s, and this pilot fish writes the first online application for his company's mainframe. It's blazingly fast, but boss tells fish, "Put a loop in that does nothing 10,000 times before displaying the response screen." Why slow it down? fish asks. "Because as more applications go online, response time will get longer and longer, and the users will get more and more irritated," his boss tells him. "This way, we can just decrease the number of times the empty loop executes, keep response time constant and keep the users happy."
# uptime
4:11pm up 312 day(s), 23:06, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.02
# uptime
4:12pm up 312 day(s), 23:07, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.02
Am unable to figure out a way to send plain text calendar invites using Outlook 2003. Is there an option?
Only on one server, ssh public key authorisation was failing. Its been like this for months together and I could never figure out the issue, until I saw this today.
ls *keys*
authriozed_keys
Do you use MS Outlook 2003 and hate those fancy coloured html / rich text mails. If you want to convert them to plain text automagically, enable this option.
Tools -> Options -> Email Options
and Select "Read all standard mail in plain text".
PS: Don't spam me with comments asking why Outlook? One of those corporate nuances.
Copy + Pasting to save a few keyboard tapes types sometimes could be disastrous. I have changed it before someone pointing out. Hopefully no-one ever noticed.
I bumped into this make shift IBM road side showroom yesterday. Was baffled to see the pamphlet. He had two ThinkCentre Models with Red Hat Linux as the OS. Any guesses for the third? DOS. Unfortunately the chap was unable to tell which version of DOS and asked me to contact his boss. Click on the pic.
