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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 am at IIT Delhi for the Hack U. It has been a fun event so far with some interesting discussions on hacks. Met with a bunch of students who are working on their PhD thesis and some of them were awesome. Let us see how the rest of the event goes.

My presentation from the event is on slideshare.

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



• Yahoo! Calendar supports Caldav. Upload the files to the calendar with the following command.



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>



• Voila, You are done.

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.

--

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.