Archive for the ‘Applications’ Category

Spanning Sync public beta

February 1st, 2007

I posted about a new application called Spanning Sync that will enable Mac users to synchronise their calendars in iCal with Google Calendar a little while ago. Well, the public beta was released just a few days ago and then promptly closed because of a tremendous spike in traffic. According to the blog:

I hate to do this, but we’ve closed the public beta temporarily until we can upgrade our hardware to handle the load. If you were one of the thousands of people who used Spanning Sync in the last few hours, you’ll still be able to sync. But if you haven’t yet used the system, I’m going to have to ask you to wait just a bit longer.

We’re thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

This application is gold for people like me who have most of their calendars on Google Calendar and rely on calendar subscriptions in iCal to keep up to date. The problem is that subscribing to calendars in Google Calendar gives you a locked calendar in iCal. You can’t edit it in iCal and you don’t have event notifications. In fact I noticed that I only receive event notifications from Google Calendar for my primary calendar and not the others that I created (I have a calendar for each major activity so I can properly allocate my events and turn whole categories of events off if I am no longer involved in them).

Hopefully the public beta will open again very soon. I am pretty excited about this product. There is a screencast here which shows what you can do with Spanning Sync. It is very easy to use and does exactly what I need it to do. I would like to see the synchronisation happening in iSync so there is one place to go to synchronise everything. On the other hand, Spanning Sync allows for regular and automatic synchronisations so there probably isn’t a really big need for integration into iSync.

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Tutorials | Comments (3)

Windows Vista launches to the sound of one hand clapping

January 31st, 2007

Microsoft’s long awaited operating system, Windows Vista, launched yesterday to a lukewarm reception. Vista’s slogan is "The ‘Wow’ starts now" and yet it failed to thrill consumers. Niall Kennedy remarked that there were no queues of people waiting to be the first to buy Vista when it launched in San Francisco. Vista comes in five/six/eight (it is a little confusing) editions which include:

There is a handy comparison chart here to help you decide which one may be the right one for you. Once you have decided you can head out to your favourite software dealer and buy it or you can buy it online and download it. I am not sure which downloads are available here in South Africa but this is a pretty nifty feature.

Vista has come under a little criticism for being a rip off of Apple’s Mac OS X (Apple delayed the launch of its new operating system, Leopard, until after Vista launched just in case Microsoft made a few quick changes to copy what may be more advanced features in Leopard - we’ll reserve judgment on that one till Leopard appears). Here is a pretty entertaining comparison of some of the features in Vista and existing features in Mac OS X:

One of the big criticisms that had been made about Windows operating systems is that they are insecure and expose users to constant attack. This is due, in part, to the prevalence of Windows and also due to the way Windows has been built in the past. I understand (and I am sure many of you know the details) that Vista is more secure because its file system has some sort of shifting capability. The references to key files and settings changes from installation to installation and this makes it difficult for attackers to lock on to key aspects of the operating system.

One disadvantage with Vista is that you may need a more powerful computer to run Vista, let alone its more advanced features. There is a tool that you can use to check whether your PC will support the version of Vista you want. You will probably need to be running Internet Explorer 7 when you run the tool though.

For my part I don’t know if I am going to upgrade my PC to Vista. I don’t think the 3 year old machine will handle it. My personal machine is my Apple PowerBook and I may look at installing Vista when I finally upgrade to an Intel-based Mac to run some of the few Windows applications I still have.

Have you bought Vista? What do you think of it compared to Windows XP or even Mac OS X?

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Events | Comments (3)

Lessons learnt from an installation

January 30th, 2007

I have just completed a manual installation of drupal 5 on my personal server. I decided to blog about it as I went through the process - as my own personal mission - with the aim of providing some guidelines to anyone else wanting to manually install drupal themselves.

i am a geek on a mission[1]. mission drupal 5 to be exact.

the tactic:

  • read INSTALL.txt word for word.
  • try to understand it.
  • you will do well young one.

the frontline operation:

  • download, extract, and copy the resultant drupal 5 folder into a directory within your root directory. check - using ftp program.
  • create the drupal database. umm. where? how? oh… i finally found it on cpanel’s MySQL account maintenance, no need to delve into phpMyAdmin.
  • create the drupal user. check - easy once you know where to look, similar to creating the db.
  • link the user to the db. check! now the db configuration looks like the configurations for the other db’s i already have installed.
  • run the install script. install script? i must run it? but when i point to the folder it doesn’t do anything. it gives me an access denied. *help* go back to the beginning…

    • “move the contents of the directory”. hmm. maybe i shouldn’t have moved the whole directory, but only it’s contents.
    • ha! it works! but now to give access to the settings.php file. also helps if you take note of the location of the settings file ;)
    • voila! see how it runs!
    • remember to restore the access permissions on the settings.php file
  • configure drupal. *tears fill my eyes*… it worked! i can see the config screen.

the outcome:

  • i win!
  • drupal 5’s so pretty!


[1]actually, the use of the word geek when referring to me is very liberal. considering i haven’t done much *real* programming in yonks… i am an enthusiast…

Tags: drupal, , , victoire

Posted in Applications, Infrastructure, Tools, Tutorials | Comments (2)

Lessons learned from a migration

January 24th, 2007

Ok, I managed to sort out the fuglies in the blog posts with a lot of help from Mladen over at Wizardworx. A couple important lessons came out of this migration. The first obvious lesson is to make sure you have the right backups before you make the move. We had a mySQL backup (I must just thank Chris Dawson and Andrew Glanville for their suggestions) which the WordPress Backup plugin generated. When we imported this we had a lot of "?" scattered in the text of the posts. I don’t think that is the best solution although I do recommend you install the plugin for emergencies. It turned out that the backup I downloaded from the cpanel on the old site worked far better and this is the version you now see on the site.

Another solution is to use WordPress 2.1’s export function to export your posts in xml. You can then easily import this into a new WordPress installation. Just make sure you keep a backup of your WordPress installation files (especially your wp-content directory which holds your themes and probably your uploads too). A mySQL backup should preserve most of your settings and formatting (sidebars and users, for example) but it won’t necessarily carry across your uploads (the developers in our audience will be able to tell you definitively) so just watch that.

Anyway, we are back up now. Our apologies for the inconvenience and for the lack of new content the last few days (difficult to add new content it we are going to overwrite it anyway).

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Infrastructure | Comments (0)

WordPress 2.1

January 22nd, 2007

The next major release of WordPress is version 2.1 and it should be available for download a little later today. The new release includes better support for images and an auto-save feature for draft posts. There may be some plugin compatability issues initially and you can find out which plugins are compatible here. For more information on what is new in WordPress 2.1, take a look at this post on Technosailor.

(Via Vecosys)

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Blogging | Comments (0)

Secure Gmail on public wifi networks

January 22nd, 2007

Here is an interesting tip. If you want to secure your Gmail access while you are on a public wifi network you can do that by using https in your address field when you type in www.gmail.com.

So instead of using the URL http://www.gmail.com, you use https://www.gmail.com and that apparently invokes SSL and encrypts your session. Take a look at this post on Lifehacker if you are looking for a little more encryption for your Gmail.

(via Lifehacker)

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Useful stuff | Comments (0)

Google Patent Search

January 21st, 2007

Google has launched a patent search engine.

Google Patent Search now allows you to search the US Patent Office and will presumably expand in time to include other patent offices. Running a search is pretty easy but actually finding what you are looking for requires you to use pretty specific search terms to avoid a multitude of irrelevant search results. Fortunately the advanced search page gives you a number of options to help refine your search including patent number, title, assignee and dates the patent application was filed.

I ran a search for the iPhone and this result was the first one:

Google Patent Search apparently uses the same basic software as Google Book Search so you can browse the pages and zoom in on the illustrations.

(via Vecosys)

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Applications | Comments (0)

How to avoid a bad breakup

January 20th, 2007

I have been with her for just over a year. We hooked up in November 2005 and have been together, side by side, virtually every day, all day. I thought I treated her well, took care of her the way I should and yet it just wasn’t enough. Granted I dropped her about a week or so ago but I didn’t think it would end like this. This morning, my sexy little PowerBook’s hard drive conked in (it is a technical term). By the time I took her to Apple hospital I had learned a few important lessons and reinforced some earlier ones. They can be summed up with the following advice: backup often and as many times as you can!

So how do you protect your data from disaster and steer clear of the heavy drinking and/or deep depression that accompanies the realisation of just how much data has been lost or must be restored? I humbly offer the following from my own, very recent and painful experience.

Firstly, make sure your documents are backed up. This is old and good advice. I use an external drive which I back almost all my vital documents and settings files to every 2 days at around 2am. I think this is probably the longest you want to wait between backups if your documents change daily. After my baby comes back to me I am probably going to switch to daily backups. If you don’t have an external drive, backup to your iPod (with disk use enabled), USB drive or to DVDs/CDs. Just make sure you have some form of backup otherwise you will really be in a big pickle. Also make sure it works properly. An online solution have heard good things about is Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (run by Amazon Web Services). The rates are pretty low:

  • Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
  • $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

The features are pretty good too:

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

  • Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
  • Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
  • Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
  • Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
  • Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Another important lesson is to keep regular backups of your email, contacts and calendars. If you use services like Gmail and Google Calendar for your mail and diary, respectively, then you are covered there. But what about yur contacts? Well, Gmail has a contacts facility but you can’t really synchronise your contacts on Gmail with another service unless you use the import/export functions (not quite as good as automated synchronisations) so a service I use is Plaxo which has a free account. Plaxo enables you to keep in touch with other Plaxo users (as their information changes, those changes reflect in your address book) and also enables you to back your data up. Plaxo interfaces with Yahoo!, Aol Instant Messenger, Apple Address Book (via a synchronisation tool), Thunderbird and Outlook.

Don’t forget to keep copies of your original application installation disks and files together with the registration codes that you may need if you find yourself having to rebuild everything from scratch! Don’t forget all your office suite and operating system updates. If you downloaded them, keep them safe. It will save you a lot of download time.

Oh, one last thing. Insure your baby from the idiotic things you may do (and I have done). When faced with replacing all that data and the computer itself, the knowledge that it is insured makes a big difference.

It turns out my PowerBook can be repaired (the hard drive will probably need to be replaced) and she should be home next week. Till then, I am back on my PC and Google apps …

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Devices, Infrastructure, Tools | Comments (5)

Drupal 5 released

January 16th, 2007

The next major release of Drupal, version 5.0, has been released:

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal’s 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

Drupal powers sites across the web, ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, MTV and even sites for NASA.

There have been over 492 contributors to the Drupal 5.0 release submitting 1173 patches, which is 150 more people than our previous record with Drupal 4.7. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, a new Drupal core theme, a web-based installer, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

Drupal is a very powerful and flexible content management system which I have running the 3puppies media and which Victoire is also trying out. I have pretty much worked out how to add quite a bit of functionality to the core installation and yet I still feel like I have just scratched the surface. If you are looking for a well developed and open source platform for your site and love digging around in all the menus and other bits and pieces then this could be the platform for you (unless, of course, you have people who love doing that stuff for you).

There are two videocasts available if you are upgrading to Drupal 5 from Drupal 4.7 and if you are installing it on to your server. These videocasts were made by Lullabot, the development company that developed, among others, the TWiT and MTV UK sites. There is also an overview of the new features in Drupal 5.

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Applications, Infrastructure | Comments (1)

Synchronise Google Calendar with Outlook

January 14th, 2007

Web Worker Daily has a great tip for those of you who want to synchronise Google Calendar with Outlook. SyncMyCal is a solution for those of you who want to maintain copies of your calendars on both Google Calendar and on Outlook and be able to update either version and have both synchronised:

One of the disadvantages of Google Calendar is that it does not support two way synchronisation so you need tools like this one to be able to do that. So why would you want two way synchronisation? Well one reason is convenience. If you synchronise your mobile device with Outlook to ensure that you have a current version of your diary and address book in your device when you are away from your computer then have probably encountered many situations where you set up a meeting when you are out and about and record the details of the meeting in your device.

The only this that you want to have those meeting details recorded in Google Calendar because that is where you maintain your primary diary. This tool should enable you to do just that by first synchronising your device (with the new event information) with Outlook and then synchronising Outlook with Google Calendar.

SyncMyCal comes in two versions, SyncMyCal Lite and SyncMyCal Pro with the main difference being the date ranges that can be synchronised. The Lite version (free) only seems to synchronise a 7 day time period whereas the Pro version synchronises any date range and costs $25. According to the SyncMyCal blog, there are plans afoot to release Windows Mobile and Palm versions of the software.

There is also a solution for Mac users on its way. I spoke about this a little elsewhere. Spanning Sync looks like a pretty impressive option and I am looking forward to testing the public beta when it is made available.

Tags: , , ,

Posted in Applications, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (2)

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »