PiM Synchronisation

Holy crap it's been a while since a post. Watch the twitters instead...

I couldn't be bothered to think up a clever title, so I'm going with direct. I've had a thing about calendar, notes, todo's and address-book synchronisation for a while (a few years). I finally got round to trying out various solutions in the last few months, and lots and lots of google searching on various related phrases.

More recently, I have discovered (via a comment in a lugradio podcast by Aq) “ScheduleWorld”

. The web interface claims to be web2.0-ish, but is rather clunky and looks like it was developed more for the author than for everyone to use; but it works. The preferences are the hardest to read, but luckily once you have it configured correctly you don't really have to use them again unless you need to reset or do a full/slow synch again.

It took a while after creating the account and doing my first synch from my phone (which has built-in SyncML support handily) to sort out the setup - first off, I hadn't set the time zone which being in the UK is rather important to do as it assumes US otherwise (at least it looks like it as it managed to create duplicates 5hrs earlier of most things.. argh!). There are tools on the site to remove duplicates and if you have multiple address-books/calendars you most likely will want to spend some time checking them as they'll all end up copied to everything else, so you need to merge the fields if it doesn't already and remove all but the master copy.

One limitation at the moment is that it only stores 1 'note' per address-book contact, on my phone the first listed in the entry; so several of my contacts that have directions in notes and also special entries for the series-60 version of Metro to indicate which tube stop is nearest for it's routing feature, or other additional notes don't get fully synched; but it doesn't appear to lose the extra notes when you sync back again, once you've tidied up any initial dupes on the phone with only 1 entry.

It supports the following that I use:

• Thunderbird Address-book - they have an extension you can have sent to you by mail to make it easy to install (not quite as automatic as in firefox otherwise)
• Lightning -
• Evolution address-book/calendar - not tried the plugin yet, but it works with the general syncml-supporting one from what I read
• Nokia N95 8Gb - syncml's built in, some issues as mentioned above; but now faily happy. Don't get it stuck half-way through a synch, I had some weird stuff happening; and notes with ampersands in (&) got html-escaped and duplicated; awaiting reply in support forums
• Google Calendar/Contacts - calendar syncs fine now dupes are tidied; contacts used to be supported but not since google changed their API :-(

Now Opera have released 9.5 (which has quite a few improvements) I can use their Opera-Link service to synchronise my bookmarks (and other things - not sessions yet) between my mobile phone's opera-mini, and opera on all my desktops; very cool. I've discovered a nice easy way of continuing browsing a site when I get home after looking at it at work (albeit with loss of history) is to add it to a folder kept for that purpose in my bookmarks (ie. temporary sites); when I get home and start up opera, it synchs and there it is. Maybe I'll sort out an automatic session-save cron job and scp to my home PC at some point but only if it really becomes annoying otherwise.

Tags: synchronisation

Cloverfield leaf-elled

Ok, again, excuse the absolutely horrible and rather-stretched pun of a title (clover-leaf? levelled?... yeeeeeessss). I went to see Cloverfield for a movie's meetup via meetup.com - well actually it should have been Sweeney Todd, but they sold out just before I got to the kiosk. Others had booked in advance, and I almost did, doh! But anyway. The usual level of non-specific spoiler applies as per my other reviews (ie you won't find out anything more, in fact probably noticably less, than watching a TV-spot promotional for it).

The usual arc of introduce some characters, build involvement and viewer attachment, have them go through some kind of change, and tie things off, doesn't quite hold for this movie. It's only missing one part, and it's not the beginning. It leaves you rather suddenly; I'd been slightly prepared for it, and there were several moments where I wondered "is this it?", but if you like the typical hollywood ending and being predictable then perhaps this movie will leave you a little cold. But I think it's more a good thing than a bad thing. It's been compared to the Blair Witch Project, but only because it sports the same camera-style of jumping around and panning everywhere rather than cutting between characters. If that aspect of the Blair Witch really threw you in a bad way (or you threw up) then perhaps you should give this one a miss, at least until it's out on the small screen/DVD, where the effect is less noticable.

I enjoyed the movie, but I only rate it about 6.something/10, and I still want to go back and see the Todd with Johnny Depp (I'm becoming more a fan of his work the more I see, and I loved his Captain Jack Sparrow - but for that law about worse sequels, damnit, or at least blatantly stretching the monetisation of them).

Tags: cloverfield

Why Linux? Top Trumps

I know why I chose Linux and continue to run it as my O/S of choice on both my home and work PCs, but what about you?

I listen to the Lugradio podcast and over the last few episodes, they've had a "Top Trumps" of each of the presenters to examine which parts of the Linux world keep them devotees and how much they take part in/enjoy those aspects. This got me thinking about mine and wondering about friends' reasons ('cos most of my friends are geeks too and run/look-after Linux somewhere, even if only at work). The categories used were:

• Freedom-crusading
• Tinkering
• Underdog
• Communitisation
• Cheapness

As per the convention for Top Trumps, you score between 0 and 10 for each category. Myself?
I would have to rate 6 on freedom, 'cos I do strongly believe that open source and standards and protecting those rights when given is important, but I can't say I do anything towards it at the moment. I do however always make the effort to release the source code to anything I do in my own time that is fit for publishing, because whatever great idea I might have, there are other people more committed and talented and if they so wish (and have time), it'll always be a help to have access to the code when looking to extend or improve software and we all benefit.

I love tinkering, so that would have to be an 8 or so; it's only not a 9 due to the limited time I put into it nowadays.

Underdog? 3. It added some coolness 11-12years ago and made me keen to try it, but I don't support underdogs specifically, and I would be more happy if Linux became more mainstream; it would vindicate my belief in how good a system it had the potential to be originally.

Community - er... Incredibly useful, and I've spent time contributing to forums and answering posts by newbies and talking to developers even. Linux wouldn't be what it is today without the sense of community around it, and how friendly and helpful a lot of people are. If everyone disappeared or started bickering lots, I'd still be happy running my versions of everything for a fair while. When new technology came along and things start dropping behind too much, then I would have to consider other options (although it would take years of bad problems), but I would look back with a lot of fondness. So perhaps a score of 5?

Cheapness - 7. It's a big plus that it's free. When you can get all this cool code without a dime (just the tcp/ip connection, or in the old days even a disk in the post, thinking back to my Sinclair Spectrum days and demos/utils), it makes you wonder why you would ever pay Mr. Gates for considerably less stable and sometimes less powerful software. When you can support it yourself and don't need high-powered 3rd-party apps that only run on another O/S, can roll your own scripts to do the mundane tasks, and leave it running for years after MS Windows has needed a host of reboots and crashed more times than you care to count (well, pre Win2000 for sure), it just makes perfect sense.
I haven't upgraded the base of my main home PC in quite a few years (if you exclude the extra memory and newer graphics card and drives), so the cheapness ought to be high-ish. But I'm happy enough with how fast the latest Ubuntu runs on it.

You're welcome to submit your answers as comments, and I strongly recommend you go check out lugradio.org if this has been interesting and you haven't already heard their brand of wit, interviews, and comment on all that is the Linux and "free" world. Tags: [tagname]

Jumped the lights?

Oops!

Oops, three months since my last post. I've been twittering a lot though! In fact, I will put a twitter box on this page so it shows up-to-date stuff. What's twitter? According to their site (excuse the quote): "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!".

Tags: twitter

Fantastic Four: Silver Surfer

I was lucky enough to win tickets to the new Fantastic Four film premiere last week, and the show was tonight. So I got to see it 3 days before anyone else, and to experience a premiere from the inside out.

It's an odd feeling, walking down between the barriers instead of being the 'public' side of either of them. Cameras held out everywhere as you walk past Jessica Alba busy signing autographs and chatting to fans, mainly with a view of the back of her head. Seriously, the biggest sea of cameras I've seen in a while, all seemingly stuck a foot or two above heads and with people attached to them below all trying to get a good shot. I've been to one premiere before, for Evita back in 96/97, also in Leicester Square. That gave me an idea what to expect with the fans crowded round the entrance, but how things worked inside the cinema was a complete mystery.

They'd taken over the whole cinema as far as I could see, I presume the celebs had their own screen so they could be away from the public and not getting hassled; we were in screen 4. There weren't any trailers, and there was free popcorn and a bottle of water in every seat. It was at least a half-hour late for starting and we wondered if we should have waited outside for longer to see who would go past. But we did see Jessica and Chris (I think I got the right name?).

I don't remember seeing the first Fantastic Four movie, or if I did it was on DVD a while after it came out; it's been easy to confuse it with the X-men universe though. So what was the film like? You might have seen the trailers for it on TV, with the Silver Surfer dude looking very cool on his shiny surfboard.

I wasn't expecting much, after the first film got rather panned by critics, and with the general rule of sequels being worse; but from what my mate said, it was better than the first one. He also knew more about the non-movie history of the characters and had a few things to say about the differences, but most movies converted from comics or books always end up changing more than the keen fans would like, to fit it into the time or make it work in a much more dynamic visual medium, and to keep it simple enough for the common denominator general public to enjoy (which can be insulting sometimes if it's badly done).

So I wasn't expecting much, but I also didn't get much - in the way of character development or emotional draw, or surprises, so yes, it is basically a hollywood blockbuster with fancy effects, a cute girl, and heroes saving the world.
If I put my analyses hat on I could rip it apart without trying all that hard, artistically it does the job being a film with a story. Graphically, the special effects are pretty good and provide for some decent action scenes when the CGI's working hard, and it doesn't make itself obvious to you (unlike The Matrix 2/3). There's a cool ship, good use of scenery including the London Eye (they did a publicity stunt today involving sticking a model of the silver surfer to the middle of the Eye like he was flying through it), and it's got some fun moments in, but overall not one I'm going to bother purchasing or making effort to watch again.