Month: January 2006

I’ve been experimenting with calendars much more than usual lately (this will probably be the first in a series of posts) and things are not working out as I’d like them to…

I’ve been using Mozilla Sunbird and it’s been working pretty darn good. I started with Sunbird long ago instead of Apple’s iCal because the systems I was running at the time were not running the version of Mac OS X needed to run iCal. Anyway, I’ve gotten used to Sunbird over the years, and I like it. (Plus, it’s open-source.)

My calendar is stored on my server and I subscribe to it using WebDAV. (I believe the webcal:// protocol is really just WebDAV, correct me if that is wrong.) So I use Sunbird to subscribe to my calendar and edit it, and read it, and it all seems to work ok.

Enter iCal. For reasons I’ll get into next time, I’m trying to use iCal. iCal can subscribe to my remote calendar, but can’t seem to make changes to it. Is this a limitation of iCal? Is my WebDAV server configured wrong? It works fine in Sunbird… Argh…

I then though I’d test creating a calendar in iCal and publishing it to my WebDAV server. That worked, but when I subscribed with Sunbird, and added an event, it got wiped out as soon as I reloaded the remote calendar, so it seems like Sunbird cannot write to the calendar that was published out from iCal. Does iCal hold the “master copy” and just publish out a new version to the WebDAV server each time? Argh…

So right now I’m not really using iCal for any editing or adding, just for reading, and I have to do this, and I’ll get into this next time, but for now, Sunbird does a good job of editing my remotely stored calendar, so I’ll keep using it.

One more note: I have no idea how .mac works. Does it do the right thing? I’m guessing you need to take the route of creating and publishing out a calendar from iCal, and then it all works seamlessly. Can you subscribe and edit with Sunbird or other apps? Question, questions…

(See also: Calendar Woes (Part 2))

So Apple thought that using the file extension ‘m4v’ would be a good idea, probably because they could then assign it to iTunes and video made for the iPod would ‘do the right thing’ in the eyes of Apple. Of course, there are a few problems…

On the Videoblogging list We sometimes see people who do things like just rename the ‘m4v’ to ‘mov’ and hope that will work. Often they do this because they assume they are making a QuickTime movie, or their server is sending the file as text/plain instead of video/mp4. (Don’t ge me started on the “QuickTime is a container format!” discussion…)

The fix? Well, you should be able to just rename the file extension from ‘m4v’ to ‘mp4’ but if you can add the mime-type to your server, you might as well just do that. I wonder if Apple has done anything in regards to making this mime-type issue known, maybe they could let those Apache folks know about it so they can roll it into the next version of mime.types…

Here is part of what I’ve got in my .htaccess file for video serving:

AddType video/mp4 .mp4 .m4v
AddType video/mpeg .mpeg .mpg
AddType video/quicktime .mov

Hopefully that will cover the bases for what I might be serving up.

As previously mentioned… We are still looking for a Linux Server Admin who wants a full time gig…

If you are one, or know one, get in touch with me…

Did you get any iTunes Gift Cards for the holidays? If so, remember that all that lovely music from the iTunes Music Store comes dipped in that nasty DRM coating. But fear not! You can remove that coating! Audio CD’s my friends… They are a good thing. Good for backup, good for removing the unwanted coating from your files.

Here’s the playlist I use to find anything that might come across as an AAC file with DRM. (Oddly enough, I’ve even seen a podcast or two fall into this playlist, which was very strange indeed!) You can also look at your Purchased Music playlist, but I was curious as to what else made it into my library with the DRM coating on it.

I’ve been amazed at how much more important playlists are to me now that there’s an iPod in the mix. (Yes, I’ve joined the iPod Army. I am one of you now. Hooray!)