RasterWeb!

Since I can’t leave well enough alone with this, I’m following up Calendaring: Still not there… with a post about events. I blame Aaron for this.

Sure, I could talk about Darwin Calendar Server, mention Calendar Swamp, or complain about http and WebDAV and CalDav and webcal in relation to calendars (I guess they are all somehow different…) But why bother? Aaron posted about upcalendar and he even released code.

Now, I’ve known Aaron for a long time, and I still read many of his posts and then re-read them, and then scratch my head and say “Huh?” As for his code, I try not to look at it. Anyway, from what I can decipher, upcalendar is about taking your events from Upcoming.org with you, so that’s what I wanted to attempt.

First I went to Upcoming.org and under ‘My Upcoming Events’ choose ‘Subscribe’ and picked the iCal URL. I then subscribed to that in Apple’s iCal, and set iSync to sync it with my Nokia 7610.

After syncing, my phone had all of ‘My Upcoming Events’ in the calendar.

This seems somewhat close, in theory, to what Aaron did, at least I think so. Who can tell what he’s taking about half the time. Anyway, enjoy… I’ve got to get back to solving this calendaring problem…

I’ve been rolling my own (or trying to) for quite some time now, and I still am not happy with my calendaring solution…

Let’s see, I started with Sunbird, and then added in Upcoming.org (even helped fix a bug) and eventually settled on Thunderbird and Lightning.

Well, Thunderbird and Lightning and iCal and an AppleScript to make sure iCal updates my calendar before iSync syncs it with my Nokia 7610… Did you get all that? Does it sound insane?

I’m all for crazy hacks if the end result is what I want/need, but I also like simple/elegant solutions, so I’m shopping around. I looked at Google Calendar, but I don’t like it. I tried to add in my own calendar, which is stored on my server and accessible via WebDAV, but it didn’t like that. Then later is seemed to like it, but it doesn’t consider that ‘My Calendar’ because it considers the one stored on Google’s server as ‘My Calendar.’ That’s not what I want… I can view my real calendar, but I can’t seem to make edits, and edits I make elsewhere do not seem to update. Google Calendar just plain doesn’t work for me. Google Calendar == no damn good.

Next I gave 30boxes a try. By the looks of the app, the folks behind it really “get it” as far as how the web works. Again, if you have simple needs, 30boxes might work for you, but when I added my real calendar under ‘My Web Calendars’ it showed up, screwed up some events, and doesn’t seem to refresh or allow me to edit my real calendar. Other than those issues, 30boxes looks pretty nice. Sigh…

So is the only answer a display-only solution? (I was doing that with PHP iCalendar like 3+ years ago, and it wasn’t ideal then.)

Is there any web-based calendaring app that will let me use my own .ics file stored on my server and made accessible via WebDAV?

BarCampMilwaukee.com is up and running. If you are interested in BarCampMilwaukee, please go there for details, and to sign-up.

Now that we’ve got a date (Sat. Sept. 30 & Sun. Oct. 1, 2006) and a place to have BarCamp (Bucketworks) we are working on things like getting participants (campers) and sponsors, and promoting it. Are you involved in a technology-related group in the Milwaukee area? Tell the people in your group about it.

We’ve set up a Yahoo! Group for BarCampMilwaukee where we are currently discussing all the details for the event. I think we’ll also be meeting at Bucketworks on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 to do some in-person discussion and planning (waiting for confirmation on that meeting…)

I’m also hoping to design & print up some flyers in the next few days… And, you know, if I’m posting too much about BarCampMilwaukee, just let me know. ;)

I do love my Nokia 7610, but recently had a bit of trouble with it, which involved not being able to actually answer calls…

At first it was somewhat random, I’d get a call and answer the phone, and all was well. I would then get another call, and it would ring once (or just a half a ring) and then no matter what button I pushed I could not answer the call. After the call was over, things went back to normal. I was also using my ringtone for the alarm, which would only play the half-ring, and then stop.

I ended up debugging the problem by changing profiles and selected ringtones, and finally realized that the MP3 I had created and used for a ringtone was causing the problem.

I’d been using an MP3 of a phone ringing for nearly a year now, and never had a problem. Did it become corrupt? It was stored in the phone’s memory, and I’m guessing it was written to memory once when I loaded it onto the phone, and read from memory each time the phone played the sound.

I’m using a different ringtone right now, but I’m going to load a new copy of the MP3 I created to see if a fresh copy fixes the problem.

I’ve seen a number of blog designs that display the comments made by readers at a much smaller font size than those of the author. I’m trying to determine if this is an attempt at lowering the value of the comments. I’d guess in most cases it is used as a visual differentiator to separate the post from the comments. I’m sure at least some people want to see what they’ve written stand out in size against other’s reactions to it. Is this good for conversation?