My apologies for the downtime today. There may be more over the next week or so. I’m prepping the web server for the upgrade and getting comprehensive backups in place in case of disaster. Tie a knot in your quipu for me.
Boot!
New server gets up and rolls! Some PHP errors, and I have to figure out a functionality test methodology, but things look promising. Oh, if only I had the time.
Ms. Jay
A Steller’s Jay is nesting about five feet from my back porch. I think it’s probably a mated pair, as I had noticed a vocal and aggressive (even for these blue meanies) jay yelling at me for the past couple of weeks every time I walked around that side of the house, but tonight after taking my fair share of abuse I glanced over and saw a quiet jay in a nest clearly thinking “you can’t see me.” That’s very different behavior, so I think Ms. Jay and Loudmouth Jay are prolly distinct boidies.
Server repair news: I was able to clone the server and upgrade the OS, but am still working on the LAMP upgrades. I am booked for the next four weeks (making a movie!) over the weekend, though, so it’s kind of a race to see if I get the work done before SIFF or not.
Flight test
Airman Knowledge test prep from the FAA.
Baby steps
Progress on the new server; I can now start and stop Apache as desired with php5 in place. MySQL is next up. Unfortunately I still need to think through how to set the new server up to do proper testing on the extant content, but, hey, get the basics laid in first, right?
Soothed
There is something so very very soothing about working on a unix command line, green text on black. I think it’s a childhood comfort-environment thing.
I mean, as long as you don’t accidentally overwrite a crucial directory structure with a textfile of recent IMs or the like. Then it’s really not so soothing.
Sync iCal <-> Google Calendar
Sync iCal with Google Calendar and see Google contacts. Java. Oh, I hope it works.
Unleashed
Seattle Parks & Recreation: Off-Leash Areas in Parks. For reference. Golden Gardens, Magnuson, and Northacres look closest. Still need to find a zero-density area to go for non-pack offleash time.
Aggregation aggravation
I have been publishing private iCal feeds to iCalx.com for years now, and have been wrangling iCal, iSync, and Google calendar to play nice over the past few weeks. I have my gCal feeds directing into iCal and thence to the phone with no difficulty, but there is no obvious way that I can see to direct public or private iCal feeds into Google Calendar as subscriptions. One may easily import to Google Calendar, but it appears to me that the ‘add calendar by address’ feature does not work as one might hope, limiting Google Calendar subscriptions to calendars hosted under Google Calendar.
This is aggravatingly counterintuitive to me, as the beauty of the iCal subscription format is clearly the ability to simply use transparent URLs.
I suppose that something happening at iCalx could be interrupting the data-pass, and that I could set up a local-file-system mirror of the .ics files such that I could keep an eye on the entire data transfer, but the reason I wanted to set this up was not to experience the joy of debugging data-piping, but to enable polymorphous data-entry on any of my primary device platforms – web, Mac, or handheld. My time budget to accomplish this, including research time, is consumed, and I’m irritated.
Conditional
Note to self: I remember seeing some interesting Applescript doohickeys that performed certain actions based on the name of the wireless network connection currently active. I need to dig that up to create conditional, timed mounts and dismounts of come network shares.