Colin Charles Agenda

I had this sudden urge to get my calendar maintained. Google Calendar is what I’ve been using, on-and-off, and its generally been a bit of a love/hate relationship I’ve had with it. Its good that its online, but that also makes it bad – i.e. what happens when I need to pen something down when I’m offline? It supports SMSing me reminders for events (good), it works via my mobile phone (good), there are Twitter interfaces to the calendar (good). It lacks integration from my main email client, Mozilla Thunderbird.

Why Thunderbird some might ask, and not Evolution? Its cross-platform. And if I were placing bets, I’d be betting on Thunderbird over Evolution, any day (in fact, I’m surprised Linux distributors haven’t figured this out as the easiest migration path – Firefox is shipped, but paired with Evolution). But I digress, lets focus on calendering.

There is the Mozilla Calendar Project, which creates SunBird (standalone) or Lightning (a plugin for Thunderbird). Naturally, I’ve chosen to align myself with the latter. My first snag was finding out that the add-on I downloaded, did not work on Linux x86_64. A little work on Google, showed me how to build it; a little further, and I found a contributor build of it, on the Mozilla site. So download Lightning 0.7 for Linux x86_64.

Thunderbird changes: Today Pane button on top-right, all right there is the option of the “today pane”, and bottom-left, there are two new buttons to toggle between email and calendering view

Once that was complete, Lightning offered to import my calendar entries from Evolution. I don’t know if on OS X, it will offer to import from iCal, but it seemed like a good enough feature to have – I however, did not use it, as I’d not been using Evolution before. When Thunderbird starts, you immediately notice options to change to the Calendar, or even bring out the Today Pane.

The secret sauce is however, in installing yet another Thunderbird add-on, the Provider for Google Calendar. Once that is installed, and you’ve read the notes on the GDATA Provider, and understand its limitations, you’re on your way to using Google Calendar, right in Thunderbird!

Lightning, in calendering view in Thunderbird

Its got limitations though. Google Calendar doesn’t support categories, so they don’t show. If you decide to edit/delete a recurring event, it doesn’t work (known bug), and you still need to login to the web interface. If you create a Task in Lightning, and so happen to tack it onto your calendar on Google Calendar, it just disappears (so make sure tasks are tracked in the local calendar); this is because GCal doesn’t do tasks. By default, all alarms are set to be popup’s, and not SMS messaging like I prefer. If you’re offline, it doesn’t show entries (c’mon, cache entries at the very least). This is something that I’d love, and there is work going on to make this happen.

Verdict? These add-on’s are going to stay in my Thunderbird install. There are quirks, I still have to hop on the web interface from time to time, but it looks like as long as I’m online and in Thunderbird, I’m going to be a happy camper when it comes to calendering.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, lightning, thunderbird, calendar, calendering, google calendar, thunderbird add-on

First off, I must apologise to my regular blog readers for all the recent politically motivated content. Its mostly over; well at least the regular pace it was at the last couple of weeks.

Malaysia made history on March 8 2008, during her 12th General Elections. The Barisan Nasional was denied a 2/3rds majority (only about 61% control now), and five states, including the most prominent Selangor (heard the phrase, Klang Valley? Its the economic powerhouse of Malaysia). The last time this happened, there was a dark day in Malaysian history, that have subsequently been written out of the history books. Don’t they learn? History is bound to repeat itself…

I was awake till past 5.30am that fateful day, chatting with the #myoss’ers, and numerous friends on various IM networks. As the results flowed in, everyone was in a state of good shock. This has to be the first general elections, where I saw so many people have a large interest, staying awake, awaiting results. It looks like the Malaysians finally decided, a change needed to happen.

Stalwarts were replaced – Samy Vellu, longest serving cabinet minister lost his Sg. Siput seat, reminding me of November 2007, when John Howard himself lost his own seat in Bennelong, during the Australian Elections.

The ruling coalition blamed the rise of the Internet and online media, for their downfall. I say they had it coming. Part of the New Economic Policy, favoured sending ethnic Malay-Muslims overseas, on a scholarship, for an education; little do they know, that they are all taught to think and started enjoying the good life (eating pork, drinking alcohol, gambling, et al) and wanted it when they had to return to Malaysia. Anwar, vows to end race-based favouritism, and focus on the NEP being there to help deal with issues of poverty (i.e. not to enrich the UMNO leaders and their cronies).

Already, there is talk about implementing a Freedom of Information Act (reported at Malaysiakini, as a statement made by Khalid Ibrahim, the new Selangor MB). I can only hope this translates to action, ASAP.

Friend, open source advocate, popular blogger, participant in NGO events (to be honest, where I first met him – Asia Source, in Bangalore) , Jeff Ooi, has also won by a great majority. I couldn’t be happier for him.

The young, who couldn’t even vote, turned up at the election rallies, and I’m proud to say, a friend from school, Shazeea Banu, was interviewed on Channel News Asia, about why she supports Nurul Izzah (Anwar’s daughter, who also defeated the incumbent with a pretty nice majority).

All in all, congratulations Malaysia. Exciting times are ahead, and here’s me tipping my glass, to you becoming the economic powerhouse that you used to be.

Technorati Tags: malaysia, elections, 2/3rd majority denied, barisan nasional, klang valley, pkr, pas, dap, new economic policy, jeff ooi, shazeea banu

Public Service Announcement: Malaysiakini’s DNS servers have been knocked off the Internet. Basically, they’re pointing to 127.0.0.1, which is localhost (your machine). Live reports of election results are still available, just access Malaysiakini via their IP address: http://122.0.17.30/.

Reason behind the DNS being unavailable is unknown, but do keep up with the Malaysiakini DNS Suspended! post.

BTW, Malaysiakini runs FreeBSD + Apache + Squid :)

There are also 6 mirrors at the time of writing… And remember, the hand that rocks the DNS, is the hand that rules the Internet (or something like that)

Technorati Tags: malaysiakini, ip address, dns

I had the opportunity to visit a school today. Not quite a school you’ll expect to roll-out a deployment of OLPCs (its a top-notch boarding school, with yearly fees that cost as much as completing a 4-year university degree), but a school in Victoria, nonetheless.

Microsoft products are entrenched in the Victorian school system. It so happens that Microsoft ISA Server 2006 is used to power mail for the students. Trying to access mail via the browser, proved to be impossible with the OLPC.

Secure Connection Failed: The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown

The error code received: sec_error_unknown_issuer. So I thought I’d try out giving an exception.

Getting an exception? You need to find advanced encryption settings

Exceptions are impossible to get, seeing that there’s no way to get to the advanced encryption settings location. After coming home, I decided to check up on this (which involves hopping on to the developers IRC channel). Turns out the ticket is #5534: Browser cannot connect to sites with non-standard Certificate Authorities.

I added to the ticket, mainly because the MS ISA Server 2006 actually had a valid certificate, signed by VeriSign. It works fine in Firefox, but just not on the OLPC. Apparently, there’s an FAQ about this too: How to ignore SSL warning about invalid security certificate? However, the idea of installing Opera, just doesn’t bode well with me – the browser itself, must work.

Time to get hacking…

Technorati Tags: olpc, olpc xo, microsoft isa server, ssl, sec_error_unknown_issuer, certificate, encryption, gecko

Malaysia’s General Elections are today. I’m not voting.

The opposition, aim higher

I did not receive my postal ballot papers. I’ll have to file a complaint soon. For fun reading, do read: How Secure is the daftarj.spr.gov.my Website?

Then, read from Malaysiakini, Programme reveals ‘twin’ postal voters. 49% repeats exist in a random selection of about 560. Shocked?

Should election commissions be trusting and running closed source software?

Update: Read Would I Vote if I Could? by Shaolin Tiger. Its great reading. Ideas like having a shadow ministry is just crucial.

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, even without the embedded probes in current versions of MySQL. For more DTrace and MySQL tips, don’t hesitate to read Joyeur, Joyent’s weblog.

DtTace, Web 2.0, Java, AJAX, PHP and the rest (notes from the talk)
by Peter Karlsson, Solaris Technology Evangelist

DTrace now has providers for a large number of languages: JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby. Perl is on the way.

MySQL 6.0 will have DTrace support; PostgreSQL already has this in Solaris currently. If building from source, there’s a flag that needs to be enabled. A lot of work was done thanks to a community member.

You need a Solaris kernel. Ported to OS X and FreeBSD. Supports “dynamic instrumentation”. D is the dynamic language, used to script instrumentation

Very common request? Find how much time is spent in a given function. The thread local variable (self->variable = expression;) – nowadays, you can be running two threads coming down in the same function call. DTrace – so this is great for multi-threaded debugging.

PHP doesn’t have DTrace integrated, so, get the Coolstack PHP.

DTrace probes have been added to Mozilla to help debug JavaScript applications. This is available in Firefox 3 (in beta now). There is also a generic DTrace framework, that isn’t just JavaScript only – the networking parts of Firefox, to look at how DNS lookups work, etc. all can be instrumented via DTrace.

Further reading? DTrace and PHP, demonstrated.

Technorati Tags: dtrace, php, javascript, mysql