Category: Apple

random stuff

Some random notes, since I haven’t been doing much blogging lately:

I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook with a new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago. It’s working pretty well. At first, I thought the fan on the MacBook was coming on too often, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem now. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the old drive to the new one, then just switched drives. No problems. I did de-authorize iTunes before switching drives, just in case. I really don’t know if switching to the new drive would have caused me to have to re-authorize iTunes, but I thought it might. I got the drive, and an external enclosure from Newegg.

I upgraded the OS on my BlackBerry Storm to 4.7.0.148 on Sunday, when Verizon released it. I couldn’t do the OTA upgrade, since I didn’t have enough free space for that, so I did it through Desktop Manager. It worked OK, but I had to manually restore my apps after the upgrade. DM backed up the apps, but couldn’t restore them for some reason. It wasn’t a big deal to do the restore myself. All my application settings, though, apparently got lost in the upgrade. I had to re-enter user names and passwords into a few apps, and re-enter authorization codes into a couple of apps. I also found that QuickLaunch 1.x didn’t work right with the new OS, so I paid CrackBerry $2 to upgrade to 2.x. It works fine now, and the new features were certainly worth the $2, so I’m glad I upgraded.

I’ve been fighting a cold since Mother’s Day. The first week, it was pretty much a standard cold. In the second week, I developed a really bad cough, but all the other symptoms pretty much went away. I went to the doctor, and she basically told me that it was a post-nasal drip problem, and just gave me some samples of Zyrtec and Nasonex. I’m not sure if either of those did me any good. When I ran out, I switched back to Claritin (actually, a generic equivalent). I’m not sure if *that’s* doing me any good either, but I think it is, at least a bit. The cough, and the throat tickle, come and go. I’ve learned to keep my windows closed at home, with the air conditioning on, and (sometimes) my air cleaner too. I definitely sleep better that way. I’ve also signed up for allergy alert e-mails from the Claritin site, and from pollen.com. I’d like to see if I can really correlate my problems with any specific allergy levels, or particular allergens. I remember having this same problem last year, right around the same time, so I’m guessing it’s a seasonal thing that I might be able to manage, if I can figure out exactly what’s screwing me up, and learn to stay away from it.

Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, catching up on my reading! I’ve read all the Hugo-nominated novels that were in the Hugo packet. I’ve now started into the novellas. Honestly, I thought all the novels were great, and I’m not sure which one deserves the Hugo. Conversely, none of the novellas has stood out as really great so far. I’ve only finished two though.

CVS and ViewVC on the Mac

I’m working on a project right now that involves CVS and ViewVC. I decided to set up a test environment on my MacBook for this. It was pretty easy. CVS is apparently part of the standard Mac OS dev tools install, so it was already on the machine. I set up a test repository under my home directory and put a few files in there. There’s an article on the Apple site about CVS that could get you started if you’re not familiar with CVS.

Getting ViewVC up and running took a bit more effort, but wasn’t really difficult. If you just unpack it in a folder off your home directory, you can easily run it in standalone mode. My repository is under ~/sandbox, so “bin/standalone.py -r ~/sandbox” gets it running at localhost:7467/viewvc. (Python needs to be set up on your machine, but that too is part of the standard dev tools install.)

Installing ViewVC so it’s running under Apache takes a little more effort, but it’s not too hard. I used the standard “./viewvc-install” to do a standard install to /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7. From there, I just edited the viewvc.conf file to set my CVS root. Then, I had to set up a couple of things in Apache. The Apache config on my Mac was in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. I set up a script alias like this:
ScriptAlias /viewvc /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7/bin/cgi/viewvc.cgi
I also set up a “Directory” section to point to “/usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7/bin/cgi/”. I think that’s all I had to do. After that, I could access the ViewVC site at localhost/viewvc.

I didn’t try to set up the ViewVC stuff that requires MySQL, but that probably wouldn’t be too hard.

some more calendar syncing notes

OK, I’m sure anyone reading this blog is by now bored out of their skull by all this talk about syncing calendars. I have no idea why, but I’m still finding it kind of interesting getting all this stuff straightened out. A while back, I blogged about the weird way that Apple handles birthdays between iCal and Address Book.

To summarize: You can generate a calendar in iCal that shows all the birthdays for your contacts. It’s not a normal calendar, though. It’s more like a calendar subscription, which means you can’t push it down to your iPod with MobileMe. I’ve been using a third-party utility to generate a “real” birthday calendar, which *can* be pushed down to the iPod, or anywhere else I’m syncing my calendars.

I think this auto-generated birthday calendar is the source of some of my syncing problems, both with Outlook (on the PC) and on the BlackBerry (via Missing Sync).

Looking at this thread at the Macworld forums, it appears that iPhone OS 3.0 may actually support subscribing to calendars, so I won’t need the third-party utility anymore. I’m not sure if Missing Sync will support pushing that down to my BlackBerry though.

Missing Sync troubles

I seemed to have Missing Sync working OK with my Storm for a little while, then the calendar sync starting tossing out errors. I opened up a support ticket on Friday night. I’ll see if someone gets back to me on Monday or not. Meanwhile, I tried a few random things to fix the situation, and I have gotten it working again, though I’m not confident it’ll *keep* working.

I did a backup and restore of my iCal data, then ran Onyx to clear out all my logs, then rebooted and did a fresh sync. No errors. It’s getting late, so I’m not going to mess with it any more tonight, but we’ll see if the device keeps syncing OK over the next few days.

I was listening to a DNR episode last week which dealt with some of Microsoft’s work on sync technology. It was pretty interesting. Apparently, sync still isn’t an easy problem to solve.

Missing Sync

I just installed Missing Sync on my Mac. I’ve got it all set up to sync my contacts and calendars between the Mac and the BlackBerry over Bluetooth. Sweet. I encountered a few bumps while setting it up, but I think I’ve ironed out all the weird little conflicts, and it’s working OK now.

I’ve still got the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software installed on my Vista machine, but I don’t think I’m going to use it for anything except maybe software installs.

Overall, the Storm is working out pretty well so far. I haven’t had any random reboots, software glitches, or anything like that. I’m getting used to the touchscreen and virtual keyboards.

In terms of my overall “holy grail” quest for maximum syncing between all my devices, I think I’m actually doing a lot better than I would have ever expected. I’ve got my contacts & calendar on my Mac, on the web, on my iPod Touch, and now on my BlackBerry. On my Vista PC, I’ve only got my contacts, but I can always get to the calendar on the web.

On the random notes side, I have Backpack on the web, accessible through FrontPocket on the iPod Touch, and through the mobile version of the BackPack site on the Storm. It would be cool if I could directly sync Backpack to the notes app on the iPod Touch and/or the Storm, but that doesn’t seem likely at this point.

On the e-mail front, I have access to all of my e-mail accounts on both the iPod Touch and the Storm now. I think the iPod Touch is a little nicer to use for e-mail than the Storm, mainly because it has full IMAP support. The BIS solution on the Storm really just forwards mail to the device. Sometimes, it seems to be able to mirror read/unread marks and deletions back to the server, but I’m not sure if it’s doing that for all my accounts. I think I’ve figured out that, for my Lotus Notes e-mail, if I delete a message on the Storm and tell it to delete that message on the server, it *will* remove the message from my Notes inbox, but it doesn’t actually delete it. I’m not 100% sure on that. I think I need to mess around with it some more.

Kindle iPhone App

I downloaded the Kindle reader for my iPod Touch earlier this week. I don’t anticipate that I’ll use it much, since I do have an actual Kindle, but I wanted to play around with it. Given the limitations of the iPhone form factor, the app works reasonably well. I suppose I could manage to read a book on it, but I’m not sure I’d want to.

I think that releasing this app right now was a good move on Amazon’s part. There do seem to be a lot of people who are comfortable reading on the iPhone. A good number of e-books have been released as iPhone apps, so apparently there’s a market. Amazon might as well pick up some sales this way, and maybe the app will eventually drive some Kindle 2 hardware sales, as people get used to buying and reading e-books, and decide to step up to a dedicated device.

I’m a little surprised that they don’t support reading newspapers and magazines via the iPhone app. Maybe it’s a rights issue. If I was going to read anything on the iPhone, it’d more likely be newspaper and magazine articles, rather than full-length books though.

iPhone app store

There’s an article up on LifeHacker about the first year of the iPhone app store. Here’s a statement I heartily agree with:

The little things: We’ll keep saying it until it’s fixed. It’s ridiculous that a phone that can remotely control your computer and work as a WebDAV server can’t be made to monitor a folder full of text notes and sync its own Notes application to it.

I’m still looking for a really good note-taking app that allows you to use it offline, then sync it back to your computer and/or the web. FrontPocket is working well for me, but it still doesn’t allow me to do much offline. Actually, FrontPocket may be the “killer app” that finally convinces me to switch from the iPod Touch to an iPhone, just so I’ll have constant access to my Backpack data.

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

more fun with MobileMe calendars

Okay, I thought I had everything straightened out, but it just seems that the combination of Outlook and the way I’m generating my “birthdays” calendar on the Mac is not happy. It seems like things go wrong on the MobileMe site after going from iCal, to MobileMe, to Outlook, and back to MobileMe. It’s that last part, after Outlook does whatever it does to the calendars and pushes it back to the web, where everything goes wonky. If there was a way to just push the calendar to Outlook, and not let Outlook push it back to MobileMe, then I’d be OK. I wouldn’t mind treating the calendar as read-only in Outlook. Oh well, I guess I’m going to have to de-sync the calendar on my PC for now. I’ll leave the contact sync going, since that seems to work fine.

more MobileMe syncing fun

So, following up on the problems I had yesterday, I did a bit more research and tried a few things. To make a long story short, I deleted my “birthdays” calendar in iCal and re-synced, and everything was OK. I added the birthday calendar back in, synced again, and things are still OK. The next test, which I’ll probably do tonight, will be to sync Outlook on my PC again, then sync *that* back to MobileMe, and see if the problem returns. Hopefully not.

There’s a heck of a lot of talk on this problem in the MobileMe calendar support forum at Apple. One other thing I did, which didn’t seem to help, was to mess with the time zone settings in MobileMe. I’m back to the Eastern time zone, at least in the account page, but my calendar is showing everything in Mountain time, for some reason. I’m hoping that one will clear itself up.