by Matt | Oct 26, 2007 | Culture, Web
That’s what setting up an ical remote calendar feels like. Mozilla Sunbird and Thunderbird (with the Lightning plugin) are supposed to “publish to a remote server via FTP” when you hit the “publish calendar” button. Unfortunatly for those of us in the real word, it doesn’t work like that. Not only does it not work, but there are no instructions on how to make it work. So, I start poking around the server and the calendar application, wondering what the hell I’m suppose to do. I finally figured it out, but only after giving myself a migraine in the process. In case you’re wondering, here’s how…
-Download and install Sunbird, or Thunderbird and the Lightning plugin.
-Start either program and make a new blank calendar. For this example, we’ll call ours “Work Schedule”.
-Right click on the calendar and select “export”.
-Save you calendar as an *ics file. Remember not to use uppercase letters or spaces.
-Open up an FTP client of your choosing and connect to wherever you’re going to be remotely storing your calendar.
-Upload your blank calendar, in this case named simply “work.ics” to a safe directory ABOVE your web directory (above www)
-CHMOD the calendar file to 777 and close your FTP client.
-Open Sunbird/TB again and select File -> Subscribe to remote calendar.
-For the location, put in “ftp://ftp_username:ftp_password@yourserver.com/work.ics”
-If all goes well, you should be subscribed to a readable/writeable blank remote calendar.
Also, you can now safely delete the default “Home” calendar now that you have a second one. Both programs require at least one calendar by default. Try it out, add a few items and see how it goes. As of the latest version of SB/TB, the changes to your calendar should be uploaded/updated automatically. If you have multiple users updating the same calendar, it would be wise to right click the calendar and select “refresh calendar” before making any changes.
Matt out.
by Matt | Oct 24, 2007 | Games
Apparently the term “save skate video” isn’t quite exact enough to make finding any sort of help on the subject likely. All I was trying to do is save the embedded flash movie to a more useable format. NONE of the 400 billion firefox extensions for saving flash movies worked. It seems that the dark overlords of EA Games decided to deeply entrench their movie playing goodness deep inside a rediculous number of nested windows and players. What you’re seeing in the post before this is merely the top layer. That grabs some ASP page, which in tern grabs the player, which grabs the movie. That’s all fine and dandy for embedding video, it works quite well. However, since EA in their infinite wisdom has limited the total number of video clips a user can upload into their system before erasing old ones, that makes it fairly hard to build up a collection. So, for no other reason than petty vanity, I tried to SAVE on of these videos. That simply isn’t happening. Looking to Google for help didn’t turn out so well either. Thankfully, that’s where community sites come in. Buried deep down in community forums is where internet travelers like myself find the juiciest bits of information. In this case it was a link to the Skate Reel Video Converter from the nice folks at Skate.This. Now I can save my videos as any one of the popular video formats with minimal fuss. Huzzah.
by Matt | Oct 24, 2007 | Games
Completely unrelated to my computer… I’m trying to figure out how to embed a video I made in Skate, and then uploaded to the EA games site.
Success! Now I can upload all sorts of stuff. I just had to figure out where EA was hiding it’s embedded player. Muwahahaha! If you want see the full size, it’s here.
by Matt | Oct 23, 2007 | Culture
It’s unfortunatly been raining and really nasty outside here in the big H for the better part of two days now. That’s put a bit of a hurt on my case painting. It has however, motivated me to actually assemble the components of the computer itself. They’re all resting quietly in my case, snug in their new homes, happy and working together quite nicely. The installation was a breeze. The new socket AM2 stuff is really quite easy to assemble. My only problem is that the motherboard only has 1 IDE chain. I have 4 IDE devices. For those of you who haven’t built a PC in a while (or ever… you crazy Mac people), you can only have 2 IDE devices per chain. So, I’ve ordered an IDE to SATA converter widget from NewEgg which should solve my troubles until I upgrade the optical drives. The hard drives will probably just stay on their IDE chain until I trade them out for newer, larger drives by years end. At the moment I have 1 hard drive and 1 DVD drive hooked up just for the sake of installing Windows. A process that, while relatively error free, should be 150 times easier.
I’ll never quite understand why I have to patch, restart, install a service pack, restart, patch, restart, service pack again, restart a few dozen more times and finally validate, patch, validate, install and lastly restart. What the fuck? Slipstream people. Slipstream. Get this into your troubled little West coast brains… I want to “update” my copy of Windows ONCE! Roll all those updates and patches and whatnot into one mega package. Work out your fucking problems with dlls, restarting processes and services so that I don’t have to restart 40 friggin times! If you need to, make it into a big pre-OS install package, I don’t care. Have it run at bootup so that no processes are getting in it’s way. I have a copy of SP2 on a disk and even that required updating before I could use it, as well as updating after I installed it. I want to walk away from the machine, and when I come back a few hours later, it’s happy and ready to go. Is that really too much to ask? Oh… and I don’t want you to sneak any “we’re trying to protect you by running this obvious spyware program in the background” bullshit in there either. I want a list of stuff you’re going to install and then all I hit is “go” and it’s done.
And I don’t want to hear any “If you used a mac, you wouldn’t have to patch” bullcrap either. While that may be true in the short term, you won’t catch me shelling out every other year for a “new operating system”. Sorry, but 10.whatever is not “new”. It’s a patch. A patch you’re paying for. Unless it goes to 11 and it makes candy poop out of the CD tray, it’s still just an upgrade.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had a long day. I had to get up a 5am to get to a shoot on time. I’m a little cranky. I need a nap.
Seriously though. I want an operating system that doesn’t suck. I think, after 30+ years of computer innovation, we’re fucking owed that much. I don’t care what camp you’re in, there’s things that suck about both operating systems.
*sigh*
Anyway, Windows is behaving for the time being. Drivers are being installed as we speak. With any luck, some sort of game might actually be playable in the next day or so. I’ve got the deepest need to dive into Team Fortress.
If it’s ever proper painting weather again, I’ll get back to my case. Until then, this skeleton looking, barebones, loud as hell case full of fresh and tasty parts will be keeping me company.
Matt out… someone get me a drink…
by Matt | Oct 19, 2007 | Culture
Couple of quick photos for you guys. First, the sides, primed, taped off and ready to be painted.
Next, a test coat of paint on the top section of the front bezel. Just a first coat so it’s not that smooth, much more painting left to do, but you can see what color it’ll turn out to be.
Last, a quick picture of the Bondo in progress. I figure it’ll take another weeks worth of layers and sanding until I get it to where I want it. This is more of the “structural” level. All that original case showing through will be covered in wire grilling.
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