iCal and password changes

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 03 Aug 2005 00:06:19 GMT

I store all of my iCal calendars on my home web server in a Subversion repository. This worked flawlessly from when I last wrote about it until about two weeks ago when I changed the password that Apache uses for Subversion authentication. When that happened, iCal was unable to connect automatically to the server. Once I entered my new password, it worked until I restarted iCal, but then I had to enter my new password again. It was acting like it still had the old password saved and was using the old one instead of the new one. I ignored this for a few days, but then it really started irritating me.

The solution was pretty simple: open up the Keychain tool and delete everything that even vaguely looks like it could be used for authenticating against the web server in question. I ended up deleting almost a dozen entries, presumably dating back to when I first started using iCal years ago. It took me three or four tries to find them all, but once they were all gone I was able to connect to everything.

This brings up a bug in Keychain Access.app, though–it’s really lousy at deleting things. In many cases, deleting items seems to delete them from the keychain database but still leaves it visible in searches in the keychain tool. I had to stop and restart Keychain Access repeatedly to make sure that everything was gone.

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Apple to adopt Hula?

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 28 Jul 2005 22:18:05 GMT

ThinkSecret says that Apple is getting ready to upgrade OS X Server with some sort of improved mail and calendar solution, probably Hula. That’s nice and all, but I REALLY want them to upgrade iCal to support some publicly-available calendar server. The ability to publish read-only calendars was nice in 2002 when it was first added, but it’s been three years, and I’m still waiting for the ability to share read/write calendars with other family members. I’m aware that I could probably do this with .Mac, but I’m not willing to pay $100/year just so I can edit events on my wife’s calendar a couple times per week.

Having said that, Hula looks pretty nice. Even without iCal syncing support, I’ll probably consider it when it’s time to upgrade my mail server software again; fortunately that’s probably at least a year away still. If iCal gets CalDAV support before then, then I might have to be a bit more aggressive with the timeframe. Either that or look for other CalDAV servers.

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Tiger: iCal is more strict about .ics files

Posted by Scott Laird Sun, 01 May 2005 14:19:21 GMT

Apparently Tiger’s iCal is more strict then Panther’s, because the .ics files created by my author readings page won’t import into iCal anymore. There are a handful of other issues with the author readings code that need fixed, too, so I’ll see what I can do with it later this afternoon.

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Apache 2.0, subversion, WebDAV, and iCal

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 24 Feb 2004 11:42:21 GMT

Somewhere in the middle of my MPx200 adventure, something ate all of my repeating annual calendar entries, including birthdays and anniversaries. Personally, I blame PocketMac, but it’s really my fault for not keeping a good backup of my calendar.

That’s not to say that I don’t have a backup–I sync iCal with my home web server every few minutes–but there’s no way to track changes or dig up old versions of my calendar. Once entries are deleted, they’re gone for good. What I really want is revision control for my calendar.

And now I have it. Through a feat of astounding geekiness, I’ve finished installing the subversion version control system on my home web server, and my calendar WebDAV share is actually a subversion repository. What that means is that every time iCal exports a new calendar to my home server, it’s transparently checked into subversion in the background. I can get subversion to give me a list of all of the changes that have been made over time, generate diffs between specific versions, and even revert to older versions.

It’s actually pretty easy. Just install Apache 2, and then install Subversion with the ‘mod_dav_svn’ Apache module. Configure up a virtual server and then add these lines to your virtual host config files:

      <Location /xxx>
        Dav svn
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Auth Required"
        AuthUserFile /etc/apache/htpasswd
        Require valid-user
        SVNPath /path/to/svn/repository
        SVNAutoversioning on
        AuthzSVNAccessFile /etc/apache2/svn_authz
      </Location>

Now create /path/to/svn/repository with svnadmin, reload apache, and you should have a nice, revision-controlled web-based file server. Most modern desktop OSes can mount WebDAV-enabled web servers just like a more-traditional file server. Both OS X and XP can do it natively, and there should be at least a dozen ways to accomplish it in Linux. This is almost certainly the easiest (cheap) way to get reliable version-controlled storage.

Thanks to Sterling Hughes and Justin Erenkrantz for providing inspiration and documentation.

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Another attempt at better organization

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 05 Feb 2004 11:09:00 GMT

As those who know me know, I’m not exactly the world’s most organized person. It’s not uncommon for me to over-organize a few small things while large swaths of my life sit in disorder for way too long. Sometimes it bothers me, some times it doesn’t. It tends to go in cycles of two or three years–the disorder will start to bother me for one reason or another, so I’ll start some new way of organizing things, only to drop it after I’ve made enough of a dent in things so the disorder doesn’t bother me anymore.

I’m currently in the middle of one of those cycles. I’ve had too many things piling up at home and at work recently, and I feel like I was losing track of most of the things that I needed to be doing. Every time something new added itself to my plate, something else fell off.

I started by trying to keep a simple to-do list in iCal and syncing it onto my phone, but that just doesn’t cut it. I need to be able to break big tasks down into smaller pieces in order to manage them, but if I do that, then I end up with a huge long linear list that is too big to be manageable. So I avoid putting little things onto the list, so they don’t obscure the big things, except now I’m losing track of things again.

I’m currently in the middle of phase two: I’m trying out better software for managing to-do lists. I’m kind of excited about Life Balance, which is kind of new-age sounding, but seems to do what I want. You lay out your life as a series of goals and projects in a big hierarchy. Leaf nodes in the tree are essentially to-do items. Each node has a priority and an effort metric associated with it, along with an optional to-do date, location, and some other settings. Life Balance then tries to produce a simple, linear to-do list of what you need to be working on right now. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful then that sounds, because it can gauge the importance of different projects and sub-projects against each other, and then try to balance them using the feedback that you provide.

Life Balance runs on Macs, Windows PCs, and Palms. The Palm and desktop versions sync with each other, and the Palm version can sync its version of the to-do list with the system to-do list. I’m currently testing Life Balance out along with Agendus on a Clie that I’ve had sitting around for a couple years. I’m still tuning the way I use the two programs, but they seem to interact almost perfectly. I’ll write up a longer review when I decide to buy them.

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