Recently in Geeky Category

Coming soon to this server, Downtime.

With my change in employment, I have to move my server, and I really want to move a lot of it off the physical hardware.  Well I have a lot moved, but the family and lug-nut sites aren't yet.  I'm awaiting some different hardware still, so tomorrow I have to take this box down, and migrate it home for a while, before I can set up my replacement box.

Not that it matters too much, I mean how often have I posted this year :)  Oh, it's my *other* services that matter to me.

For a while I've been trying to get a better way of managing my calendars on systems.  Between my iCal on my laptop, at home, my phone, and my google cals (gmail account, and apps for my domain),  I've gotten worse, rather than better at keeping things in sync.

My largest problem was that I didn't want any single location to be the absolute truth in terms of knowledge, especially when it came to choosing where to edit.  As an example, I dont' have to have to go to google calendar to edit, just because my iCal can only *read* from there, or vice-versa.  So enter GCALDaemon, a Java (I know) app which can run on linux, mac, and more and allow bi-directional work between my gcal, and ical, kontact, and more.  It works quite well, except the direction don't apply for the current Leopard release of OSX.  The main difference is in the location of where iCal stores its information, which is now in:

~/Library/Calendars/<Unique-id>.calendar/Events/*.ics

Which just happens to be the data you need for the config file, instead of the location they originally suggest.  Also of concern was that by default, my google apps calendar wouldnt' give me a "private" link, but I just had to munge the url of the public ics file with a s/public/private/ and it worked.  I now have my google calendars syncing bi-directionally with my laptop and desktop.

I haven't tried yet, but it also has a tool for getting an LDAP access to your google contacts, which will be nice.

Yes, I'm moving on.  It's time for me to go to a new place, so I'm starting to troll along with my resume for anything interesting.  I won't go into my reasons here, as I am still employed :) but would like to find something new.

If for some reason you are reading this and don't know what I do, or what I'm good at, wow, I'm surprised :) but here goes a little.

I'm a very experienced Perl programmer,with previous experience in the usuals (C, C++), but those are pretty outdated in terms of experience.  The larger part of my experience and background is in dealing with Billing and Finance applications, and large scale replicating site/cms tools.  I'm a core developer on the Freeside billing system,  and heavily involved with the local Open Source community.  Go ahead, check out the resume - http://halls.lug-nut.com/jayce/resume.html

After a a few casual tweets, a website is born :)
http://geeksnguns.com/

Phil801 had been discussing shooting to blow off some stress, and I mentioned that it sounded time to have another geeks-n-guns event.  He found the name amusing, and the site is born.  Go check in if you are a geek with and interest in things that go boom!

A big thanks to our friends at Tier 4 for buying 15 cases of marballizer paint, and inviting all of us to play.  It was a great day for paintball with beautiful weather, lots of fun players (both first timers, and experienced people), and plenty of action.  It was fun to begin setting up teams by calling out for .RPM vs .DEB, and then watch as destruction happened in various game formats.

Make sure to thank the sponsors, and maybe they'll buy for us again!  If you did enjoy it and would like to do it again, also let us at UTOS know, so we can plan more activities for the groups in Utah.  Also thanks to the non-geek Team DesertEdge members for helping out with team balance, and keeping the games moving :)

Found this article on Popular Mechanics recently: 25 Skills Every Man Should Know

Use it as a scorecard, where did you wind up?  I do like that it is updated to include concepts such as backing up your drive.

Wow, this is a pretty darn nice email list search tool.  You can easily filter into topics, such as Perl Lists, or Apache Lists and get some very nice analytics along with your search.  Boxes gives trending on your search topic, breakdown of attachments, and which email lists are included.  They seem to have already included some of your average geek favorite toys, such as: (though not all exposed in the interface yet)

• keyboard shortcuts (n,p,j,k)
• sorting (add order:date-forward or order:date-backward to query)
  
• negation (-extension:ppt)
  
• header filters(subject: extension: list: type:)
  

Ooh, and as we move towards the "Gimmie" season, I always love seeing the new products companies come out with to vie for my attention.  Well Leatherman has a very interesting new tool that looks quite cool.  The Leatherman Skeletool.  I currently love the Leatherman Wave that I carry, but this one has some spiffiness that cannot be denied.  I really like the look, the increased blade width, and the dual purpose carabiner/bottle opener.  It doesn't offer quite as many  "tools" as my wave, but covers the important parts, in a sexy new look, and especially in the CF body, a very nice weight.

Now here is a pretty spiffy little toy to have around, the FrogPad.  A small one-handed keyboard that can be worn, and bluetooth connectivity.  Says it has mac drivers, wonder how well they might work with an iTouch/Iphone when the new SDK comes out?
 
Image blatantly ripped from their site:

Yes, this was the announcement title from Ivan today as he pushed out the door the return of MySQL support in Freeside.  Now all those people who have hesitated to try out freeside from lack of PostgreSQL experience, or simply wanting unification in their MySQL infrastructure can get started.  The notes for installation from Ivan are:

You'll need DBIx::DBSchema 0.35 from CPAN or

 http://www.sisd.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/DBIx-DBSchema.tar.gz?view=tar

and FREESIDE_1_7_BRANCH (or HEAD):

 http://www.sisd.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/freeside.tar.gz?view=tar&pathrev=FREESIDE_1_7_BRANCH