Engineering Life

Some months ago, I bought a SonyEricsson P1i. Partly because I needed some way of keeping track of my calendar while on the go, partly because I thought it sounded like a cellphone I would like. And like it I did. It had just about everything I needed, everything that is, except for the ability to play nicely with my operating system of choice (you guessed it, Linux). I tried just about every piece of software I came across, which promised to be able to synchronise a Symbian-based phone with Linux, but to no avail. I finally concluded that there was quite simply no software in existence that would sync a UIQ3 phone with Linux (well, that’s not completely true, but I never did manage to get Funambol to work).

Anyway, I settled for having to put up with only having my calendar available on my desktop PC and then having to remember every single appointment while I was away from it. That is, until I more or less accidentally came across ScheduleWorld, which is capable of syncing with a host of different platforms, including Google Calendar, any SyncML-capable device and, with the help of SyncEvolution Evolution. Now, the only problem is, of course, the fact that I use Kontact as my PIM application, and since I had a localdir resource for storing my events, this meant a little grepping and output redirection to generate a single .ics-file which I could then ask Kontact to use (putting it in ~/.evolution/calendar/local/system/ as that is where evolution would normally put the default calendar), et voilà: Using SyncEvolution (run every 12 hours by a cronjob) and the bergamot project’s Swim application for my phone, I now have my calendar automatically synchronise itself, without any intervention from me whatsoever. Furthermore, since ScheduleWorld can automatically sync your calendar with Google Calendar when your mobile device syncs, I can also check my calendar if I happen to not have my phone with me (assuming of course, that I have access to a computer with an internet connection).

The only drawback: For those who are (overly?) concerned with their privacy, ScheduleWorld does require registration and your calendar data are not send using a secure connection (but hey, how confidential are your dentist’s appointments anyway?). For the rest of us, this seems the easiest way (at the moment) to sync a SonyEricsson P1i and a Linux computer.

I just read an article on website of the major Danish newspaper, Politiken, about an ammonia spillage from an abattoir in the northern part of Denmark. According to the article, the police were just a few minutes from requesting the DEMA to activate the warning sirens. The bit that troubled me was the following paragraph:

We were standing by at the fax machine, when the operations officer called to tell us that the spillage was under control

The FAX MACHINE!?
I really would have thought (and hoped) that more modern technologies would have come into use by now. It really could not take that much effort to find a more useful (and reliable) method of requesting something as important as an initiation of the warning sirens. Preferably a dedicated client with at least 3 redundant methods of communicating to a server at the local DEMA Centre. Two obvious choices would be a normal (copper or fibre) internet connection and a GSM uplink. A third possibility might be something like satellite communication or the TETRA standard.

In any case, we should not have to entrust public safety to a process containing such a large number of things that could potentially go wrong (read: such a large amount of human interactions).

Enthusiastic as I am about the EU, I wanted to wish everyone a happy Europe Day, too bad I did not get around to doing it until it was just about over.

In any case, I very much hope that the future holds a great deal of development for the European Union (ultimately a European Federation).

And yes, I am — for those who have not already deducted as far — a so-called “jovial european” [literal translation of the June Movement's (I believe they are the ones who coined the phrase) term »Jubeleuropæer« (in their view a negative term, though I take it as a positive character trait)].

Just stumbled upon this quite amusing little song about the “Web 2.0 Bubble”. The song is based on Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire”, and as requested in the song, here’s a blog post about it.

Until the Wordpress theme viewer allows me to update my theme, the latest version (currently 1.4.10) of the Shade of Gray theme can be found here.

In an attempt to find a usage guide for the Window Rules plug-in for Compiz Fusion, I went by the Compiz Community Forums and did a search, this required me verify my humanity via CAPTCHA (this in itself seem rather unusual to me, CAPTCHAs for a search function?). This proved something of a challenge, the CAPTCHAs were so badly scrambled that I had to try five(!) different CAPTCHAs before getting one that I could make out, and even then I have a feeling it might have been mostly luck.

Maybe I’m just bad at reading CAPTCHAs or maybe they can be made too effective?

Yet another good thing has come from the European Union. Though it is so far only a piece of advice and has yet to see an actual ruling, it would seem that the privacy of consumers is still intact. Should the ECJ, however, choose to rule in favour of the Spanish consumers, it seems likely that national courts would have to take this into heavy consideration in future civil lawsuits by IFPI and the likes hereof.

After having battled Ubuntu for half a year, trying to make it play nice with my MX1000 mouse, I decided I should probably read the man page for evdev, this did of course solve all my problems (almost). Continue Reading »

Having stumbled upon this article on HowtoForge, I wanted to try out VMWare to see how it fared as an alternative to wine. Problems arose however as I attempted to boot into Windows Continue Reading »

This is in fact blatantly simple, just utilizing a dcop call to amarok asking for the title of the current song and then converting that to a string to be sent by ERC. However I thought I would post it anyway as it might not be as simple to everyone.

(defun erc-cmd-NOWPLAYING ()
(erc-process-input-line
(shell-command-to-string "dcop amarok player nowPlaying")))