Stephan Paukner :: syslog

“It’s a Sony!”

This camcorder relies on a docking station to provide connectors for power, FireWire and USB. However, the dock didn’t get a tripod mount. So, you have to commit something like that to get a live DV stream. In addition, the camera is only loosely attached to the dock, making an additional rubber band necessary.

I found out how to get all my calendar entries into Google: Sync the events into a single iCalendar file using OpenSync’s Sunbird calendar plugin and import this into your Google calendar. In Sunbird I exported an empty calendar into a local iCalendar file and used this as a starting point; a plain empty file was not enough.

Unfortunately, there is a known annoying bug preventing entries that are older than one month from getting pushed to your Android smartphone—only noted as a “small” bug by Google, though. You’ll have to re-save those entries in the web calendar to update their modification time and have them synced to your phone. This, however, won’t work by updating their LAST-MODIFIED time stamps in the iCalendar file prior to the import.

As I’ll get my Motorola Milestone on Monday (W00t! W00t!) I tried to get my data from my Symbian cell to Google somehow. I made several syncing attempts:

1. Using OpenSync on my Debian box
1. Syncing from Symbian to Gnome Evolution: That was my regular task to get contacts and calendar entries backed up to Evolution. I had to take care to never let the slow sync occur after an attempt was unsuccessful, e.g. when I forgot to turn on Bluetooth on the cell. This would have doubled all entries. I had to remove the lock file and rely on backups of ~/.opensync-0.22 and ~/.evolution quite a few times.
   I also had to take care to not sync too many entries at once. The process froze when the counter reached 140 items. I had to configure a size limit (of 500 bytes) to have the process jump over that limit (and ignore some entries).
   I tried to use this as starting point to get things into Google, as there’s a plugin for it.
2. Evolution to Google: For every item that should have been synced to Google, a Python error showed up, what took 2–3 seconds for each item. Syncing my >1000 entries thus lasted forever—and froze at a certain point, apparently due to Google’s limitation of connection attempts. A retry started to create duplicates. FAIL.
3. Symbian to Google: Just the same as above. FAIL.
4. Files to Google: I tried to be smart by first syncing my cell to plain files on the PC and then using subsets of those to sync them to Google incrementally. But the same thing as before happened, and at each step the entries from the previous step were duplicated. FAIL.
5. Building a recent SVN version from source: That was hard. I had to hack the code by myself to get it compiled. But then it FAILed at runtime.
2. Symbian’s Sync: There’s a help page at Google that explains how to sync (only) contacts from Symbian to Google using on-board software. That even worked! But the contacts got synced without their birth dates—this seems to be a Symbian limitation.
3. Mail for Exchange: Another help page at Google shows how contacts and calendar entries can be synced to Google using this free app by Nokia. But the name keeps up to its promise: It’s crap. When the “System error” comes up, there’s no way to get rid of it. FAIL.
4. GooSync: This proprietary app finally made my day. The Lite trial version only allowed to sync a time window of −7/+30 days. So I had to get a pricey premium account to enjoy a ±365 days window. This, however, still leaves older entries at my previous places. This setup seems to work so far for calendar entries, but contacts, however, don’t get updated to Google. And tasks can only be synced to GooSync.com, not to Google.

Sigh. Luckily, not much of my data should change within those few days remaining.

This is the most extreme example I came over so far for why I refuse to use the German language in all technical or scientific texts. Most of my technical postings in this weblog are in English to serve help-seeking people from all places in the world; the “inter-” in “internet” stands for international, btw., and the international language for technical or scientific texts is (US-)English. The common programming languages are made of English words (if, else, while, true, false, whatever) and rely on the English keyboard layout for easy insertion of special characters ({}, [], \, /, etc.). The German localization of menu entries in all kinds of electronic devices is pervaded with weird abbreviations. That’s why I operate everything, from PC to digital camera, in the original language. (And I prefer TV series and movies in their original.)

Now look at this screenshot of a German-localized cell phone:

“Alle Radiofunk. w. ausg. Sie können nur Anw. verw., b. den. k.ein Funksen. z. Eins. kom.” ¿WTF? Funny, the Germans are dumb enough to not understand any English, but they’re smart enough to understand the meaning of that text and of the term “Flight mode”. (Btw, this reminds me of a TV ad about a brand called Splendid, where they say “Das find’ ich echt splendid!” as if anyone of their target audience knew its meaning.)

From: me
To: help@a-lottery-site
Subject: Re: Antwort: Mail-Aktivierung funktioniert nicht

Bei zu hohen Schutzmassnahmen (wie zum Beispiel eine Firewall) im Bereich Ihres Internet-Zuganges stoesst unser Support aufgrund der Komplexibilitaet unterschiedlichster Konfigurationen und Installationen leider an seine Grenzen.

Ich habe herausgefunden, warum es nicht funktioniert hat, da ich ein ähnliches Problem schon einmal bei einer anderen Website hatte: Ihre Website stützt sich zu restriktiv nur auf bestimmte BrowserNAMEN.

Details: Ich habe den Browsernamen meines Firefox (unter Linux) auf „Microsoft Internet Explorer Windows FAKE“ geändert, und plötzlich geht’s. Jetzt sehe ich auch eine „ordentliche“, moderne Website, während zuvor nur eine Minimalversion (für Handy-Browser?) angezeigt wurde.

Ihre Web-Entwickler sollten den Firefox-Varianten mehr vertrauen. Der originale User-Agent String meines Browsers ist:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009091008 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-3)

(Das ähnliche Problem war übrigens das hier.)