Author Archives: daniel

Sync Google Calendar and phone

I really like Google Calendar. Shared calendars, good interface, it’s becoming my calendar of choice. Except of course the calendar I always have with me is in my phone, a Nokia 6230i.

So I was looking for a way to sync them.

Via Outlook would be pretty easy. Nokia have well-established Outlook syncing software, and you could use Google Calendar Sync between GCal and Outlook.

But I don’t use Outlook since switching to Thunderbird. Ideally a solution would sync with Thunderbird Lightning, but it’s not that important.

I went looking for options:

Open source: GCalSync — for Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry and a few others that run Java. One weakness: does not update entries that have been modified on the phone. Not updated since 2006 though.

Open source: GMobileSync — for Windows Mobile 5.

Open source: PrimoSync — details vague at the moment.

Commercial: CompanionLink (US$29.95, free trial) — for Blackberry, Windows Mobile via Outlook, Palm OS, Apple iPhone

Commerical with some free options: Goosync — the free option is limited to 7 days past, 30 days future, 1 calendar only. I had to refresh my Internet Access Point settings to get it to work. Seems to work okay… the question might be how much the Net access from my phone costs. But it’s handy that it can be initiated any time from the phone, so I’m going with this for now.

Some other options

Apple pushes Safari

Watch out, Windows iTunes users: Apple is pushing, via its security updates feature, Safari 3.1 onto Windows users. You can opt-out of it, but if people just click OK on the default, they’ll get it. Ed Bott rants about it here. (Amusingly the report, at least for me, is accompanied by an Apple advert.)

I’ve got IE7 and FF on my PCs already. I don’t need or want another web browser. It was rude enough that Apple insisted Quicktime be bundled with iTunes… no wonder the size blew out from 19Mb to 33Mb.

But now they’re pushing Safari onto people as well?! No thanks.

Remembering the Beeb

For those of you who owned or used BBC Micros, a couple of articles just popped up on BBC Online:

Creators of the BBC Micro re-unite to look at the micro and its legacy — Acorn were working on the Arm chip as a result of the BBC Micro and BBC Master project. It’s a wonderful British success story; Arm chips are in practically every small mobile device that are in the world today.

David Braben (co-author of Elite) looks back at the BBC Micro — It would be great to see the spirit of the BBC Micro live on today; perhaps the excitement of being part of perhaps the most important entertainment sector of the future can be used to entice students into Computer Science, Physics and Maths?

Update: More memories, from those who designed and built the Beeb.

Freebie database dev tools

I used TOAD for a while for browsing around Oracle databases. Good stuff, though the free version is a bit limited, and Quest Software, who sell it, have the annoying thing of not selling it retail, but negotiating licence prices, making purchasing it a long drawn-out process.

Turns out there’s now an alternative: Oracle’s SQL Developer, which does a pretty good job at doing the same thing, and it’s free. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it uses Java and the JDBC client and apparently doesn’t need the humungous Oracle client software (though I haven’t actually verified that yet).

(Tony found the SQL Server equivalent some time ago, though it’s moved slightly. MySQL? MySQL GUI Tools.)

Setting up Joomla on Windows

I had to do this recently. It’s not excessively difficult.

You can use this thing, but it’s really for dev environments.

WampServer installs Apache, MySQL and PHP. Easy.

Once it’s running, go into PhpMyAdmin and change the root password from the default (blank). You’ll need to update the PhpMyAdmin config too: this is in C:\wamp\apps\phpmyadmin2.10.1\config.inc.php — remember that this, like most of the files, is in Unix format, so you need to use a Unix-aware file editor. (Wordpad seems to be okay for this if you have nothing else installed, at least on Windows Server 2003.)

Download Joomla and chuck it into the root directory (default is c:\wamp\www)

Browse to http://localhost/

If Joomla tells you to change anything in the PHP setup, you’ll find it in C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.5\php.ini — though it seemed to take no notice when I changed magic_quotes_gpc as requested. Odd. I eventually found you can reset it using the WAMP5 tray icon: Left-click, PHP, PHP Settings. It then automatically restarts Apache to make it take effect. Neato.

The rest is easy… go through the Joomla install pages and it does it all for you. Then start figuring out your template and structure.

Still to figure out:

  • Contact page/email doesn’t work. Probably some hiccup with Apache not figuring out how to send emails from Windows… maybe I need to make sure the Windows IIS SMTP server is running or something.
  • Issues with .htaccess, needed to switch on friendly URLs (well, friendlier than those default Joomla/Mambo monstrousities)