iPhone Calendar Sync with Google Calendar

Just discovered this one this week: to get Google Calendar synched with the native iPhone app, enter NuevaSync. The only way to get OTA calendar data pushed to the iPhone apart from MobileMe, is by Exchange ActiveSync. (despite what Apple say, it is certainly not 'ActiveStink' - I mean, come on, how puerile can they get). So what NuevaSync does is act as an Exchange proxy, routing all your calendar data between your iPhone and Google Calendar.

All very effortless and secure. Just give them third party access to your Calendar account (I don't need to remind anyone to not use their Google account password when signing up to NuevaSync) configure your iPhone to add a new Exchange account, select calendar synching, and away you go. Of course the only problem is if you are already synching with your work Exchange account you have to ditch that account first. But that's okay; just one less reason for me to check my work email out of hours :-)

Now I don't know what their business model is, how they intend to monetise this, or how long they will be around for - I just know its completely free right now, totally reliable (for the brief amount of time I've been using them), and solves one of the last jigsaw pieces in my never ending quest for 'Synching Shangri-La'.

Google Reader to Omnifocus

One problem I have with Google Reader (apart from the hideous information overload that I subject myself to) is quite often I'll read about some gig or event in London, or some website that I should check out when I've got more bandwidth, or some silly Sigur Ros videos that I should download. My current system is just to 'star' the item, however all that means is that I just have this huge list of starred items that I never end up looking at. Instead I have now considered Reader as another source of todo's that should be processed in my OmniFocus inbox appropriately.

After wishing for a while that Google would release a 'Send to Omnifocus' link on Google Reader (yeah sure), I suddenly realised that I already had this functionality: Simply emailing the item to myself using the '+omnifocus' address prefix, I could get GMail to route these items to a @todo label, and then subsequently get the OmniFocus Mail Processor to pick up the items and add them to my inbox. So simple, I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier.

Omnifocus + iPhone + JungleDisk Synching

Ok so no posts for a while as I've been tragically too busy with *shock* real work. Real work as opposed to playing around with new SDKs and APIs and devices. Sad, I know...

One recent technical achievement that I have made (perhaps 'achievement' is overstating it) is finally getting my act sorted out with an online backup provider. I chose JungleDisk in this instance which I'm sure everyone knows stores all your data on an Amazon S3 cloud. That in itself is pretty ho-hum, however I did also finally purchase the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M to start getting rid of my reams of paper that seems to follow me around from city to city that I can't seem to shake off. Long story short, I have now happily scanned, OCR'd, indexed and backed up around 30% of my paper archives up to the JungleDisk cloud.

I went for the JungleDisk Plus service that gives me web access to all my files, and as I just discovered today, WebDAV. More on this later.

On a parallel, unrelated stream of work, I've also been sorting out my life by gradually bringing everything out of my head and on to my iPhone (NB: Comments about me gradually reducing my brain capacity and capabilities will be ruthlessly deleted). The tool that has been helping me do this is OmniFocus (desktop and iPhone editions). I had WebDAV synching running for a while set up on Apache however it was always a little bit irritating having to ensure my Mac was on before I could sync the two databases. Behold, today I just found out I can use the JungleDisk WebDAV server to sync my OF databases. Nice leveraging of my investment, huh?

All I had to do was point my desktop OF to https://myusername.myjungledisk.com/default/, punch in my credentials, share the settings to the iPhone and then sync back with my iPhone. Very very easy. And now even less thinking that I have to do. I'll let you decide whether that in itself is a good thing or not.

CSI New York: I will create a GUI interface...

Bwaaaahahahahahaha

I don't often repost from other people's blogs, but seriously:



UPDATE:

Here is the deliverable from that hardworking CSI programmer:
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/7976/csivbguigh8.png

Ouch Resharper - that hurts

After years of faithful service, Resharper bit me hard in the bum last week. I recently started a new contract in London and turns out I am one of only two people on the whole dev team that use Resharper. In fact, the two of us basically get spurned for our beliefs, and are constantly defending ourselves. I know that Resharper can be a more of a philosophy than a simple VS plugin so normally I just smile and let the others believe they are right. I'll just win them over with my clean, readable, some would say superior code, I thought to myself.

That was until I found myself doing some maintenance on some classes in a rather large code base. My habit when maintaining my code is to first start with a bit of a cleanup (you can tell maintenance of other people's code is not my forte), just a quick 'optimize usings', maybe a 'remove redundant this. qualifier'. After I cleaned things up a bit, did whatever else it was I needed to do to the class, I did a check-in, and feeling rather proud of my work, toddled off home.

However little did I know that my simple 'optimize usings' had gone and broke the build. As I slept my happy Resharper dreams, the build server was churning away, and breaking... It turns out there was a conditional compilation block that used 'System.Threading'. Resharper thought 'System.Threading' wasn't used and blindly obliterated the line.

The woe that befell me that morning...

Not exactly the best way to leave a good first impression, not to mention my failed attempts to convince the team that Resharper was actually a Good Thing. Our team has a strict, 'Break the build and buy the team a round of beers at the pub' rule. So after suffering my punishment, we got in touch with Jetbrains about this behaviour. Their response was that it was a known bug (I think they actually said 'limitation') and that they had no plans to fix it on their current roadmap.

So watch out Resharper fans. I know we are on the true path, but we must still watch to ensure our zealotry doesn't come back and bite us in the ass.

Nice one Belkin

I needed to log on to my flat's DSL router admin interface this evening to check some settings, but unfortunately had forgotten the password. After trying the usual suspects (blank, 'password', 'secret') with no luck, I noticed that every time I hit the submit button, the interface didn't actually seem to connecting to the server. What were the chances the Belkin developers had implemented the password check as an async javascript invocation? Not bloody likely.

So I thought I'd do a quick view source:

pwdAdmin = 'mysecurepassword';
pwdSupport = '';
pwdUser = '10';

function frmSubmit()
{
with ( document.forms[0] )
{
var returnval;

if(pass.value == pwdAdmin){
pass.disabled=true;
usrUserName.value = 'pass';
LogDiv.innerHTML = "";
returnval = true;
}
else
{
usrUserName.value = 'fail';
LogDiv.innerHTML = "Login Failed: Error Password !";
returnval = false;
}
}

return returnval;
}


I'll try not to pass judgement and just have a little giggle to myself instead.

1Password

Here's some feedback I posted to the 1Password dev team today:

I typically NEVER give feedback on any software that I use. Nor do I typically pay hard cash for it. Here is me doing both...

This software is brilliant. It solves a problem that has been nagging me for years. To the point where I have tried to design firefox plugins to achieve what you guys (and girls) have done. I basically put it in the too-hard basket, until you guys came out with your bit of kit.

After I first heard about it, I thought "Cool - all it needs is iPhone integration"

A few months later, and voila!

Then I thought, "The one other thing that it REALLY needs for seeing your passwords when you're away from your machine, is a web interface".

And then today I got my beta invite to your web interface. Just bloody awesome.

Elegant, unobtrusive, and priced just at the right point. I wish you guys all the best with your product. You deserve it.

Nick
- who tries not to gush too much