Technology

Google Calendar wishlist

Google Calendar team recently ran a survey, asking users what is it that they like and dislike about the product and how to make it better. Of course, I submitted my opinions, but, as always, better thoughts come after the action has been already taken. Here is my two items wishlist for Google Calendar.

[Update: not true anymore, see comments] SMS notifications for additional calendars. Google Calendar only supports SMS notifications for your primary calendar. But if you want to have a separate calendar for work and personal life, then you’ll have to choose which of these will send you messages to the phone.
Related events. Quite often I get into a situation where I need two related entries in the calendar. For example, I might have a birthday party event and shopping for presents, or a beer session at the pub and table reservation. Having just one event and a tonne of reminders for it doesn’t really work. Having two events however makes it more difficult to manage them. If the party was rescheduled, I’ll need to update my calendar to reflect the change, but I’ll also need to find and update the related event. It would be so much more convenient if I could just relate one event to another and when I move one (a couple of days later, for example), the related event would reschedule itself as well.

What are the features that you want to see Google Calendar?

Subversion is not dead

Git is on the rise right now, especially in the Open Source Software development circles. Some even went as far as predict the death of Subversion. As much as I appreciate git (here is a link for you, if you don’t) and what it is doing for the Open Source Software, I have to agree with Brandon Savage:

Corporate America needs a centralized version control system. Subversion still offers this: Subversion centralizes the repository and simply checks out a working copy (versus Git, which gives you a complete repository). Corporate America still needs to have cannonical version numbers, and the ability to see the progress of a product over time as a single line – not a bunch of branches and independent repositories.

And this is true not only for the corporate America.

Email is not dead

There’s been a lot of shouting recently about how dead the email is. Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, and what not – all were named killers of email. What a load of crap, I think.

Firstly, those who think that X can kill email, are probably misusing email themselves. Email is awesome for email. For other ways to communicate you already have chats, forums, mailing lists, blogs, social networks, and so on and so forth.

Secondly … nevermind. What I really wanted to say was that today I hit to edgy cases in my email usage. Both of them in one day – that’s rather weird. First, I noticed that my 7.5 GB Gmail storage is at 91% utilization. That’s a lot of email. Worried that I might run out one of these days, I cleaned up and reorganized some of the archives, dropping disk space utilization to 64%. Second (again, I know), if you think that I am just another pack rat and I store tonnes of useless stuff, you’re probably right. But, right or wrong, today I was asked to find some emails from 2010, 2009, and 2008. As early as I could get on that specific discussion. Not every day that I get request like that, but I was rather glad that I could satisfy it.

Thirdly (yes, I decided to continue), there is this really silly corporate world. In there, people still uses faxes. They still use emails. And they just started getting used to Skype. So it will take them a really long time to get off the email.

So, for all those of you who think that email is about to die, get off the pipe. There is a huge world out there, and you should go out and experience it. Over and out.

Fedora Linux history tour

Last weekend I went through a somewhat lengthy process of upgrading one of my servers from Fedora 6 to Fedora 12. The server is vital for a company that uses it, there is more than 2 TBytes of data on that machine, and I only had a weekend to go through the upgrade.

Fedora is a very dynamic distribution, with new releases coming out roughly every 6 month. An upgrade backward compatibility is maintained only for the last 2 releases. So, I had to first upgrade from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, then from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, and then finally from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12.

Of course such a long path would pretty much guarantee that things would break. But gladly I didn’t have to fix them for every upgrade, only once, after Fedora 12 upgrade was complete. So the actual upgrade routine was rather simple: insert DVD with the new version, reboot, upgrade, remove DVD, reboot. I was attempting to boot the system at least once into each new version to see how much stuff would break and if I notice anything going horribly wrong. Everything was going smooth, except for once machine refused to boot into the new version (Fedora 8, if I remember correctly). That didn’t stop me though. Just upgrade to the next one, and then to the next one, etc.

After the upgrade was finished, I installed the updates for Fedora 12 and started fixing things. The thing that I was worried for the most was Request Tracker (aka RT3) installation, which is a Perl application. As any proper Perl application, RT3 utilizes a whole lot of Perl modules from CPAN and every time Perl version is changed signifficantly, these modules should be downloaded and installed. Before, it was a rather slow, boring, and time consuming task. Now however things are much simpler. Before any perl upgrade just create an autobundle using the command “perl -MCPAN -e autobundle“. This will create a bundle with all your current Perl modules. After the upgrade is done, run “perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Bundle::Snapshot_2010_01_27_00‘” (where 2010_01_27_00 is the bundle version, as given to you by autobundle). Now Perl will download all modules and their requirements from CPAN and install them automatically. Pure magic.

Apart from RT3 only one thing broke. One that I would expect to break because I don’t follow the development of it that close. It was Samba. After the upgrade to Fedora 12 none of the users could connect to any of the file shares. “Access denied” was given no matter which username and password was used and what was the access level to the share. A quick Google search revealed the fix. Apparently, somewhere in between Fedora 6 and Fedora 12, Samba changed default back-end for storing credentials. A fix was as simple as adding a single line (“passdb backend = smbpasswd) to the configuration file, that switched Samba back to the old backend.

And that’s it! That’s all that broke and had to be fixed after an upgrade between 6 versions of a rather dynamic Linux distribution. Once again, I am really amazed by how well things are managed in Fedora. Kudos and congrats!

Backupify – your ultimate backup solution for the cloud

I have just learned about a really awesome service – Backupify. This a really simple yet extremely useful web application for those of us who use plenty of web services. Backupify, as you have probably guessed from the name of it, does backups. It can backup your data from a whole lot of services – Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and so forth. Backups are stored at Amazon’s S3 service. And you have an option of using your own S3 subscription if you have one. I don’t so I chose to use the one from Backupify.

As I said, the service is extremely easy to use. You just register for an account and then specify which of your online profiles should be backed up. There are options for daily and weekly backups and email notifications. Support for more services is in the works too. And the best part of it is that if you register today (before December 31, 2009), you’ll have a free account forever!

But if you were late for the free cheese, I’m sure the usefulness of such a service is beyond a few bucks that they will ask you for later on. Strongly recommended!