The Downward Spiral

iphone requires some groupdav.htaccess to work with caldav and carddav, but their included one didn’t work for me because I use PHP as a CGI.. so here’s my .htaccess file in my public_html folder

- also note that you’ll get an error when setting up card and caldav, that it can’t authenticate you… that ok.. ignore that error.. and hit save
- then in the settings under Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> sync (in the group calendar) set “All events”
- carddav works right away, even though you get that error

here is my modified .htaccess file

# iphone
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.well-known/(caldav|carddav)$ /egroupware/groupdav.php/ [R]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD}   ^(PROPFIND|OPTIONS)$

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ /egroupware/groupdav.php/ [R]

# iOS 4.3+ calendar requires that to autodetect accounts
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(principals/.*)$ /egroupware/groupdav.php/$1 [R]

# must be last!
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

it’s seems like it’s pretty hard to dump an incoming call that is ringing multiple extensions via a ring group to voicemail in asterisk via a signal from a desktop phone, but I’ve managed to come up with something pretty close using perl and watching the log files from a sepearate process.. here’s the code

phone sends sip code 603 (which, IMHO, SHOULD do exactly what I’m trying to do here anyway) for ignore, daemon picks up on that, and then hangs up all extensions that are ringing

this probably won’t work very well in high call volumes.. and I bet someone might /dev/null someone on accident.. any suggestions to improve the “make sure you dump the right extensions” would be super.. but I think this will do pretty well

I tried stuff like this to get the battle net mobile authenticator for blackberry.  I looked up user agent strings for BB 8830 and tried to download this:

http://wap.bizmobil.com/content/games/XXX/blizzard_mobile_auth_US_BattleNetAuthenticator_Blackberry_1_0_0.jad

and when that didn’t work I tried the 9000 Bold…

http://wap.bizmobil.com/content/games/XXX/blizzard_mobile_auth_US_BattleNetAuthenticator_Blackberry_8900_9000_1_0_0.jad

Ya.. I tried twice.  Undoubtedly I paid $2.00 for no reason… but I couldn’t ever get it to work no matter which user agent strings I used.  So instead I found a Blizzard Mobile Authenticator US jar file. This isn’t exactly optimal since this isn’t written for blackberry, so not everything will work… it’d be nice if I could find a copy of the jad I mentioned above.. that would work much better

Anyway, then I just emailed that to myself on my Tour, opened it, and it installed.  I ran it and it gave me a code to input on the website.  Again, the buttons didn’t work, so I had to exit and come back in.  Then it gave me the second code to enter on the website, and it worked!

The icon isn’t right.. you can’t go to Menu inside the app.. you CAN resync with # (Alt-Q).. but it works.  You open it and it gives you the authenticator code to login.  Works in WOW and on the website.  Woot.

If  someone out there reading this wants to send me the blizzard_mobile_auth_US_BattleNetAuthenticator_Blackberry_1_0_0.jad file, that would be rad of you.

the “playstation network” is “down” for users of the older PS3′s

this isn’t exactly true… the PSN is UP, it’s just that older Ps3′s can’t connect to it.  The date was reset to 12/31/99, which is outside the settable times.  Any game that stores trophies online won’t load, saying quit and reload to try and connect.

I think Ps3s that were turned on yesterday connected and then disconnected and then some flag was thrown south and now we can’t reconnect.  With the trophies thing, I can’t believe they wouldn’t know that PS3s wouldn’t be connected all the time, and so I’d think they’d cache the trophies locally… I think they had to… so that leads me to believe “something happened” upon connecting to kill the trophy cache, and now we can’t reconnect.  So, two problems.

Either that or there is another timer inside the PS3 besides the clock.. my “black box sense” is telling me it’s one of those two things.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of speculation about trophies… we HAVE NOT lost them… even though they aren’t listed on your PS3.  If anyone is worried, login to the PSN website and you’ll see that they are still there.  No big deal.

if you have a barcode like 047995855086, then the leading 0 is important to have there

unfortunately, excel, in it’s infinite wisdom, will not keep that leading 0 there unless the format of the cell is Text…

so, that should be easy right?  If you have a spreadsheet with 047995855086 in there, and copy it to a cell formatted as Text, it will STILL drop the leading 0.

The magic is you have to paste it from a “text source” (I’m calling it) like Notepad.

so let’s say you have a huge column of 12 digit barcodes (with no spaces or dashes or anything).. all the leading 0′s are dropped.

First apply a Custom Formatting to all the cells and put in 12 0′s … wowzors… now we have leading 0′s.. well, you can SEE leading zeros.. but if you were to copy a cell or reference it or whatever, guess what? … leading 0′s dropped

soooo .. now copy that column… and paste in to NOTEPAD… ah ha.. magic sauce is brewing!

now, back in the Excel, change that column’s format to Text … leading zero’s are dropped, but the stage is set

back in notepad, copy everything and paste back in to excel… leading zeros really there (for real) and the cell has a little green triangle in the corner.. you may even get a warning cuz OMFG you have LEADING ZEROS!!!

but.. that’s what you want… you win! do a happy dance!

I so upgraded my phone to the Blackberry Tour on Sprint.  It has EVDO Rev A and a pretty quick processor… it’s a pretty viable computer in the palm of your hand, but still a really great phone.. even clearer that my Pearl was.. which is usually a trade off with other such devices I’ve had.

Connection speed is about 500-600Kbps .. not 1-3Mbps like EVDO Rev A is supposed to give ya, so it’s really the processor in the thing slowing it down.  This is about 10 times faster, in both directions, though than the Pearl.  I ran the speed tests using Xtreme Labs speedtest.

With the faster stuff and the full keyboard and a speaker that can play LOUD ring tones (I have the volume at half right now, cuz damn), that fixes all the problems I had with the Pearl.

The only problem I’ve had so far is Google Maps not being able to find the GPS.. I guess they are working on that.  I got another app called Poynt that I’ll use unti it gets fixed.

I’ve also found an SSH client for the Blackberry which uses MIDP Java stuff found here: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/  … works pretty damn well… you gotta be sure to put the connection type on TCP/IP .. Default will not work and give a connection string error .. now I can reset shit over ssh from my phone… it’s the holy grail I’ve been looking for since the dawn of time

I can’t believe I’ve been messing with it for so long.. Microsoft Live Writer is SOOO SLOW.

I’ve switched to ScribeFire… an extension for FireFox.. it is so much better… I guess not as “fancy looking” but it works a whole hell of a lot better… doesn’t take a minute to turn it on and another minute to start typing and 5 minutes to publish.. it does all that really really fast.

I decided to reinvent the wheel and make my own contact syncing for egroupware on the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform.. so C# talking to PHP

the reason is all the others I’ve tried don’t work.. all of them end up in contacts being duplicated.  Also my contact store backend is LDAP and uses LDAP address books like egroupware suggests… still.. doesn’t work with their syncing stuff.

I have both sending contacts and getting contacts working now.. and you can currently delete all contacts on the device before you read them from the server… deleting the other way will work eventually too

so nothing ever deletes unless you pick “delete all before import/export” .. then it wipes out everything (right now only local deletes work) and sends all changes over

it also never overwrites a contacts filled in attribute with nothing … there’s always gotta be “something” to overwrite

… so this isn’t syncing.. so much as writing one way or the other and filling in what’s missing, if anything

if anyone out there in the world wants a copy, email me.. I’ll put up a link somewhere later.. I was thinking about making this a sourceforge thing, but really it’s for internal use and I don’t want to “support” it for other people

Well, Microsoft would have you think so.

The more I work in MS stuff, the more I realize everything is really just dressed up VB… C#, .NET, etc … they just changed the words to make you think you aren’t writing in BASIC… feel good… “u r totally awsum there guy!”

nice one MS.. nice one

Samsung NC10-14GW … so far pretty nice.  What did Jon say.. a media consumer and not a media creator.. well.. I’m blogging from it

I went on an uninstalling rampage like I always do.. well.. don’t uninstall the Easy Display manager.. you need that or you FN keys don’t work