Schinckel.net

I ended up using a program called Serial Mail for the first mailout I did. I’m really hoping it works, as there isn’t really a way to tell if it has or not. It’s currently sending them as I type this. I really think I’ll end up rolling my own - there’s some limitations as to the system I used (a typo/bug means I can’t get people’s birthdays!), and I really think I can do better. I think I’ll write my own templating interface, rather than use a Draft (although, this is a good idea). And it just uses AppleScript calls to do all of the generation - I think I may try to hook straight into the APIs. Which reminds me - I came across someone who mentioned it’s possible to make ‘proper’ custom fields in the Address Book Database - which wouldn’t be accessible through the standard application, but would allow greater flexibility. Like to define a field as only being able to have a particular value, such as a Coaching or Referee Level, or Gender. A custom program that can work with custom fields, and do mass-mailings. Something to do in the next holidays. I wonder how long this thing is going to take to send all of those 146 emails?

I’d forgotten this was how I’d removed the Operator Logo last time: I registered with SMSpup.com, and Australian Web-based SMS service. If you register you get a couple of points, and you only need one to get an operator logo. Then make a custom operator logo, with no background, and make it so it is just whitespace (a single space works well). Then choose your provider, and then click Preview. You may need to re-choose the provider before clicking Send. All done. When you receive the Operator Logo, it will default to being active, masking the YES OPTUS that was there, or whatever your provider displays. If you ever want it back: Menu âžž Settings âžž Main Display âžž Operator logo âžž Off

To disable the annoying camera sound in the Nokia 6101, do the following: Menu âžž Media âžž Camera âžž Options âžž Settings âžž Camera sounds âžž Off And I thought I’d need to get some fancy firmware hack!

I’m not having any real issues with my new phone, but these are the things I’d like to be able to change:

• It’d be great to be able to Sync with my Mac Address Book.
• Camera shutter sound is very loud. Will need to disable it. Done.
• PTT button is a waste of space. Would like to remap it to something else.
• Need a blank operator logo. Had one for the 6610, and it was great. Done.
• Front screen is lower in colour depth. Images look bad.
• Some photos don’t transfer across properly - they cannot be opened when copied to the phone.
• Memory isn’t very large (<3Mb).
• The Optus image on the mini screen when it’s open sucks.

I was excited about the update to Missing Sync for Palm OS. Finally, it promised to link up Palm and iCal categories. This to me was a big reason to upgrade, since I seem to spend lots of time manually updating calendar items to be in the right category. It also promised better Address Book support. Including multiple addresses, birthdays, and support for Address Book groups. And that’s where it falls down. Multiple addresses are fine, as are birthdays. And groups work, kind of. The big issue is that it’s possible in Address Book for a contact to belong to multiple groups. In fact, I have contacts that are in about 6 groups. When one of these contacts is synched to the Palm, it chooses one of the groups, and assigns it to this. That’s okay, I have no issues with that. What shits me is that when it is brought back into Address Book, it now only belongs to this group. All of my hard work making sure all contacts are in the right groups is wasted. There’s a large difference between a one-to-one and a one-to-many or many-to-one correspondence. And contact vs. groups can clearly be a one-to-many. Obviously, in iCal, the behaviour is simpler, as an event can only belong to one calendar. And another thing. When I have an email address on iCal, I want it to be an email address on the Palm. Otherwise, when I try to IR it to my phone, it only takes the number part of the email address. ie: luser88@hotmail.com -> 88 in the phone. I think I understand why Mark/Space have set this up: PalmOS doesn’t distinguish between phone numbers and email addresses (other than email addresses get E-mail as their field name), so the simplest way to match up Work email and Home email is to just classify them as work and home, and parse the data on the reverse sync looking for the @ sign. Of course, this doesn’t help me a helluva lot.

Well, my contract with B Clear and Simple finally ran out, so I ran out and got a new phone, and a new contract. Luckily, a few years back the Australian Government decided to make it possible to port your number to a new Service Provider, so I’m keeping the same one. And for some reason to get this legislation through, they didn’t have to make up some bullshit about clear and present danger of terrorist threat on home soil… Anyway, the first OptusWorld shop I went to didn’t have any 6101 phones, so I went to another, and they did. Took about an hour (or so it seemed) for all of the paperwork to be done. Then the guy said it would take about 4-5 hours for my old SIM card to stop working, and my new Optus account to be up and running. I wandered 100m down the mall, went into a sushi bar and unpacked my phone. Battery nearly fully charged, and SIM card already working! So, I really like the phone so far. Especially since the old phone was starting to have some issues: buttons weren’t registering properly on a click, and so on. I’ll write more when I’ve actually used it for some time.

I bought a new phone yesterday, and was partway through the process of sending all of my contacts from my Palm Zire through to the new phone (a Nokia 6101), when I noticed that the contact details were not current. I’d just imported a whole lot more contacts into Address Book, and modified a fair chunk of the rest of them, and these changes weren’t reflected on the Zire. As it turned out, one of the System updates I’d done recently had updated iSync, and in doing this it removed the Zire from the synching devices list. Because Missing Sync doesn’t run iSync unless there are devices there it needs to sync with, and with Missing Sync/Palm Desktop you don’t explicitly run iSync either, I had no idea this had happened. Running iSync manually fixed the problem - it ran a little helper that re-added the Zire to the devices list. Of course, now I have to re-copy all of the contact I’d already transferred. Grr.

I don’t know how I never found this before… You can use {$smarty.get.<var>} to get the URL variable you want. For instance, you can use the following ones in WordPress MultiUser:

• year
• monthnum
• day
• name
• paged/page
• category_name
• wpblog

Unfortunately, these variables don’t seem to be set with Pages, rather than Posts. However, this has given me some tips as to how to fix the .htaccess RewriteRule problems causing Blogsome not to display subsequent pages of monthly archives. Possibly something to do with the fact it uses page, rather than paged, and that for some reason it parses the word page as the name of the post. This looks like not a .htaccess bug at all, now that I think of it.

This is more of a personal note, rather than a blog post, but still…

• timemods.js parts do not work in IE 5.5
• quicktags.js does not remove some text (as required) in IE 5.5
• floater.js has some issues with IE - clicking the shrink/grow checkbox when not at the top of the page is buggy. It then moves the box down too far, and keeps moving it down when scrolling
• In IE, the buttons are too wide. This might actually be a CSS issue, rather than a script issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an installation of IE 5.5 to figure out why the first one is so. I’m not that worried about it as it is a modification that can be lived without. Ditto for the second: it just removes the info about what tags are acceptable, and the buttons are just for these. The third one is the one that annoys me - I spent a fair bit of time getting the floater code to work properly, and I thought I had ironed out all of the bugs. It’s also very frustrating that IE doesn’t respect the position:fixed CSS attribute. That makes everything so much easier. (I think this is the section with the code bug. It may not be an IE specific bug, but since IE is the only browser that actually uses the object.makeFixed(); method, it’s the only browser that displays this bug). The final one may have something to do with Installed Fonts. I’m not that sure. And since in general text is a little too wide in IE (such as in the sidebar, where some stuff wraps onto a second line) this looks to be the case.

Luis Suarez, over at elsua.net wanted to know how to get his posts out of Blogsome. It’s really quite simple - all you need to do is use any XMLRPC offline composer that can get an arbitrary number of posts. ecto is a great example. Then set it to get more posts than you have, and it will grab them all from the server. You may need to learn how to set it all up - I won’t go through that here, but if enough people comment, I will write a tutorial. You can then re-post these entries to another server. IIRC, there isn’t a way to say ‘post all of these entries to another server for me’, so I wrote an AppleScript to do this when I migrated to Blogsome. Basically, it grabbed all of the posts from an Account, and cycled through them, posting each one to Blogsome (after changing the date to match the original, I think - there was an issue where it thought each post was a ’new’ post, rather than using the old date). If you are on a Windows box, there is a version of ecto for Win, but obviously no AppleScript, so you may wish to investigate other solutions. It should be possible to write a simple program that just does this (copies posts from one host to another, via XMLRPC), but I don’t have the need, so I won’t write one ;) As it turns out, Louis asked for, and received a zipped file of all his posts anyway, but incase anyone else needs to do it fast… Oh, and Louis, I didn’t write a Comment because I didn’t want to have to create yet another account somewhere. Maybe you could consider turning on Comments, and using some sort of Spam protection other than requiring logging in. Casual commenters will be quickly turned off this. All of my Comment Spam is gone, just by using a simple JavaScript - now all I get is Trackback Spam.