Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

My computer is still broken

My internet is still shut off

My site is back where it was for the time being

I am still in search of the optimal way to keep the tools I use for contacts and calendars and mail and feeds in sync with each other. It’s a daunting challenge. I have yet to find a very good solution, but I’m going to describe some of the tools I use to try to do this.

Gmail

I’m actually using the Google Apps for Your Domain, but it’s close enough to being GMail for me. GMail’s support of the IMAP protocol makes using a desktop client to read my email easy.

Thunderbird

My email client of choice. For a long while, I was simply using Gmail’s web interface, until I decided that I wanted to get myself a PGP key and start signing my outgoing messages. Enigmail makes that easy.

Lightning

A plugin for Thunderbird. This gives me my calendar in the same program I read my email.

Outlook

I wanted to give outlook a try. I wanted to like it. I used to use it for work. It supports IMAP. Unfortunately, I found it to be way too slow for my tastes. I could jump from message to message in Thunderbird way faster than I ever could in Outlook. Still, I need it if I want to synch my contacts and my calendar to my Creative Zen Vision:M.

Chandler Hub

I needed an online place where I could send my calendar. I am constantly running the latest nightly build of Lightning, thanks to the nightly updater, so the Provider for Google Calendar wasn’t working for me. Also, GCal doesn’t support To-Do’s. Chandler Hub was the best service I have thus found that would allow me to do a 2-way sync of my calendar.

Plaxo

A great service. They have plugins for both Outlook and Thunderbird. This keeps my address book in sync between the two, as well as several of my other online address books. Unfortunately, Plaxo for Thunderbird doesn’t sync my calendar. If they did, I could probably get rid of a lot of the other tools I use.

Schedule World

This is a new service I have been trying. Thunderbird syncs it’s calendar with Chandler. Outlook syncs with Plaxo. Outlook won’t read Chandler properly, so I had no way to get the stuff in my calendar over to Outlook. This is where Schedule World steps in. I have been having a little trouble getting it to synch my calendar with Outlook, but it is doing the To-Do’s fine.

It has now taken me 3 days to get this post written, so I’m going to stop right now. There are other links of my chain of getting things synched, but they are not as important as these pieces.

Do you have a suggestion for a tool that helps you stay in sync? Feel free to contact me.

Every day this week I have been forcing myself to get up at 07:00. Naturally, I am somewhat of a nocturnal person, left to my own devices, the time I go to bed will get progressively later and later. Combine this with the fact that I have been unemployed for approximately the past 8 months, my sleeping schedule has fallen into what is "normal" for my body. The only limiting factor in this equation is the fact that I have two small children.

Toby has actually gotten pretty good at going to bed at a decent time. He used to be pretty much of a night owl, but (thanks to the efforts of my wife) has been managing to go to sleep at a normal time for a 2 1/2 year old boy on most nights.

Then there is Random… Much like her brother when he was younger, she tends to stay up fairly late. I am pretty good at getting her to sleep by standing up with her and rocking her, but that does not always work. I can only hope that in time, we will be able to get her to bed at an earlier time.

This will become very important to them as they get older and start going to school. I have always felt that school starts entirely too early. I understand most of the reasoning behind it. They try to get the kids to school before their parents would traditionally have to go to work, but it was always so early. I have always felt that my grades in school would have been better had I started even 2 hours later. Then again, maybe I should have just studied harder.

I will be starting my new job this coming Monday. I will be required to be in Ann Arbor by 8:00. My current wake time of 7:00 most likely won’t be sufficient. I plan on eventually pushing my alarm clock back another half hour tomorrow to get my body used to being a morning person once again. Once I have acclimated to 6:30, I’ll probably push it back again to 6:00. That should give me plenty of time to lollygag before having to go to work.

Today I made the decision to move a lot of the content on my site into WordPress using it’s "pages" feature.

Previously, my site was separated into two sections. My WordPress blog, and everything else. At one time, I had my blog matching the theme of the rest of my site.

When I updated my install a while back I pretty much lost that. Considering that I hate the visual look of my site as it is, I didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to bring down the prettiness of WP’s default theme with my horrid artistic sensibilities. So now I have the task of copying and pasting a bunch of text from my custom PHP content management system (if you could call it that) into WordPress’s online page editing page.

I was really hoping that Windows Live Writer would give me the ability to compose and edit pages in adition to blog posts, but as far as I can tell, I don’t believe they do.

In other WordPress related news, I’ve updated the template to create better RDFa for this site. I don’t know exactly how many other sites out there give the complete SIOC information for their blog in RDFa, but this one does. I’m actually not sure how good my attempt at RDFa is. I use an extension for Firefox called Operator. It’s a really great program for identifying microformats in a page, but the current release isn’t fully updated to the new RDFa spec. Because of that, I can’t tell if some of the things I’ve tried to do (like using @instanceof) are actually producing the desired triples.

Did I mention that at least some of these pages should be showing up as hAtom enabled? Well they are. I really wish that WordPress would include a lot of this stuff by default. I’ve been thinking of taking my changes to the default install of WordPress and publishing a patch file that people could apply. If there is any interest out there, let me know.

No Parking on Cement

Originally uploaded by duck1123
This was a sign that my wife spotted at a gas station when we were coming home from my mom’s house.

Instant messaging programs need to support the sending of language information. I am an English speaker. 98% of the time, if I am producing something, it will be in the English language. I would probably go into the preferences of my IM client and set my default to en-us.

Now, I have been occasionally been known to say the odd phrase in German. I took two years of German in high school, so I know just a little bit. The rare case that I write something in German, I could easily change the language selector to German. This should be sent out as xml:lang="de" in the case of Jabber.

This would be good, for one, because it would allow us to file the messages appropriately w.r.t. language. Second, you could then get tools to sit between the message and you. Imagine that I am an English speaker for a moment. (Really stretch that imagination.) Now say that I am speaking via IM someone that has set their preferred language to Spanish. It would be easy to set a processor on my end to take the message I have received, automatically run it through a translation service, and display it to me. I would of course still want to have the original message available to me as well.

All these things could be easily done if clients routinely sent correct language information. Since this information is currently almost universally unreliable, it’s hard to really make use of it.

This is what that site wants me to put in my code. I’m not quite sure I want to do that. I would love to find a way to serve all of my site as application/xhtml+xml, but I have all these old quizzes I took back in my Livejournal days. I’ve tried to clean it up, but there’s just so much of it. I would need a better way to open and edit the MySQL database that Wordpress uses before I’m really going to get it all cleaned up.

That’s my clean up of it. It’s not pretty, but it’s a lot better, markup wise.

I don’t want to talk about my rankings. I don’t really know enough about the records of any of these people (politically correct term) to verify if this is accurate or not. All I had to do was answer a few questions about how I feel about certain current issues, and then rank my interest in those issues. I’m assuming the script merely matched my answers to the public stated opinions of these candidates.

This makes me think that more and more we need a RDF version of APML. The amount of good, semantic, machine-readable data is increasing all the time. I want to be able to link from my FOAF file a service that gives all of the data it has collected for me the ranking and weight of my interest in any given URI.

Once the service is in place, then would come the tools that let me manipulate those settings, and other applications that dump into it. We would just need to mint a URI for each of these issues. Then we could create a database of the candidates, and their relation to those issues. Once I have rated those issues, it’s a simple matter to pull together my interests (in the political profile) and the stances of the politicians, and do a simple match.

Oh well, the happy, shiny, semantic world will come one day. Until then, I will base my voting decisions on a simple CGI script.

I have some thoughts to write out, but I know I’m going to need more than the measly 140 characters that twitter will give me.

Right this instant, (as soon as it loads) I am buying a new domain name. There has been this long thread in the Jabber Admin mailing list about what name is best to call Jabber. There are several names. The web-y name is Jabber. That was the original name, and that is what many people know it as. The problem is that it is also a name of Jabber, the company. Being an open protocol, they wanted to have a disconnect between the open standard and a company that uses that standard.

The IETF-y name is: XMPP, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Very techie sounding name. My mother in law wouldn’t really remember that, nor would she want to say it, let alone use it. You aren’t going to win over people reluctant to change by making them switch from a normal word like “aim” or “yahoo” by making them say four letters. XMPP sounds great when you’re throwing together every acronym that starts with X for your resume, (XML, XSLT, XQuery, XPath, XHTML, XMPP, XForms, ad infinitum.) but in can’t be said in a few syllables, let alone be verbed.

[just bought name, more later]

The next name is of course, the name of the Behemoth. Google Talk. Google, in it’s infinite wisdom, used XMPP as the technology when they released their Google Talk product. Every Gmail user is also a Jabber user. This has caused quite a few sites shooting for the lowest common denominator listing the input field as GTalk address. Sometimes they try to remedy the situation by also having an option for Jabber. This make it even worse as now people start to think they’re two separate things. bill@gmail.com doesn’t realize they can talk to sue@jabber.org so they never do. I don’t like the name, or even the standard Talk name because I think it’s just kleenexing it.[1]

{back from footnote land}

So anyway, when I wanted to buy a new domain name, I had the choice between SpreadJabber.org and SpreadXMPP.org I didn’t think we really needed the Spread XMPP one. Anyone that knows anything about XMPP is probably capable of Googleing it on any search engine[3] and finding out more. So I bought SpreadJabber.org from Go Daddy. I don’t know what I’ll do with it yet. I’d like to put up some information for the average user on why they should switch to Jabber. Anything you got is welcome. I’ll also need some buttons designed. I might drop in a Wordpress blog for now.

I will gladly sell the domain name off to whoever can prove to me that they will be a good steward for 7 dollars. I know there are bot that crawl the web for good domain names they can buy and sqat. I mentioned the name earlier, and didn’t want it to get stolen.

I’m interested to hear what you think I should do with it.

My JID is Duck at Kronkltd.net.

[1]: I’d really like to get the term “kleenexed” and the various forms of it entered into the standard lexicon. So often you will see a case where a certain maker of a product gets so well known that the company’s name gets used when referring to the general product. (Google, Jell-o, Zip-Lock, Cool(Whip|Aid), Tylenol, and of course Kleenex) I say why not make matters worse and verb one of them to refer to all of those products in general. So start dropping the K-bomb casually in polite dinner conversations. Make them think you’re smart by using a word that none of them have ever heard before. They’ll tell 6 friends who will tell 6 friends who will tell 6 friends, who will realize that they only know the same 6 people and move on, but someone will over-hear them and know what it means, go home and Google[2] it and find this post, and learn about Jabber.

[2]: By “Google it” I of course mean going to www.google.com entering the word and hitting enter. I will not be accused of kleenexing the name of Google. I will verb it, but I will not kleendex it.

[3]: Okay, I couldn’t resist. I guess I am a kleendexer after all.

I spent a good portion of my morning injecting some RDFa into my blog. In case you didn’t know, RDFa is basically Microformat’s big brother. RDFa takes the full power of RDF and embeds it invisibly in a normal XHTML page. It takes a little bit to get used to thinking of your data in terms of RDF triples, but when it comes down to it, it’s really not that much harder than coding in support for a Microformat.

I’ve got a bit more data that I can still mark up properly, but for now you can grab your favorite RDFa extractor, highlighter bookmarklet, or Firefox extension and see the semantic goodness hidden just under the covers of this page.

I just got back from Kali’s house. I joined their Sunday night D&D campaign. Why can’t I teach barbarians there no need to kill?

I miss working for Comcast. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really miss actually working for Comcast. What I do miss, is the free service they give to employees.

I just had to pay them off quite a bit of money to get them to turn my service back on. I think I need to start shopping around for other ISP’s. Or, at the very least, see if I can get in touch with the retention department and see if I can convince them to put me on a promotion.

Windows Live Writer sees like it’s a pretty good tool for writing blog posts. The only problem, Wordpress supports tags natively now. Hopefully, with the help of this tutorial, I’ll be able to add tags from right within Writer.

I recently read that the new version of Windows Live Writer supports AtomPub. Always being one to play with new thing, I’ve downloaded it and am testing it’s ability to post to my blog.

I am currently looking at a baby carriage candle that my wife got from her friend’s baby shower. It’s a cutesy little baby carriage with pink wheels and blue bedding and frills, all made of wax. There’s no little wax baby inside, (thank god) but there is a little wick in the middle of the bedding.

Now it may be just me, but isn’t seeing a flame sticking up from your baby carriage generally considered a bad thing?

I wonder if having a Babel Fish would help me understand what my two year old son is trying to say to me. What about the Universal Translator from Star Trek? We need something here.

Criticism aside, he is actually getting really good at talking. The only thing that Random can say thus far is “da da da da da”. I think “Da” must be the baby equivalent of “Aloha” and “Smurf“

This is just a warning to anyone that may still be subscribed to this feed. You may start to see an increase in the number of short posts to this blog. If you don’t really like me, or don’t have the desire to read my shorter posts, I suggest you take this time to unsubscribe from my feed and go stick your head in a pig.

I’ve been meaning to do it for some time, but I finally got around to upgrading my Wordpress to the latest release. Once I did that, I installed the WP-OpenID+ plugin. I tried installing it once before, but was having problems with the libraries. I also wrote my own ages ago, but never had it quite working right and gave up on it.

You must now be registered with a valid OpenId to comment.

I’m going naked today.

It appears that the default Wordpress theme has a little bit of style information left. I’ll have to fix that some day.

Edit: fixed (and on the same day no less)

This is a test.

This is a test message I’m sending using Imified. I’m really sending this from my XMPP client. (Trillian) but I gave Imified access to my blog.