Many years after most users I have jumped on the iCal train too. I’ve dumped my very old Palm and started using iCal as my main calendar.

But iCal itself is not good enough:

• it doesn’t know how to calculate Easter. For this I have subscribed (free!) to project24, which is very nice for Swiss holidays (for German and Austrian ones too).
• it doesn’t show the week number. project24 comes to the rescue again.
• I want to print/export real lists, not just empty boxes with a date. Some calenders have less than one event per week and I wanted a list with all events. All iCal does is filling pages with empty days and once in a while a day with an event. Clay Spinuzzi mentions the Ruby iCal module, which did the trick for me.

What I haven’t got working yet: iSync limits the calendar period that is copied to my mobile to 8 weeks and I haven’t found any hidden plist entry or any other hack to fix that.

I just installed Postfix Enabler to be able to send my emails through a SMTP server on my own powerbook. I didn’t want the hassle to configure the postfix server myself, so I went for a software doing it the Macintosh way.

The default configuration was a little too open for my taste. I want others (that is me on the PC nearby) to use the postfix server only if they know a password. Using the Postfix Enabler configuration tab to setup password authentication still lets anybody on the same subnet send mail without a password.

The three of us had a very nice time in Scotland in the last weeks. Most people are very friendly and helpful; we stayed mostly in B&Bs and found some that I can’t help telling (in alphabetical order):

• Aberdeen: Crynoch Guest House
• Broadford: Ailean Cottage
• Broadford: Blairmore B&B (just across Ailean Cottage)
• Pitlochry: Bridge House B&B

Triggered by a Slashdot Story I tried to find the best aerial photo of my home town Berne. Here is what I’ve found so far:

• Google Maps, not very detailed (linked from the Brad’s UNESCO World Heritage map links page
• map.search.ch, much more detailed, showing the “Bundeshaus”
• The most detailed photos I found at the official town map site. When you choose “Orthofoto” from the “Darstellung” selection and go to the coordinates 600 420/199 550 you can see the fancy new plaza in front of the Bundeshaus at almost any scale (1:1000 works fine)

If you know of other photograph sources, please leave a comment.

I’ve got a Benq X-Touch 122 keyboard with Swiss German layout. Apparently this is a very rare species, or how else would it be possible to not get it right?

The shortcut on the front of the “Y” key is wrong; Undo is Ctrl-Z (or Cmd-Z), not Ctrl-Y. It is true that the “Z” key sits to left of the “X” with many layouts (the QWERTY ones), but not with the German QWERTZ layouts. 😢

Even before I upgraded to OS X 10.4 (Tiger), I got the report that the Save File dialog in Realpolitik crashes. Now I have applied a quick’n’dirty fix for the next couple of days for all Tiger users and released Realpolitik 1.7.0 Alpha 2 earlier than planned.

Currently I’m revamping the dialogs known to Mac developers as Navigation Services. Already done in Alpha 2 is the Open File dialog:

From the users perspective you have now a working type pop-up, where you can choose Realpolitik Files (.dpy files and files created by Realpolitik), Text Files or just any document.

The four days at the ACCU Conference in Oxford are over. Except Günter nobody seems to have blogged the C++ track.

Apart from the discussions and presentations what should go into the next C++ standard (called C++0x and scheduled for 2009), one of the big topics was concurrency and a new awareness that some new ideas are needed. Herb Sutter presented the points of his recent DDJ article. As an example for an exercise simple to understand and yet far from easy to solve he mentioned the Santa Claus Problem:

For some time now I wanted to change my weblog to a server based one. I did no extensive research, but what I read about WordPress made my try it first locally and then for good. So far I’m happy with it.

To get the nice permanent links (like http://pesche.schlau.ch/2005/04/14/wordpress-and-new-hosting-provider/), the web server (if it is an Apache httpd) has to support mod_rewrite. After some failed tries I mailed my hosting provider (hosttech.ch) if they could enable mod_rewrite. This is the answer I got:

After much carbonizing by Ben Hines and some polishing by me a new Realpolitik Release is available on Sourceforge, the first release for OS X.

The release version Realpolitik 1.7.0 Alpha1 is not yet stable (hence Alpha 1), there are still some known (and probably many more unknown) errors like selection and redrawing problems with the orders window, but with some care (backup your .dpy files!) it should be usable.

Parallel to the Mac version a new Windows version is out. It’s called Alpha too, but should be as stable as the old releases. The only major change for the windows version is the switch from Mindvision Installer VISE to the NSIS installer. VISE was once free for shareware developers, but is not anymore. And NSIS looks at least as good as VISE, is open source and has CVS-friendly plain text configuration files.

Ever since I started my blog, I was looking for a neat solution to upload my internet pages whenever Nanoblogger updates the local copy.

I didn’t want just a recursive upload, because some directories (e.g. data) shouldn’t be publicly accessible. My first attempt was a script using ncftpput, but it always uploads the whole site.

I wanted a more intelligent solution that copies only new and changed files. This is presumably a very common tasks, there should be plenty of ways to achieve it. But almost all FTP clients capable of intelligent uploads involve some GUI. The only command line client I could find is lftp (available on OS X from Fink and from Darwinports).