CalConnect (The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium) will host a one-day Timezone Workshop on Tuesday, February 3, 2009, at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. This workshop is intended for and open by invitation to parties with an interest in Timezones, how they are currently implemented and managed, and what to do about them in the future. We particularly want to attract representatives of other industry and technology areas to gain a broad perspective on the problems with Timezones as implemented today, and the relevance of our proposed direction. You do not need to be a CalConnect member to attend the workshop. Please see http://www.calconnect.org/timezoneworkshop.shtml for more information, and to request an invitation to the event.

The error that occured, in a console window, was:

Error : Could not open WIN file D:\05006XSP.swm!
ERROR : RecoWMAInfo.exe did not run poperly!

Long story short, I ended up installing the windows 7 beta. We had some experience with Vista since I own a copy, and we figured we might aswell try something that worked well, and wasn’t old(XP).

It worked amazingly well with the laptop. The only driver I had to get was the one for the built-in camera. Since Win7 uses the same driver model as Vista, the Vista driver from the Toshbiba support page worked very well.

I must say that installation was a breeze. You just install the plugin Intense Debate provides, sign up and tweak your configuration, and you’re ready to go. No need to mess with any tags, or any code at all, and as far as I can tell, it just works.

The plugin mirrors very many of the configuration options from the Intense Debate site into its wordpress settings page, and it also allows you to switch to the old commenting system with a flick of a switch if you want to, even letting mobile devices use the old system as many of them don’t support javascript.

The best part is probably that importing and exporting is also a breeze, meaning that you’re not losing any data. The plugin also imported all my wordpress comments automagically, which was also a very good feature.

For now I haven’t had any comments in the new system yet, so no review of usage so far, but installation is absolutely a simple task who everyone who managed to install WordPress and any other plugin will be able to carry out.

When I’ve had a few comments I’ll make a small review of the usage from the administration side, so feel free to comment away and test ahead. Since this post is about testing a commenting system, I think it’s fair to use it for testing. So if you don’t have anything to say but just would ike to test it writing garbage, feel free, I will neither mark it as spam nor delete it unless it’s offensive.

Check out http://www.intensedebate.com/ for more information.

Well, today I took the step up and installed postfix on the vps, and now I’m receiving mail again. I’m not sure if any of you have sent any mail, but I forgot to publish two comments because of it. Very sorry about that.

I’d also like to mention this excellent documentation for setting up everything you need for a good mail setup http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/. Easy to follow, and it works.

I’ll also be removing all the ads on the page. They are generating a big zero of income, and they are just taking up space. I’ll probably put in a blog roll in instead of the ads and leave the income to my daily job.

Well, Google did as I told and led me to this thread. People were talking about deleting files on the command line, sorting permission and even re-installing the Dock.

Too much work for me, so I turned to IRC, knowing morning here meant evening somewhere else.

ph^: Is there anything similar to explorer in windows that you can kill in os x to make the dock and ⌘⇥ work again?

Infininight: yeah…

Infininight: it’s called the “Dock”

And so I fired up Activity Monitor and force killed Dock. Two seconds later my Dock popped up and ⌘ ⇥ worked again.

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

The first challenge was just about finding the proper drivers. Apple, for some reason, do not make the necessary drivers easily available. The only way to get them is to extract them from boot camp. Luckily someone have already done this. You will need the KeyboardInstaller.exe and BootCamp.msi.

Once you have them both installed, you’ll see that most of your keys work as expected, except (at least in my case) ⌥ and ⌘, both left and right. Well, they work, but they are swapped. First I tried something called “Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4″, but that didn’t even show three keys to the left of the space bar, so no dice there.

First I found an application called [AutoHotKey] but this had alot more funtionality than I needed, but in the docs I found a reference to another application called KeyTweak. KeyTweak not only allows you to remap files, but it does it natively (in registry), which means that you don’t need any applications running for it to work, and it will work in all applications and games.

After remapping your keys, which is really easy, you just reboot and everything works as expected. Keep in mind that you have to map both ways, Left Alt to Left Windows, and Left Windows to Left Alt. Do the same thing for the Right Alt and Right Windows too.

Now you can have a peek at Apples keyboard mapping in XP and get full advantage of your lovely keyboard.

I just want to mention that this works exactly as expected over synergy too. Even if you have your keyboard connected to the windows machine and use synergy over to OS X, it feels like it’s connected to the Mac because all keys work exactly like the native OS X keys.

Commands only (details below)

ssh-keygen -t dsa       # generate keys
# enter pass phrase

ssh peter@neverland     # login to server like normal
# enter password

mkdir -p .ssh           # generate .ssh dir 
exit                    # log off server

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub peter@neverland:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2
                        # load key onto server
# enter password

mate ~/.ssh/config
                        # Host neverland
                        # User peter
                        # #Port 22

mate ~/.bash_login
                        # alias neverland="ssh neverland"

source ~/.bash_login
nev⇥                    # log in on server
# possibly enter pass phrase in dialog once

Setting up SSH keys

To use SSH keys you first got to generate keys on your local machine. This is done very easily with:

ssh-keygen -t dsa
# enter passphrase

This will generate two keys in ~/.ssh/, named id_dsa and id_dsa.pub. The id_dsa is your private key and it should never be shared with anyone. id_dsa.pub is your public key and it’s this file you distribute to all the servers.

DO NOT USE AN EMPTY PASSPHRASE, THIS DEFEATS A LOT OF THE PURPOSE

Right, now that your keys are generated it’s time to spread them onto our servers. In the examples I’ll use “peter” as user name for the server and “neverland” as host, but you substitute these with your own user name and host name.

First we need to log on to our server and make sure the .ssh/ directory exists in our home directory.

ssh peter@neverland
# enter password
mkdir -p .ssh
exit

Now we copy the public keys to the server by using this scp:

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub peter@neverland:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2
# enter password

That’s it, you’re ready to use keys:

ssh peter@neverland
# NO PASSWORD REQUIRED - we get straight in

Now that’s a lie you probably don’t get straight in. First OS X will ask you for the password. It’s important that you note this is the pass phrase you generated for the keys, not the normal password.

SSH agent

Now at first you think we haven’t gotten very far. Alright, so you only have to remember one pass phrase, but you still got to type that when you connect. The beauty with Leopard though, is that it’s initiating ssh agent automatically, and hence you only have to enter you pass phrase once per session on your computer. That means the next time you try to connect to any server using the keys you just created, you wont have to type the pass phrase. Now it’s a pretty big difference between entering a password every time you connect to a server and only enter your pass phrase once (first connection) after you restart your computer. (ssh agent livs across hibernations)

Extra tips & tricks

Setup your ssh config

Use your favourite editor to edit ~/.ssh/config. This might be an empty file, but that’s fine. Add this:

Host neverland
User peter
# Port 22

The port part is redundant as 22 is default SSH port, but this is great to add if the port is something other than 22. After doing this, it should suffice to just type this command to get logged in:

ssh neverland

To change your SSH config is also the only way I know of to get svn+ssh:// to work if your local user name differs from the one used on the server. Every application or protocol that uses SSH will use these settings.

Aliases

Another good thing to setup are aliases for host names, this particularly goes if the host name is long and/or difficult. Setting up aliases are really easy. Fire up your favourite editor to edit ~/.bash_login. Add this at the end of the file:

alias neverland="ssh neverland"

Save and close the file, then type the following command to load the new settings:

source ~/.bash_login    

Now it should suffice to type this command to get logged in and ready on your server:

neverland

It will even be autocompleted like commands and files (nev⇥).
Pretty cool, eh?