the reality tunnel

ghing@silvertongue:~/.mozilla/firefox/imtysl65.default/Cache$ ls -lh `find . -size +1M | file -f - | grep Flash | awk -F ':' '{ printf "%s ", $1; }'`

Update: Photos of my planner! Mine is on the left, next to a moleskin to give you an idea of the relative size.  Below is what each day looks like.

I use Sandy for most of my calendaring, but don’t have a PDA or mobile phone with a convenient calendar app (and can’t afford one).  So, I needed a paper daily planner that could be generated on a weekly basis from the events that I shoot into Sandy.  I find that it’s no too hard to do a daily paper->electronic sync to update my calendar in Sandy.  Sandy has an ics export which is really nice if I want to view my appointments along with appointments from my other calendars (like my work one, managed by Webcalendar).

What you need:

• Calendar software that supports printing a daily view (I used KOrganizer)
• psutils package

Import your remote calendar(s)

I first imported my calendar into KOrganizer (File->Import->Import Calendar and then entered the URL of my iCal feed in the Location field) .

Print the calendar to a postscript file

I printed a page for each day of my calendar with  File->Print and then chose Print Day for the Print Style.  I selected a month worth of dates for the Date & Time Range.  I clicked Print and chose the Print to File (Postscript) option for the printer Name.  The ability to print to a file came with my default KDE setup, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get this ability from whatever printing management system you’re using.

Make the postscript file 4up

I used the psnup program to put four days on one letter sized page.

 ghing@silvertongue:~/tmp$ psnup -pletter -b0.25in -4 planner.ps planner-up.ps

The above options say that the output paper size is letter, that there should be a .25 inch margin around each page (I did this to allow for a binding on the left hand side of the sheets), that there should be 4 pages from the file planner.ps combined into every one page in the output file planner-up.ps.

Open the postscript file and print it

I used evince to open and print my planner.

Cut the pages into quarters

I used a paper cutter to cut the printed pages into quarters.  Take care to keep track of the order of pages so it’s easier to assemble your calendar.

Find a cover and a binding

For mine, I used part of the cover of a notebook that I dumpstered in Bologna and held everything together with a butterfly clip that I got from the supply closet at work.  Be resourceful!

I’ve been playing around with Drupal for work and wanted to use mod_auth_kerb to authenticate Drupal users. The Webserver Auth module seemed helpful, but only worked in Drupal 4. I got the module working with Drupal 5.5 running on Apache 2.2.3 using mod_auth_kerb 5.1.

Link to my patch to make webserver_auth-4.7.x-1.x-dev work with Drupal 5.x
Link to documentation  on updating  Drupal 4.7 modules to Drupal 5.

I’ve been working on setting up a Drupal instance for work and have, for the first time been using Postgres for the database instead of MySQL. I was installing the Content Template module and got errors when the module tried to create the tables by default. I think the problem is with the fact that the CREATE statements in contemplate.install use MySQL-only data types.  It seems that others have reported this problem as there is an issue on the Drupal site at http://drupal.org/node/172775 .

I was able to create working tables manually with the following syntax:

CREATE TABLE contemplate (
    type character(32) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL,
    teaser text NOT NULL,
    body text NOT NULL,   rss text NOT NULL,
    enclosure character(128) NOT NULL,
    flags integer DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (type)
);CREATE TABLE contemplate_files (
    site character(255) NOT NULL,
    data bytea NOT NULL,
    UNIQUE (site)
);

I made a patch to contemplate.install that fixed this issue. download

Once I got past the table creation, the module still returned SQL errors when I tried to update the template for a CCK content type. This seemed to be due to a problem with the SQL syntax. I made a patch to contemplate.module that fixes this in Postgres. I don’t know if it ends up breaking MySQL in the process. download

Oh yeah. I’m using Drupal 5.5 with contemplate 5.x-1.8 and Postgres 8.1.9

Helping out with the AMC website, I threw together a quick Drupal 4.7 module (haven’t tested it on newer version of Drupal yet) to export user profile data generated by the profile module to a CSV file suitable for import into a spreadsheet program.

UPDATE: After searching the Drupal website, I realized that someone had already invented this wheel.

Link

My job is letting me work while I’m on tour.  For the most part I can just log into machines remotely.  I log into my workstation and from there, I can get access to internal machines.  I just keep a screen session running so I can pick up where I left off.  However,  I’ve run into frustrations when I have to copy images that I edit on my notebook to a remote host that is beyond my SSH gateway.  So, I made a simple script called scpush that copies the file from my notebook the a dropbox directory on the SSH gateway and then copies the file from the gateway to the ultimate destination.