Stats

Sorry for the self-indulgence. I realize that the bulk of posts here have been about the blog itself. This is a passing phase due the the newness of self-publishing. And by passing, I mean it will pass. Promise. That said, one of the great things about self-hosting this site is that I now have easy access to statistics. Even though I'm using one of the cheaper hosting packages, a statistics package is just a click away. I turned it on a few days ago, and now, for the first time in the history of this site, I have stats. And stats, I'm discovering, can yield some really interesting information.

Some of the stuff I find oddly fascinating:

  • My most popular articles since moving are the recent Default Shell Hell, the famed iCal Publising post and the one about Sending Remote Commands via SSH. The first and last of which are pretty insanely geeky.
  • By far, the most popular means of accessing this site is via the Firefox web browser. I find this intriguing as it reflects my own particular preference to a far greater extent than it does actual, real-world browser usage. Oddly, the second most popular way to access this site is through NetNewsWire, which does not reflect my preferences for anything.
  • Heartening, but hardly surprising, is the fact that this site is read primarily by Mac users, or at least by people who are on Macs at the time they read the site.
  • And, finally, I'm quite pleased to see that people are actually still visiting this site, despite all the recent hullabaloo. Over the last couple weeks I've had several thousand hits from a few hundred unique visitors. That's way more than I ever thought were visiting the site, even when I was on Blogger. Neat-o!

At any rate, if anyone happened to visit today, they may have noticed some strange goings-on here at TASB. Yeah, that was me completely breaking — and subsequently restoring — the site. Let's just call it an episode of, "When Good SysAdmins Do Incredibly Stupid Things," and leave it at that. I really don't want to discuss it except to ask one thing: Did Blogger do something to completely break Wordpress's ability to import posts? 'Cause I haven't been able to do that now for a few weeks, and I need to.

In any case, it's always useful to reiterate: Always make a backup. And perhaps it's also useful to make an additional one if you happen not to be at the computer that has the backups on it. You know, before you go screwing around with delete keys and the like.

Okay then. See all 358 of you later.

UPDATE: And, oh yeah, since I totally broke it anyway, I decided to try another new look. I think I like this one better, now that I've had my way with it. A little stuffy, but still, pleasant and appealing.

UPDATE: The trouble importing Blogger to Wordpress is discussed and a solution proffered here on the Wordpress forums. For some reason it seems to work using a Wordpress.com login, but not on my 2.6.1 install. In fact, I think the last time it worked was when I was still at v.2.6, so perhaps this is a 2.6.1 bug. Whatever. I'm kind of over it after yesterday's fiasco.

Google Calendar Sharing

One of my "greatest hits," if you will, is called "Publish iCal Calendars on the Internet for Free," and it's about just that: publishing and subscribing to your iCal calendars using Box.net's free and WebDAV-friendly file sharing service. This method of calendar sharing has helped me (and others, I presume) keep tabs on all our calendars from one central location, but it's not been without its share of hassles and limitations. One problem has been that Box.net has never officially supported WebDAV, which is needed for the process to work. They have it enabled, but any sort of troubleshooting request is met with a "We don't support the WebDAV protocol," meaning all that nasty, angry, WebDAV-troubled traffic comes my way. Blech! No thank you.

What am I, a WebDAV protocol expert now?

Another big limitation of the service has historically been that the calendar is not a two-way sync. This has had to do mainly with how iCal and WebDAV work together, I think, though I don't claim to understand it fully. Suffice to say that, using Tiger's version of iCal and WebDAV for calendar sharing was a one-way affair. That is to say, one computer always acted as the calendar master — the machine that hosted and shared the calendar — and all other machines could only read said calendar. Again, not Box.net's fault. And again, impossible-to-fulfill requests coming my way for the functionality.

But Leopard changed the way iCal works in some significant and incredibly useful ways. When it was announced that Leopard's iCal would support the CalDAV standard, many of us admins were elated. For CalDAV, you see, is a standard that does support two-way calendar sharing natively. Having it in iCal meant it was only a matter of time before two-way calendar sharing became simple and ubiquitous with popular services like, oh, I don't know. Google Calendar!

Yup, that's right. You can now set up Google Calendar to host your iCal calendars via the CalDAV standard. You can then subscribe to these calendars and edit them either from Google, or from any properly set iCal client. Changes made in iCal are instantly propagated to Google and vice-versa.

I tell you, my friend, it is a thing of beauty.

In the old paradigm, your calendars lived on a desktop computer somewhere — or, as in my case, on numerous desktop computers — from where they were controlled. In this brave new world, all my calendars are set up in one single, central location — Google Calendar — and are written to and read from, well, anywhere.

Setting all this up beyond the default calendar provided by Google is a bit of a pain. Google's instructions are as good as I can imagine, so, rather than writing it all out for you, I'll simply link to their page on the matter:

Big Giant Google Calendar Sharing Link

This new functionality, aside from just being plain cool and handy as hell, opens up all sorts of possibilities for sharing amongst other folks — co-workers, family members and the like. Possibilities I haven't even begun to consider. Yet.

I will say, however, that this is still considered beta, and that there are issues particularly with To Dos and Reminders. I'm sure it will become more robust and full-featured soon. But I've been using it for basic calendar sharing for a week or two now and it's been working great at keeping everything in sync. If that's all you need — or if you've been hobbling along with the Box.net trick for the past couple of years like I have — this solution is for you.

Linked

I don't monitor my traffic, but I don't think I have a really heavy readership. Every now and then I have a minor hit, but for the most part we're pretty hardcore systems administration around here. It takes a very special kind of geek to follow exploits such as Tiger Lab Migration, Three Platforms, One Server or External Network Unification.

Truly special.

But all of a sudden I started getting comments on an old article from just over a year ago. Seems the Mac OS X 10.5.2 update causes a similar problem to one in the 10.4.9 update — network slowdowns due to bad delayed ack values, or some such — and MacFixit has linked to the old post. Neato! I feel popular!

Anyway... Hi, MacFixit folks!

iPhone Browser Cache

I love my iPhone. It is increasingly important to me for getting things done. I use it for everything: appointments, reminders, fact-checking, contacts, text, entertainment and, of course, as a telephone. It's boosted my productivity immensely, yet made my life easier and better in so many ways. I'm not sure how many products I can say that about.

Nevertheless, I have one persistent gripe when it comes to the iPhone, one thing that just pisses me off and confounds me every time I encounter it: Mobile Safari's cache is simply too small, to the point where it almost seems pointless to have cache at all. Case in point: I open a web page. It gets cached. I open a new window, and a new page in that new window. It too gets cached. Unfortunately, this new cache invariably wipes out the previously cached page, so that when I navigate back to the other window, the first page has to reload. And, just for the record, these are mostly text-based blogs, sometimes with a picture or two. It doesn't always go down this way, but more often than not it does. This defeats the usefulness of both cache and the multi-page interface available in the browser. I'm not sure what the point is.

I'm sure the browser cache equation rides a fine line between usefulness and unnecessary disc overuse. But for anyone who uses the Edge network on any kind of regular basis, I think they've got that balance wrong. And I can't help wondering why they don't give us a setting — just like in any other desktop browser — for cache size, within a sensible range, of course. Or, if not that, simply make the default a bit larger. The current one is pointlessly small.

UPDATE:
Fixed!