Blog Entries
Google and Outlook Calendar Sync'ing
Jul 8, 9:00
I previously described my desire to hook my Outlook calendar up to my
Google calendar. I just found out that I can do this and the reverse as both support publishing calendars to the Internet. The following are how I set this up under Outlook 2010 and Google
Calendar:
In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.
In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from Google Calendar.
In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.
In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.
In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from Google Calendar.
In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.
The Curious History of Uniform Resource Names - IETF Journal
Jul 1, 10:51"Sometimes it’s hard to judge whether an engineering effort has been successful or not. It can take years for an idea to catch on, to go from being the butt of jokes to becoming an international imperative (IPv6). Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which are part of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) family, are conceptually at least as old as IPv6. While not figuring in international directives for deployment, they-and the technology engineered to resolve them-are still going concerns."Web Linking IETF draft - draft-nottingham-http-link-header-10
Jun 20, 1:16"This document specifies relation types for Web links, and defines a registry for them. It also defines the use of such links in HTTP headers with the Link header-field."RFC 5870 - A Uniform Resource Identifier for Geographic Locations ('geo' URI)
Jun 9, 3:31"A 'geo' URI identifies a physical location in a two- or three-dimensional coordinate reference system in a compact, simple, human-readable, and protocol-independent way."RFC 5854 - The Metalink Download Description Format
Jun 1, 6:46"Metalink describes download locations (mirrors), cryptographic hashes, and other information. Clients can transparently use this information to reliably transfer files."People's Republic of Interactive Fiction
Apr 1, 2:42Its like a better version of what I was doing with my Web Frotz Interpreter. Its all client side javascript, HTML, & CSS to play Z-machine based interactive fiction games. They even do the saved game in a URL piece.webfinger enabled for all gmail accounts with public profiles - WebFinger | Google Groups
Mar 13, 5:27WebFinger is finger but for the Web...draft-hoehrmann-javascript-scheme-01 - The javascript resource identifier scheme
Mar 3, 6:15Finally giving the javascript URI scheme its own IETF doc.Weave Developer Resources
Feb 27, 10:17Weave syncs web browser user data. Its an open platform using JSON data, RESTful URL based APIs, with basic auth over HTTPS.View PDFs on Android
Jan 10, 4:07Irritatingly, my G1 won't show me PDFs so I've made the Google Docs PDF viewer which will load PDFs on the web up in Google Docs. Google Docs has the useful ability to display PDFs in web browsers without any Adobe software and works (mostly) on Android.
This was very easy to put together as an Android activity. First its necessary to register the application as handling PDFs from the web. This is done via the intent-filter declaration in the manifest:
intent-filter
action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/
data android:scheme="http" android:mimeType="application/pdf"/
category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/
category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/
/intent-filter
The action part says my activity will view PDFs, the data part says it accepts data with the PDF mime-type and with a URL that has an HTTP scheme. The browsable category is necessary to allow
links from a browser to open this activity.
Second, the activity opens up the browser to Google Docs pointing to the PDF.
Intent intent = new Intent();
intent.setAction(getIntent().getAction());
intent.setData(Uri.parse(
"http://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=" +
percentEncodeForQuery(getIntent().getData().toString())));
startActivity(intent);
This is very simple code to invoke a new intent browsing to a newly constructed URL for the PDF in Google Docs. That was easy.The Metalink Download Description Format
2009 Dec 28, 2:19"This document specifies Metalink, an XML-based download description format. Metalink describes download locations (mirrors), checksums, and other information. Clients can transparently use this information to reliably transfer files."curlies - Project Hosting on Google Code
2009 Dec 23, 9:58Results of a set of black box tests on various characters in various parts of URLs in various popular browsers.Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times
2009 Dec 1, 9:40Wow: 'The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain communications "metadata"—URLs of sites visited, e-mail message headers, numbers dialed, GPS locations, etc.—without any real oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn't. The courts ruled in 2005 that law enforcement doesn't need to show probable cause to obtain your physical location via the cell phone grid. All of the aforementioned metadata can be accessed with an easy-to-obtain pen register/trap & trace order. But given the volume of requests, it's hard to imagine that the courts are involved in all of these.'RFC battle: Browsers vs. programming languages - cat /dev/random | grep security -
2009 Nov 25, 7:09Relative URI resolution differences in browsers vs programming language libraries.Metalink/HTTP: Mirrors and Checksums in HTTP Headers
2009 Nov 24, 5:51"Metalink/HTTP describes multiple download locations (mirrors), Peer-to-Peer, checksums, digital signatures, and other information using existing standards for HTTP headers. Clients can transparently use this information to make file transfers more robust and reliable."301Works
2009 Nov 13, 6:36Hooray for the Internet Archive! "The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities."Sense and Reference on the Web
2009 Oct 30, 10:33"What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Does it have a sense, and can it refer to things?" I hope it will cover some of the new scheme vs always HTTP scheme and distinct vs not distinct URLs for a real world object and its web page perma-arguments.
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