We all know that Domino should been good at calendar apps but sucks balls in reality, so i quietly poo’ed my self when a manger says “could we have something a bit like google calendar”, however flex comes to my rescue, now i cant claim any of this is mine its just gluing other people work together so first take Quietly Scheming’s Calendar UPDATE: the app is much newer than the blog posting would indicate, as it keeps being updated
sexy isent it?, now this takes an ical format as its data source, which in case anyone was wondering is just a vcalander file with some extra bits stuffed in (which we wont need), so to get to that data source, enter Jake Howlett’s excellent series of articles, in particular Flex with Domino Quick start, go pinch his example database for the ‘simple view’ stuff, you will want to butcher that to output your data as a ical text file (the download for Quietly Schemings flex apps has examples of what they should look like in the “data” directory of the zip file.),

One snag here is that the Adobe parser for icals is REALLY picky, there must be no extra white space in your file, and every line must finish with a proper Carriage return and a proper line feed (i ended up with computed text of “@Char(13)” at the end of every line in the view template and “@Char(13)+ @Char(10)” after every field in the view, so be careful, but other than that it works like a charm!!, and my manager thinks im a coding god (well he doesn’t because he knows me, but never mind)

there you go, if this dosent make sense just put a comment and i will explain more

Just a quick note to the people out there taking advantage of the one click update from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, make sure you don’t have “auto logon” enabled, if you do, you stand a huge chance of happily screwing up your install (you will get lots of permission denied errors against /dev/null when you launch a xsession, even if your ctrl-Alt-F1 in and reset the security to “666” from “600” the darn thing resets on reboot (and anyway you just get a blank screen even if you get it (ie by ctrl-Alt-f7) to get back to xsession login,

….so careful careful party people

.. P.S. to the Mac boys out there laughing, i rebuilt in 14 mins (after backup), and i did not have to go to a “genius bar” to fix my problem…so RASSSSSSP!!

Fiends and Followers of this pack of feeble ranting’s will know my love of the
drobo external nas drive, as i had filled mine up with 1tb drives, i was much
pleased with the news that the first of the new uber big Seagate drives came
out (1.5tb), i purchased 4 of said drives, and popped them in, a week later one
seems to fail for 30 seconds then be ok, but the drobo did its rebuild thing
for 24 hours (which means it goes slow), i shrugged, but then a couple of days
later another one failed on the other drobo, so they were both rebuilding,i
started to get nervery if one more failed i would lose the raid, Eeeeeeeek!.
How ever it seems i was not alone, the drobo forums were alive with the horror
of these drives, turned out that something to do with their slightly larger
power requirements, if the drive did not get EXACTLY what they wanted on
startup, they would go in to “autistic mode” for 30 seconds (ie sulk), which
breaks the drobo raid, it turns out that is problem is common to all the modern
operating systems (Linux, Mac osx, vista), Seagate flatly refused to accept
responsibility telling people were miss using their drives (it mainly happened
when people were using them for raid), however as they had put “best usage:
Desktop raid” on their website, that did not cut much mustard (the little
devils removed it once people pointed that out but thanks to the joy of the
internet, plenty of screen shots had already been taken….ha..power to the
geeks!!), they have now released a firm ware fix (which you need a PC to apply
to the drives), but it too late for me, I’ve already swapped back to the 1TB
drives and used the 1.5Tb for other backups, the following is how to format
said drives in Linux as they throw a little tantrum.

Most people who are Linux users who have come from a windows background, like
gui apps, and the best for disk formatting is called Gparted, however the
current “sanctioned” version of Gparted (0.3.5), throws a hissy fit when you
try and format a partition greater than 1TB, Sooooo, with these monster drives,
open a terminal window:

sudo su

means you don’t need to keep putting “sudo” at the beginning of all your
commands for this terminal session

parted /dev/sdd

or what ever drive is if you have gparted you can see the drive name there, now
your in parted, but your drive is completely blank so you need to enter

(parted) mklabel msdos

an msdos label will do these drives fine, Next enter “print” to see the drives
details

(parted) print

Disk /dev/sdd: 1500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags

as you can see we have no partitions on this drive, in this exersise i want one
partition that takes up the whole drive and to use the ext3 format, the 2
numbers at the end are the start and end points of the partitions so “0” to
“1500GB” to do the whole drive.

(parted) mkpart primary ext3 0 1500gb

now lets do “print” to see if that took effect

(parted) print

Disk /dev/sdd: 1500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 1500GB 1500GB primary

rayyy, worked, now we need to pop out of parted

(parted) quit

the drive is still not formatted so fill in the following (you can check on
gparted again if you don’t know what to put as the drive, ie. /dev/ssd1)

/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdd1

mke2fs 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
91578368 inodes, 366284000 blocks
18314200 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
11179 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848

Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 28 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

here you go that’s the format done, while your here you might as well sort out
the other bits, soo

e2label /dev/sdd1 mp3picsbackup

This give the drive a label, so that, say this is a usb drive, it will auto
mount to the label, now i like really open security (lazy sod), and as such,

chmod 777 -R /media/mp3picsbackup

oh, i had to mount the drive for this command to work.