No Fox Soccer Plus for Cablevision Subscribers

I’m too lazy to find the email I got from Cablevision customer service but it said that Cablevision did not currently have a contract to carry Fox Soccer Plus. Great.

Fox Soccer Plus

I’m guessing ‘premium’ means it’ll go on the pay sports tier. Which would be fine by me since I already have it. Of course, whether Cablevision carries it is another valid question.

Unprofessional Foul.

How to Connect a wifi HP Printer with Snow Leopard

The other day I bought a new all in one wifi HP printer/scanner/fax with my new iMac. I have a closed wireless wifi network at home and run Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard on the clients. “Closed” meaning it doesn’t broadcast its SSID. So you have to know the network SSID as well as the password to connect.

Now all HP drivers are included (and updated) with Snow Leopard system updates from Apple. Everything’s built in so you don’t have to load HP’s drivers separately. I have an older HP printer with wifi and remembered that you have to configure the wireless via a hard network connection and the printer’s built in wireless configuration web page. However the new HP printer didn’t have a wired ethernet connection. Just a USB port which ain’t a network connection. Hmm.

So how does one configure the device’s wireless capability to a closed network? It’s not really well documented anywhere. Turns out, the printer default settings (once you turn the wireless on on the printer touch screen) sets up an open network called ‘hpsetup’. So I connected my iMac to this new network, went to the Print and Fax in my system preferences and clicked on Add a Printer via Bonjour. Sure enough, it found the new printer and made a connection. Open the Print Utility which will allow you to open the printer’s built in web page to configure the wireless. I clicked on Advanced, changed the SSID and password to match my home network settings and hit ‘apply’. Be careful here to get everything correctly typed because when you hit ‘apply’ it changes the printer’s wireless settings immediately. The page will not reload in your web browser because you’re no longer connected to the printer wirelessly. Don’t worry.

Disconnect from the wireless ‘hpsetup’ network and reconnect to your home network. The printer/fax/scanner will show up in your Print and Fax panel of the System Preferences.

When the Hard Drive Crashes

I’m all set to put a new monitor on my Mac Mini and it’s looking great. I futz with the screen resolution and get a blue screen of death. A quick check of the apple support forums and a safe boot should do the trick. So I do a safe boot and everything comes back to normal. Restart the Mini and it begins the boot sequence. Tries again and shuts down. Uh oh. Never seen that before. Dust off the old Snow Leopard CD, boot from it and hit the Disk Utility. Starts sequencing through but can’t repair the disk. Not good. Off to the Apple Store for a copy of Disk Warrior. My version of it was on a floppy so you know how old that is. Booted into the Disk Warrior startup and it went to work. It created the mirror directory just fine but couldn’t write to the poor old Mini disk. The write head must have crashed.

So I turned on the trusty external firewire disk and told Disk Warrior to start backing up. Life would have been less stressful if I used Time Machine but that’s a discussion for another day. Anyway, My Mini (Intel late 2006) was struggling on 1Gb of RAM so I had planned to replace it on my terms.

Back to the Apple Store, this time with my eye on a new iMac (23″ with 1 Tb of storage and the ATI Radeon graphics card). Came home, hooked it up, connected the external firewire drive (FW 800!!) and was back in business with no data loss in a couple of hours. That’s what I call making the best of a bad situation.

Big Calendar Plugins

I’ve been using EventCalendar3 for a couple of years. It’s a great plugin and version 3.1.4 still plays nice with WordPress 2.9.x. However, I was rolling out a new website with WordPress as CMS with a requirement for a Big Calendar. A couple of EC3 users had built big calendar capability into the development branch. The last beta version (EC3.2 beta 2) had big calendar functionality built in so I installed it. After I made the move to WordPress 2.9, everything seemed to be working fine until I realized my comments feed was returning a 404 all of a sudden. Comments on posts were feeding properly as were category based feeds and the site feed. So, I went through all the usual troubleshooting (check the wordpress.org forums and deactivate plugins). Turns out EC3.2 beta 2 was the culprit. When I deactivated it, my comments feed started working again.

I’ve spent a fair share of time going through the EC3 code over the past couple of years and couldn’t figure out what EC3 and comments had to do with each other. EC3 does highjack some feeds and futz with canonical redirects but everything I saw in the code seemed benign. I commented out some of the redirect functions with no luck. On my other blog with E3.1.4, my comments feed was fine and the plugin is still solid despite its apparent abandonment. Odd. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, I packed it in.

Fortunately, I hit gold on my first stop through the WordPress plugin repository with Kieran’s excellent calendar plugin. It’s a no nonsense big calendar with two useful template tags to generate lists of events. While similar to EC3 in that it uses a separate table to store event data, it differs in that you add the events using a backend form rather than the posting method EC3 uses. You can link the event on the calendar to a blog posting (or any other url) which is a nice touch as well. Kieran’s plugin also seems pretty bulletproof as WordPress evolves.

It’s sad when a plugin withers away but plugin authors are very special people who give without compensation (for the most part) and are swamped with support requests from all kinds of folks who should have RTFM. When or if EC3.1.4 finally breaks, there’s an alternative.

Lotus Notes Sync to Google

I’m getting ready for life after the Palm OS. My Centro has a lot of life left in it and more importantly, over 9 months until I can upgrade so I need to figure out how to get my enterprise Lotus Notes calendar (version 7) onto whatever my next smartphone will be. The good news it will be either a webOS or Android phone so the obvious solution to me was getting my Notes calendar onto my google calendar since both phone OS play nice with the google apps over the air. Yesterday I dove into CompanionLink for Google. The app advertises to connect to your google apps via the google API and sync your enterprise or local calendar to your google account. Here’s my first impression of the software:

The good:

• Easy to configure. The wizard picked out all the arcane Lotus Notes file locations both locally and on the domino server.
• Has a purge/reload function for the inevitable duplicates that will be generated on google.com as you’re fiddling around with getting the right configuration for you.
• No need for a wired sync. Just a live internet connection. I like that.
• You can schedule syncs with quite a bit of flexibility. Not quite a push but pretty close.
• Relatively inexpensive at $39.95. They also seem to roll out new builds fairly frequently. I wish they’d use incremental version numbers rather than build numbers to identify updates. Version 3.0 has been out for a couple of years with a ton of new builds but no move to version 3.1.
• The address book/contacts sync worked really well.
• You can sync multiple google calendars to your PIM. I would like to have the ability to select how I want to transfer the events (ie pull from my personal calendar, push or sync from my work calendar, pull from my family calendar, etc) but that’s not supported. If you choose to sync, you sync all the selected google calendars.

The Bad:

• Windows only.
• If you are trying to sync an existing google calendar with and existing PIM, you’re going to get duplicates. Get ready to spend some time culling. Use the purge/reload function to clean your google calendar before you sync if you can afford to purge the google calendar.
• Kind of hit or miss when you have meetings when you are not the organizer. I have a monthly meeting that the organizer sets up once for the year that doesn’t show up on my google calendar no matter how far back I go in the sync date range.
• Syncing repeat appointments can create duplicates on the first day of the appointment.

Recommendations:

The software is ok. Not great. Not bad. I’ve finally settled on having my google calendar mirror my Lotus Notes calendar which isn’t a sync but a push to google. I didn’t feel like dealing with the duplicates for the amount of times I will create an appointment on google (none). If you can live with your google calendar/smartphone being a mirror, I’d recommend the software. I’m sure the sync works ok, too but I got turned off on the first round of duplicate culling.

EventCalendar 3 and WordPress 2.9

I’ve been testing out EventCalendar ver 3.2 beta 2 with WordPress version 2.9 RC-1 for the last couple of hours. Everything I’ve tested/used seems to be working normally without throwing any errors. I haven’t tested every feature but the basic stuff is working ok on my local installation. php 5.2.11, mysql 5.1.41, apache/2.2.13. My setting is to Keep Events Separate. I did not test ‘Events are Normal Posts.’

What works:

• Add/delete event, including calendar popup.
• Calendar and Upcoming events widgets.
• js calendar month scrolling
• tooltips popups.
• proper linking to archive templates (monthly, daily).
• setting ec3 options in the admin back end.

What I didn’t test:

• calendar feeds via ics.
• complex ec3 queries.

Overall, I’m comfortable with upgrading WordPress and keeping my essential Event Calendar functionality. Version 3.1.4 seems to be working just fine with WordPress 2.9 as well. As always, caveat emptor.

Updated 6 Jan 10

Looks like EC3.2 beta2 broke my comments feed. I have no idea why. I took it down. No problem with EC3.1.4.