Google and iPhone Now With Even More AWESOME
Earlier this week Google released Google Sync. This allows mobile devices to sync google calendar and contacts over the air using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Why do I care about this? I care because now I don’t have to use a third party Exchange Server to get push syncing for my calendar and contacts on my iPhone. I was a little wary of syncing my contacts with GMail at first because I was afraid that all of those automatically added email addresses in GMail would be added as contacts on my phone. However, this is not the case. Only those you have explicitly added as contacts in GMail will get synced to your phone.
My current syncing situation was that I would sync my Calendar with Google Calendar by using NuevaSync and then I was just backing up my contacts to Apple’s AddressBook on my Macbook. I really only did this as a backup for my contacts since I only need the info on my phone. Here are the steps I used to get my phone working with the new Google Sync.
- Backup Calendar and Contacts: You will lose any calendars and contacts on your phone when you setup your phone to sync with Goolge. I didn’t backup my calendar since I was already syncing it with my Goolge Calendar via NuevaSync. My contacts were backed up by syncing them with AddressBook via iTunes.
- Setup Your iPhone to Sync With Google Sync: I followed the steps found here.
- Migrate Your Contacts to GMail: After you finish setting up the syncing you will notice that all of your contacts are gone. Well we need to migrate our contacts from AddressBook to GMail. I used A to G to accomplish this task. What it will do is export your contacts as a CSV list that you can then import into GMail.
- Profit: Now if you check your contacts or calendar on your phone they will be the same as on Google Calendar and in GMail. Any changes you make on your phone will be pushed to Google Calendar or GMail and vice versa.
ChicagoLUG Meeting February 7th at 3:00pm
The Chicago GNU/Linux User Group will be having our next meeting on February 7th at 3:00pm. We will be meeting at the Institute of Design (350 N. LaSalle Ave, Floor 2 Room 201). This location is accessible via CTA trains as well as a parking garage across the street with parking for $8.
WHAT: Chicago GNU/Linux User Group Meeting
WHEN: February 7th at 3:00pm
WHERE: Institute of Design (350 N. LaSalle Ave, Floor 2 Room 201)
TOPICS:
- Tool and Tips to Help Market Yourself (Kevin Harriss)
- This presentation will introduce some tools and tips that people can use to help market themselves so they can get the job that they want.
- Remember the Milk (Jim Campbell)
- An overview of the the web-based task manager, Remember the Milk.
- Miro (Christopher Allan Webber)
- An introduction to Miro a free, open source Internet TV and video player.
- What is a Hackerspace (Ishmael Rufus)
- An introduction to the basics of what hackerspaces are and why they are created which would lead into talking about the project in Chicago Pumpingstation One.
Ubuntu Global Bug Jam Setup Meeting
Today at the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group meeting the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo will be helping people get setup for the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. We will be helping people setup and learn to use launchpad, create gpg keys, sign the Ubuntu code of conduct and show them how to work with ubuntu bugs. We ask that people bring a computer with ubuntu installed on it or have ubuntu in a virtual machine to use. The meeting will be taking place at the Institute of Design in Room 201 at 3:00pm. Please make sure to be on time as we will be starting promptly at 3:00pm.
WHAT: Ubuntu Global Bug Jam Setup Meeting
WHEN: Saturday, January 17 @ 3:00pm
WHERE: Institute of Design (350 N. LaSalle Ave., Chicago IL) Floor 2 Room 201
I hope to see everyone there and ready to help make linux even better.
Chicago LUG is Now on Twitter
So I finally got around to setting up an account for the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group on twitter. I will use the account to post information about our meetings, along with general linux news. If you are on twitter and have any questions about linux, our group or our meetings feel free to shoot me a question @chicagolug. You can find our profile page here. I look forward to interacting you some new and familiar faces via twitter.
Slicehost is My New Favorite Hosting Company
So for a project I am working on with some of my friends we were looking for a hosting solution. We decided that we didn’t need a big beefy dedicated server so I went out looking for a VPS host. In the end, I narrowed it down to 2 providers and they were Linode and Slicehost. After looking them over and reading customer reviews I decided to go with Slicehost and boy am I happy that I choose them. Linode had a slight edge in the cost factor, we would have gotten a little more performance for the money. They both had similar outstanding customer reviews. So the real deciding factors that made me go with Slicehost was their outstanding feature set. Here are some of the features that really impressed me.
- Super Quick Setup: They advertise that upon purchase your slice will be created and you will be able to access it in 2 minutes. This is true, within 2 minutes I had the ip address and root password for our slice.
- Great Documentation: They offer some excellent guides to help people setup and secure there server. This is a great resource especially for people that are looking for a hosting solution but might not be the most experienced System Administrator.
- Super Simple and Clean Management Interface: Everything I would need to manage my slice and just that is available in their management interface. It has the ability to resize, restart, rename, backup, restore your slice as well as managing DNS for your slice. There is also a web based console to connect to your slice. However, some other hosting solutions offer everything under the sun in the management console, like updating and managing the OS on the slice. I find that this just clutters the management interface, especially since I can do all that via the command line. Some user might find this lack of system OS management a negative but for me this is a huge positive.
- Management API: Along with a super simple and clean management interface they offer an api to manage your slice. This has to be enable in the management interface to allow API access. The API is well documented and they try to maintain a stable API.
- iPhone Management App: Since the have an open API someone has written an app for the iPhone to allow you to manage your slice. This is awesome since I don’t allows have a computer on me but my phone is always on me, so if something comes up and I need to resize or restart my slice I can from my phone.
- Pool Bandwidth Across Slices: Currently we only have one slice but in the future we will most likely have multiple slices and when we do all the bandwidth limits of our slices will be added together in a pool. This is nice if you have one slice that does very little bandwidth and another slice that is pushing the bandwidth limits since you can in a sense share bandwidth. Also you don’t lose money by wasting unused bandwidth.
Beer Project Looking for Web Design Help
Are you a beer enthusiast? Do you have an interest in home brewing beer? If so then now is your lucky day, I am working with a group to help improve on-line collaboration between home brewers and general beer enthusiasts and we are looking for some help. We also plan to help educate people about craft beers as well as introduce them to new craft beers. We are currently looking for a web designer to help translate our ideas into the web interface for the site. We are unavailable to pay someone for this work, but will be more than happy to treat you to some tasty beverages. This would be a good opportunity for someone looking to get some experience in web design. If you are interested in helping us out please contact me. Please feel free to forward this message to anyone you think might be interested.
Migrating to OpenOffice3
At my current job we are evaluating if we could migrate all staff, faculty and lab computers to OpenOffice3 and away from Microsoft Office. I have a few questions that I haven’t been able to find solid answer for so I am turning to the loyal internet.
- Are there plans for a OpenOffice3 English version for OS X PPC? Currently the latest version is 2.4.0.
- Have you experienced or heard any major problems when saving to microsoft file formats as default? I would like to migrate to an open document standard but since we interact with other departments and companies that wouldn’t be able to open them we have to stick with the microsoft formats for now.
- How different is the work flow of OpenOffice3 from that of Office2003? My boss and I don’t find the work flow very different but we only scratch the surface of the tools?
- What benefits would you express to users to convince them to use OpenOffice3? They don’t care about the freedom but cost is a selling point. Also the fact that they can open OOXML files is a big plus since we have updated to the latest office suite yet.
We are currently testing it out on a few computers but hope to have a wide release after we answer some of these questions. If all goes well we will have another success story for Open Source software.
Ohio LinuxFest Recap (Better Late than Never)
I guess I have put this off long enough, here is my excellent recap of this years Ohio LinuxFest. Again this year I went down to work the Foresight booth with Ken VanDine, Eric Lake and Michael K Johnson. We had a lot of traffic to our booth and people really seemed to like the specialized versions of Foresight we were showcasing. It seemed that there was always a kid at our booth playing with the Foresight Kids Edition and a group of people checking out the Mobile Edition on the Intel Classmate PCs we had at our booth. The number of people that have heard of Foresight or recognized us has increased since last year which is a great thing. I was even getting stopped as I was walking around the conference by people who recognized me from past events.
The real meat and potatos of OLF is hanging out with the community. The pre-party on Friday was a blast. Rich, Jesse and I meet up with Jono and Jorge and grab some great greek food at Happy Greek. Thanks to the Zenoss guys for the meal. At the pre-party it was great to meet up with the rest of the Michigan guys, some more people from Chicago and the OLF organizers. After the pre-party a group of us hit up a great club in Columbus with live music and a DJ. On Saturday after the conference, there was a post-party with Dual Core and the Open Source ‘Dance’ Competition, which was ‘won’ by myself. After that we went back to the club we went to Friday night. On Saturday night, they had a kick ass Metal coverband. Towards the end of their set a mosh pit opened up inside of this club with our group and some other people at the club.
Overall Ohio LinuxFest was great and I will be attending again next year. Columbus is a nice town but it would be better if the bars stayed open past 2am.
Mounting LVM Disks from Ubuntu LiveCD
So what happens if your os won’t boot and you need to access some files on your hard drive for backups or just to fix the original problem? No problem you can just boot off the Ubuntu LiveCD and mount the drive and do what you need with the drive. However, what if your drives are LVM then this won’t work right out the box. Don’t fret I will give you the steps below so you can access your LVM partitions.
1. Get a LiveCD (I used an Ubuntu LiveCD)
2. Boot off the LiveCD and install lvm2:
#apt-get install lvm23. Scan all disks for physical volumes:
#pvscan4. Scan all disks for volume groups:
#vgscan5. Activate all volume groups:
#vgchange -a y6. Scan all disks for logical volumes:
#lvscanThis will give you the path to your activated lable. Something similar to this ‘/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00′.
7. Mount the partition:
#mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt8. Now you can access the partition at /mnt and work with the data on your hard drive.
Google Earth Missing MSI
So on one of the new faculty members needed Google SketchUp and Google Earth installed on his Windows computer for his class. Of course, I setup his machine with 2 user accounts a limited account for the faculty member and then an administrator account for me to use to setup and maintain the laptop. Whenever I installed the software I was under the Administrator user and to install Google Earth under windows you have to use GoogleUpdater.exe which is a wrapper for the various Google product MSIs. This normally isn’t an issue, however with Google Earth and Google SketchUp integration under the faculty user it needs to find the MSI to install some extra bits for that user. The problem is that the MSI doesn’t exist since the wrapper removes the MSI after installation. Don’t fear there is a solution to this problem.
- Launch GoogleUpdater.exe
- Uninstall Google Earth
- Install Google Earth from the website
- While it is installing type %temp% in the run box
- Copy the 2 temp directories it creates to the desktop
- After Installation move the 2 directories to a safe place on the computer where they won’t be deleted.
- Launch Google SketchUp and Google Earth
- Map your Google SketchUp model on Google Earth
Hopefully others that might encouter this problem find this helpful to fix their problem.
