Google has a new calendar service, and it's great. I really try to avoid hosted data solutions, but this one's just too good to pass up. My one gripe is that there's no easy way for non google calendar users to view the calendars. They're available live as both ical and rss/xml files, but the average home web user doesn't know what to do with either of those.

There are plenty of services out there that will display an ical file as a web page, but none of them I tested rendered the google ical output well, and all of them were packed with ads. Previously, I'd used software called phpicalendar to display ical files created by my old calendaring solution on the web, so I started there. It didn't parse the google output well either. However, with a little tweaking (see the patch in the zip file below) and some Apache trickery (see the README in the zip file) I can now get good phpicalendar output from google.

After a lot of cleaning, painting, and decorating my condo is finally on the market. Thanks to Kate and Natz for all their help. We've priced it very aggressively in hopes of not having this process drag on, so if we're lucky we'll be bidding a fond farewell to MLS 3165642 soon.

If you ever came by and admired the place, tell your house hunting friends.

Last week Kate, Natz, and I painted a few more rooms, added handles to the cabinets, added some bookshelves, and did a lot of minor repairs around the condo in preparation for selling it. I also cut up the throw pillows and sewed some arm covers for the couch. They look as cheesy as arm covers always do, but they hide the cat damage.

I'm finally tackling all the little projects I always meant to do around the house in preparation for selling it. Today I installed some simple roller shades downstairs and built a fairly complex multi-panel window covering system thing in the bedroom using the ridiculously modular KVADRANT stuff.

I've never had serious problems with IKEA stuff before, and these weren't any worse than usual, but one really is constantly beset by low-level disappointment at the quality of the pieces, their fit and finish, and the meager guidance the instructions offer when working with IKEA stuff. Still it's cheap and looks nice, which is exactly what one wants when staging for a sale.

Wikis, like ry4an.org, are websites meant to be easily edited. One simply clicks the edit button, changes the content, and poof the page is changed. One of the most famous wikis is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It's a wonderful resource and chocked full of information. Unfortunately, due to its anyone-can-change-it-at-any-time freedom, some folks are hesitant to consider it a reliable reference.

Wikipedia's documented accuracy is largely due to careful edit policing by interested persons. I could go change the date of Abraham Lincoln's birthday right now, but someone monitoring the changes would detect the "vandalism" and revert the change in minutes. Sadly, anyone viewing the Abraham_Lincoln page between my edit and the repair would see the wrong birthday.

My Roomba had been on the fritz lately. When I powered it on it went forward a few inches and then started backing up in a tight circle. I figured it was a dirty sensor, but I cleaned everything I could see and had no luck.

My coworker Brandon pointed me to the Circle Dance website, which explains how a dirty internal sensor can cause just that problem. I've got an older Roomba, but the wheel assembly seemed the same. The site has great instructions and photos showing how one can fix the problem. They do, however, go through incredible contortions, including removing 10 screws and a hard to replace panel, just to remove a single screw.

Kate Bauer and I put together the vanity/informational website for our wedding. Those joining us will find information on travel and hotels. Note the snazzy embedded google map on the bottom of the hotels page. Thanks go to Kate for writing most of the content and putting up with my insistance on hand-edited HTML.

The site also links to our engagement photos, where you can see how very lucky I am.

Years back I wrote an IRC nick tracking script. It's served me well since then, but it has one major annoyance. When people changed their name slightly it would remember that name change, even though the old/new mapping didn't contain any real identity change information.

For example, when Gabe_ became Gabe it would display every message from him as <Gabe_(Gabe)>. That doesn't tell me anything interesting about who Gabe is.

Yesterday I got the warranty replacement machine for my (company's) Dell X300 laptop. Dell mailed me an X1, which seems a nice enough machine. It meets my firm criteria: under 3 lbs and thinner than an inch. If Apple would hit those numbers I'd be there in a second.

Unfortunately, it looks like getting Linux on to this thing is going to be a pain. Emperor Linux will sell an X1 with Linux pre-installed, but they want $450 to take the X1 I already "own" and put Linux on to it. If they're not able to simply mirror a debugged installation over, that says a lot about their volume. I value my time pretty highly, but $450 for a software install seems extreme.

My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely.

When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible.