Abby and Win’s Blog

I’ve been trying to figure out how I can sync my calendars on to more than one machine. Since switching to a Mac a couple of years ago, I’ve been using iCal. What I hate though is having to pay for a .Mac account (now know as Mobile Me) every year. It’s $100 annually but the only feature I use is the calendar and contact syncing. I already have my own website so I don’t need that from the service.

So I started to use Google calendar a couple of years ago to avoid having to pay for Apple’s service. It works perfect! I can be on any computer with an internet connection and have access to my calendar. I recently found an app that Mozilla created that does calendar management - Sunbird. It’s been out for awhile but an add-on was recently created that “Allows bidirectional access to Google Calendar”. Great! It makes my solution of using Google calendar easier. With this add-on, you can now connect to your Google calendars and have full access. Prior to this, you only had read-only access (which my iCal currently is doing ).

So now I can use Sunbird to fully manage my Google calendars without having to use my browser. Then my iCal will continue to do it’s one-way sync from Google, then syncs with my iPhone.

Now the only thing that’s left is my Address Book.

Part 1

Part 2

- first video blog
– new iMac 2.66GHz, 4GB ram, 20″
– using built in iSight
– using quicktime pro
– room is a mess

- abby is nearly 16 weeks
– we have dr appt on wednesday
– show ultra sound - 10weeks, 12 weeks

- aiptek a-hd+ 1080, $150
- flexpod tripod, $20

- it’s labor day 2008

I finally pulled the trigger on a new iMac. I’ve been wanting one since I heard Apple’s future OS’s will stop supporting non-Intel Macs. I still have my old PowerMac G5 (dual 2.0GHz | 2.5GB ram). It still works flawlessly but was concerned of its support in the future. So now with my new iMac, I just have my G5 do video conversions and soon I’ll update the OS to Leopard server.

Some things that caught me by surprise after I using it for a couple of days.

• No magnetic remote rest for remote control (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306284) - I was bummed out about not having this. I have this feature on my iMac at work.
• With my G5 (since it uses a separate monitor), I was able to leave the computer on overnight and just turn of the monitor. With the iMac, you have to set up the screen saver timer and the display sleep option. Not a big deal but I have to keep changing it if I plan to leave the iMac on overnight. I change the settings to the lowest minutes possible but can’t have this option while I’m using it regularly.
• The 2.66GHz model came with 320GB. I thought this would be enough but after transferring my data over from my G5, I’m left with 130GB. I guess I miscalculated how much data I had. I was thinking I had a little over 100GB of data only. No worries, I have over 2TB of external hard drives.
• Upgrading the memory is a little different from the previous iMac models (non Aluminum). After removing the screw for the memory area, there now tabs instead of the levers. You have to pull the tabs in order to remove the memory. The first one was somewhat easy to pull, but the second was a little harder. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1760
• The ATI Radeon HD 2600 (256MB PCIe) is a great upgrade from my G5’s ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (64MB AGP) video card. My frame rate on WoW has at least doubled and in some areas it tripled.
• The startup of my iMac is a little faster than my G5 but would’ve thought it would be faster.

I haven’t really got too much into it to feel the difference. But if you are still running a non-Intel Mac, I would suggest getting a new one with an Intel CPU. Not only will Apple stop support on non-Intel CPU’s in the future but programs like Parallels and VMWare run great on the new hardware (requires Intel CPU).

my messy desk

iMac info

I just got my first bill with our iPhone 3G and was surprised to find $260 for a week’s worth of use. So I called AT&T up so I can get an explanation of the bill. I was informed that I was charged for what I’ve used the initial month, plus next month’s bill, and $72 for activation (2 iPhones). The customer service rep offered to remove the activation fee for the inconvenience. I was shocked but happily accepted. I didn’t sound upset or anything, I just need clarification on the bill. Thanks AT&T! Even though you charge a lot for the iPhone services and provide little to no service at my house, you have so far exceeded my expectations with your customer service.

I recently been playing around with Windows 2003 because we are still running Windows 2000 Server at work and may be upgrading soon. Our ASP pages are using includes to our database connection page…

<!–#include file=”some_folder/db_connection_file.asp” –>

If you were to run a page with that code on a Windows 2003 server, you may get an error similar to…

Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0131′
Disallowed Parent Path

To fix this error, I had to do the following:

1. Create a new virtual directory of the folder that contains the files. We’ll call the virtual directory “example”.
2. Update the include syntax to use virtual instead. So you’ll have something like
   <!– #include virtual=”example/some_folder/db_connection_file.asp” –>

You may get this error with javascripts as well if you have something like…

<script language=”javascript” src=”../some_folder/my_script.js”></script>

You should update that syntax to something like…

<script language=”javascript” src=”/example/some_folder/my_script.js”></script>

I’m not a big Windows user anymore so I don’t know why it has to be done this way or know of a setting so that the old method still works. But those are the 2 changes I had to make on some of our websites to make them compatible with Windows 2003.