hackish calendar backups

My phone (a Nokia E71) is terribly out of date. Despite this it is really good at the limited things it does. However, recently I've had a big issue with calendar sync.

I use Nokia's Mail for Exchange app to sync my phone calendar with my Google calendar. This has worked great for years, but recently I've experienced some data loss. Not good. My entire calendar would disappear.

I'm not sure what is triggering this, but in the meantime I've decided that I really need a backup system for this important data. This little script will do the job I think:


#!/bin/bash
cd /home/mike/Documents/gcal
url=https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/ADDRESS/private-SECRET/basic.ics
wget -O - "$url" |grep -v "^DTSTAMP:" >basic.ics
git commit -a -v -m sync


I'm currently running this hourly via cron

fun with rsync

I recently discovered the --itemize-changes option to rsync. It is incredibly handy. I often run rsync with -nv to see what it will do, but with this option it will tell you why.

However, I have discovered one thing that it remains quiet about: --link-dest. If you tell rsync to link against a given directory, these link actions will produce no output with either -v or --itemize-changes. I can understand that -v might be quiet about them since no files are being transferred, but --itemize-changes does show remote hardlink actions

"Without Walls"

So MS has a new set of TV spots in some sort of attempt to counter the (I presume) hugely successful Mac ad campaign. At the end of these "I'm a PC" spots, they show a Windows logo with the phrase "life without walls" underneath.

In the presumably intended sense, this is an outright lie. Vista with its closed source, proprietary formats, and built-in DRM is one of the most limiting OSes out there.

Then in a sadly ironic sense, it is quite true. "Without walls" is an apt description of Windows system security, which is so bad that network administrators are turning to fascist measures to keep virus-ridden boxes off their networks.

Then there's the pun aspect. Windows... walls... ....except, ... it makes no sense. Windows are openings in walls. Sure you could take a window unit from the hardware store sans wall and still call it a window, but what good it it? Just a heavy, fragile, useless lump until you mount it in a hole in the wall. Come to think of it, maybe windows without walls is a good analogy for their OS.