Month: February 2004

iSync, ical and p800

iSync kept bumming out on me when trying to sync my calendar on my P800 with ical. It seemed to get all the items from the phone, merge them ok but then fail with a comment like ‘could not connect to p800 please check the pairing with this computer’.
This Apple document sorted out the problem for me – I didn’t even get to the stage of rebooting the computer. It seems to be curable by removing and re-adding the phone from devices to sync. Next: turn all my calendars to RDF and put them up somewhere.
Oh, powerbook users may need the bluetooth firmware upgrade.

Moblogging

I decided to set up moblogging on planB (a movable type weblog), inspired bydanbri’s typepad one. There are probably better ways of doing it…Joi Ito has a moblogging resources page that might be useful.

I fooled around a bit with Joi Ito’s python script but didn’t know enough python to be bothered to debug the error I got (it was Saturday):

sh:~/moblog/mail2entry-2002-12-25$ cat 416D0264.jpg | python /home/libby/moblog/mail2entry-2002-12-25/mail2entry.py test
/home/libby/moblog/mail2entry-2002-12-25/mail2entry.py:8: SyntaxWarning: import * only allowed at module level
def main():
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/libby/moblog/mail2entry-2002-12-25/mail2entry.py", line 50, in ?
main()
File "/home/libby/moblog/mail2entry-2002-12-25/mail2entry.py", line 43, in main
return result
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'result' referenced before assignment

Another guy had the same problem but no solution.

So then I tried Dav Coleman’s perl version. It requires XMLRPC::Lite and MIME::Explode; they were both on the system I was using. I commented out the japanese text bits and the system calls to java etc.

I have an account that can recieve mail on the same machine as my blog. I don’t know whether it needs to be – the perl program uses XMLPRC to post to the blog.

So, in order, this is what I did.

  • created an email alias on the machine. I could have used my default one, but figured better to make it a bit more secret. Just knowing the mail address wouldn’t allow anyone else to post though.
  • got the perl prgram, made sure XMLRPC::Lite and MIME::Explode were installed

  • edited out the ‘system’ calls and japanese bits I didn’t need
  • with help from shellac, installed procmail and wrote a .procmailrc file in my home directory:

    :0:
* ^FROM: .*theemailaddrfrommyphone
|/home/libby/moblog/perl/blogpost.pl
  • set up a new username and password for my blog and found out a bunch of information I needed
  • created .blogpostrc file in my home fdirectory, looking like this (following the instructions in the perl file)

    blogurl = http://planb.nicecupoftea.org
blogxmlrpc = http://rdfweb.org/mtcgi/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
blogimgurl = https://planb.nicecupoftea.org/archives/images
subdir = default
output_dir = /usr/local/apache/htdocs/archives/images
bloguser = username
blogpass = pwd
blogid = 5
defaulttitle = new post from cell phone
defaultbody = 
defaultcategory = 28
  • tested it by mailing myself a picture from my phone

Fiddling with the actual perl code (to process text atachments), it was easier just to pipe a saved message to procmail manually: cat msg | procmail

And bingo – it worked. I’m going to set up a new blog specicically for pictures. And then I want to be able to parse RDF somehow out of the text attachments.