Nokia 97 and Google Calendar

I am the proud owner of a Nokia N97 - my new work phone. It immediately fixes some problems I was having with my old E51. I couldn't read the screen on the largest font size without reading glasses making me feel rather decrepit, Also it was absolutely painful to send emails on it.

Out of the box it works fine as a phone and email with the University of Manchester's IMAP email server. The big touch screen means I can even read email while walking. I have not got used to the scroll and would like a scroll wheel. The slide out keyboard is fine.

But my other problem is being in meetings and not being able to check my diary or add things to it. I use Google Calendar. Its great as I can just paste appointments like "External Affairs Committe meeting at on July 26th at 9:00 in the Council Chamber Sackville Street" and the google calendar parses it and puts it in the right time. Sometimes even gives a link to a map!.

Ok so how to sync with the N97? On my E51 i used Goosync. That was good but they have just made it a paid for service and I knew other people had got the N97 to sync with its own software.

First thing about the N97 you need to know is that Mail for Exchange is installed (you dont need to get it from the Ovi store) but it is integrated in the mail program. You have to set it up (with the wizard) to point at the server m.google.com. But if you just put in your google mail address it just sets up google mail automatically with IMAP. Well done Nokia/Symbian. Good thing to do. But then you cant change to an exchange server. So start setting up another email account. Put in any rubbish for the email address but be sure to type m.google.com as the server, your google name and password. Then you get to edit the settings. In particular when it has looked at the server and decided it is an exchange server you can choose Exchange rather than Imap. Now you can go through the sync options. I turned off mail, contacts, todo and turned on calendar. Ok so now I can see my Google calendar in the calendar app on the N97.

More when I have some experience of it working.

Thanks to UoM IT support for sending me a helpful link. Vodafone were willing to help but had no real experience of the N97. I spoke to someone called "John" at Nokia support who was very jolly and not called John. He was keener for me to rate him as 5 on the online survey than he was to help me. I called the special N97 help number he passed me to. The first suggested I send the link to the Ovi download from the Nokia site. He didn't have a clue. The second guy I spoke to did know that it was now integrated, and then I figured it out.

Cheap USB Camera 0c45:62c0 Microdia

The built in camera on my laptop bust and I had an important Skype call first thing in the morning. I was staying at a Hotel in South Kennsington so went out to a local shop to buy a webcam. Armed with my laptop so as to get one that worked with linux. Well specifically with skype. I run OpenSuse 10.3 on a Del XPS M1330. I tried a logitech quick cam before with only limited success so I was suspicious. However the Dell built in camera worked fine on everything: Skype, kdetv, Ekiga etc.

The one I bought says "Sunny" on it but is a generic chinese made camera. It has a ring of blue leds controlled by variable resistor on a bump on the cable, and can clip on the laptop or stand on a table.

On plugging it in lsusb identifies it as "0c45:62c0 Microdia"

After some fiddling, much to the amusement of the man in the newsagents where I bought it, I eventually found that running luvcview -d /dev/video0 -f yuv -s 640x480 managed to knock v4l and the camera in to action and after focussing I got a good picture. Skype did not have much to adjust once it found the camera. Not got it to work with Ekiga consistently but works fine with Skype and kdetv. Also not figured out how to get the flash plugin (eg facebook video) to work. Well I'm not the only one with that problem.

Cutting pages out of pdf files

Just discovered PDF toolkit. Makes it really easy to cut pages and do many other things with a pdf file in one easy command line.



Useful examples on Linux.com.

Zotero - bibliography management in firefox

For a while now I have been saving the academic papers I read on line on my laptop in folders by journal wih names like author_title.pdf. I have a little bit of automation: a bash script converts pdf to text, then spits the first few lines of the file, typically containing the title and authors, in to an html file with a link to the local copy of the file. The advantage is that it is minimal trouble. I look at a lot of papers on line and my memory is not so good, this is quite fast and does the job. Of course what I really want is this automated so with one click in my browser the pdf is saved and an entry saved in a database which can export to BibTeX for use in papers I write.


Well fortunately someone has done all of that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that scrapes bibliographic information from journal web pages, Google Scholar, ISI Web of Science, MathSci, etc

If the full text is available, and "automatically attach pdfs" setting selected in preferences it saves a copy of the paper in a directory that can be accessed from the database (or otherwise). references can be saved in a number of formats including of course BibTeX, but also RIS which is popular eg with Endnote.

My own university library, the John Ryland University Library at the University of Manchester has an OpenURL server called "FindItatJRUL", this can be linked to the Zotero database. To do this go to "preferences" OpenURL, custom and paste http://openurl.man.ac.uk/sfxlcl3 in the box. Goodness knows how this works. I just made an informed guess. But it does. My work for your library too.

I did try EndNote a while ago and dint find it very useful. In any case I do not use Windows or Macs, only Linux (Suse 10.3), and it did nor seem worth to trouble to run it in Wine or CrossoverOffice. Strangely though in Web of Knowledge clicking the "Export to EndNote RefMan or ProCite" icon, then ignoring the option to save a file, but then clicking on the little zotero icon in url box of Firefox does the trick. In Google Scholar clicking on "Import into Endnote" does the job with no fiddling.

It remains to be seen how well this works out. For example how easy it is to restore the database after say reinstalling Firefox and Zotero or other possible nasties, or if any other annoyances crop up. It does seem to be under active development though, so I expect bugs will be ironed out rather than get worse, and integration with popular databases will probably get better.

For MathsSciNet I found I had to use the main www.ams.org/mathscinet/ site rather than the german mirror I normally use. Also it fails for older MathRev records starting with zero until that is fixed. Of course off campus, instead of using the crappy University (ie cisco) VPN, I use "ssh -ND some-port me@somecomputeroncampus" (see also a better way to proxy" and then the FoxyProxy Firefox extension to route requests to places like MathSciNet that are not authenticated by "athens" or "shibboleth".

Firefox wrong flash player version?

For some reason my Mozilla Firefox on Linux seemed to have an old version of Adobe (was Macromedia) Flash Player. I checked this on the adobe web site which claimed I was running an old version on Windows rather than version 9 under linux.

Installing the rpm version of flash and checking the plugins directory where firefox was installed did not help.

Typing "about:plugins" in the location box in firefox listed the plugin gave me a clue it was something to do with
NPSWF32.dll.so, and that souds windowsey so I susspected Crossover Office.

However I had tried uninstalling flash in crossover, but it either hung or crashed. Seems my windows flash installation was broken.

I found the problem in my home directory

~/.cxoffice/win2000/desktopdata/cxnsplugin/linux/npcxoffice-8be57157-dcc2-49ef-988f-3a73a6023181.linux.npqtplugin.dll.so


and lost of similarly named files linked to

~/.cxoffice/win2000/desktopdata/cxnsplugin/linux/npqtplugin.dll.so

I deleted the links and it works fine.

A better way to proxy

Following on from the post My little Proxy a few years ago there is now a much easier way to do this.

So the problem that I want to access on line journals and databases like MathSciNet that we have a subscription for at work, but despite the wonders of Athens, Shibboleth and other "single login" methods to access on line resources there are still some things that stubbornly insist checking your ip address.

Running squid on my desktop machine worked up to a point but I found there were some sites I needed that for some reason did not work with that.

The "Official" solution was to use the University's proprietary and highly flaky VPN service. As well as being unreliable the damn thing also disables access to the local network (on both adapters). This obviously a complete load of pants if you want to download a paper then print it out on your printer on your home network. Oh dear don't let me get started on another rant about "worst practice" software procurement!

Anyway a nice chap from information systems gave me a "completely unsupported" (nudge nudge wink wink) work around: ssh -D.

Here is how it is meant to work. Choose a typical proxy port like 8080, and a sever you can ssh in to on campus (preferably your own of course, but it works with our departmental linux cluster. Lets call the machine fred.fun.ac.uk (its not his real name). My username on fred is assumed to be me.

Now form a terminal run ssh -D 8080 me@fred.fun.ac.uk

This now means that on your local machine (my laptop s running Mandriva 2006, but expect the same works for other proper operating systems) it looks like there is a socks 5 proxy running on port 8080.

Now I configured a proxy in Firefix Edit> Preferences>Advanced>Network Connection Settings.
I chose localhost and 8080. Now that did not work. In the terminal where ssh is running I get the error message

channel 3: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed

Not sure exactly what is going on here, but it seems necessary in firefox at least to use the ip address 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost for your own computer (could be something in etc/hosts?) and you need to click the SOCKS 5 radio button (my depend how new your ssh is I suppose?)

Finally switching the proxy on and off is a bit of a pain without a nice Firefox add on called FoxyProxy. This makes it easy to for example switch the proxy on and off by clicking on the status bar or only using the proxy for certain websites.

On some of our machines we set the sshd to listen on a port other than 22. This can be helpful for example when you are using a public wireless connection in a cafe or one of the University's cobbled wireless access points that blocks port 22. Just change the line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

One thing I would like now is a script that reconnects the ssh -D when the connection drops, eg using wireless.

Some links

This
arstechnica discussion also diagnosed my problem.

SOCKS on Wikipedia in case you wondered what it was.

OpenSsh manual page for ssh

Another blog doing this on Mac OSX

FoxyProxy

Check the ip address you are browsing from here for example.

Apparently it can be done on Microsoft Windows to here
using PuTty. (duh I like that, windows, putty, get it?)

You probably want to set it up so you don't need to type a password when you log in to ssh. Here is how to do it

KDE to Mozilla migration

I love KDE, or at least I am so used to it that I find it really convenient. While I only use Linux, at home, office, laptop in a way its not so much Linux that I like. If all the software I want was available on another 'nix: BSD*, Hurd, whatever, I would n't notice so much aslong as the interface was the same.

Konqueror has lots going for it as well as desktop integration, embedded applications that just work, man:, fish: etc as protocls. I love doing Alt-F2 gg whatever to google for whatever and other KDE standard shortcuts.

However konquerer is a standards compliant browser and lots of websites, especially gmail, google calendar, blogspot, youtube as well as some I use for work are not standards compliant and test to check you are using a browser implementing their favorite bugs.

Kontact: Kmail and Korganizer have server me well but I could not get korganizer to sync with google calender, kmail didnt agee with the universities imap server and did not let me read folders off line. Reluctantly I switched to Mozilla alternatives.

So how to easy the pain and recover some of the functionality of KDE with the mozilla apps.

The most annoying thing about Mozilla (at least on my Linux implementation Mandriva 2006) is the extremely annoying file save open menus. You cant even type the path and have it auto cmplete. Its all tedious clicking. Worst when the file you want to open is a program you want to run to associate with a file you are downloading, and it goes looking in all the wrong places. Another big pain is the non-standard printing menu.

Many of these irritations can be fixed by changing hidden settings in the about:config obscure settings sections.

Much help can be found on the Gentoo wiki.

File download can be configured more flexibly with firefox extension Flashgot. I downloaded the latest binary version of Firefox as it is needed for the latest extensions, and having checked all the bookmarks and settings worked I uninstalled the older rpm version.

Now for Thunderbird. There is an about config hidden in the Edit->Preferences dialogue box. Go to the advanced tab then "config editor". Then same as Firefox for the kde print menu.

Sunbird, the Mozilla Calender, is the weakest of the three suites. And the three are not tightly integrated. The configuration menu can be found in the same place as in Thunderbird.

There are two ways to connect Sunbird to google calendar. Provider for Google calendar synchronises it while on line. But for a laptop this does not work as the calendar goes blank when disconnected. In this case GCALDaemon is a sync daemon written in Java that sits their in the background syncing your google calendars ical file with a local copy that Sunbird can view and edit.