Nick Bonadies's Barbarian Blog

iCal and CalDAV calendars

nick@barbariangroup.com(Nick Bonadies) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:15:35 -0500

Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night?
Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic?
Have you or your family ever seen a spook, spectre, ghost, or blue screen?
Has your CalDAV calendar in iCal ever acted a fool?
If the answer is “yes,” then don’t wait another minute. Pick up the phone and call the professionals…
Barbarian Group Help Computer!
Our courteous and efficient staff is on call 24 hours a day to serve all your supernatural-computational elimination needs.
We’re ready to believe you.

If you’re like us you’ve probably had a bunch of problems with Apple’s implantation of CalDAV in iCal (at least in Leopard). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it get locked up or all kinds of messy, and usually the only way to fix it is to delete a bunch of cache files, reset the sync history, etc. Normally this is tedious process. Well no longer cause there’s an app for that! CalDAV Fixer to save the day!

All this does is run a shell script that clears out your sync history, then moves all the potentially corrupted CalDAV data from your calendar library folder to the trash. If something disastrous happens you can roll back by dragging all the .caldav folders from the trash back into ~/Library/Calendar. After you run it you’ll have to re-setup your CalDAV accounts.

Leopard only!

I offer this up without any warranty, implied or otherwise. Also with no promise of support whatsoever. If it breaks your stuff, sorry but I warned you. TBG is not responsible for any data loss or any sort of loss whatsoever. Be it financial or otherwise. Always back up your data before running!

Formal Friday Intern Beer

nick@barbariangroup.com(Nick Bonadies) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:04:49 -0400

Two of our interns Alex Kaminsky and Frank LeClair were kind enough to get some beers for the office, imagine that! It also happens that I kinda did a formal friday thing today. Thanks guys!!!

Impossible Ebay

nick@barbariangroup.com(Nick Bonadies) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:40:39 -0400

eBay is busted, and its not because some code went bad or because a server somewhere failed. Its because eBay is overrun with people trying to scam other people.

Even the unstoppable Bruce Schneier isn’t immune. He almost got scammed twice while trying to sell his laptop on eBay.

Consumerist has a nice write up about the problem:

The cool thing about eBay’s support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn’t a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has learned the awful truth behind today’s eBay—something many readers here already know—which is that it’s become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium-to-high end electronics there anymore.

Pretty lame. But I never really trusted spending a lot of money on anything via eBay. Its just too bad that everything on the internet sort of turns into this. Too bad or crazy awesome. I can’t decide.

HOWTO: Create a transparent local Apple software update server

nick@barbariangroup.com(Nick Bonadies) — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:18:01 -0400

If the benefit isn’t clearly obvious from the title, let me explain why you would want to set up something like this in your office network. Bandwidth is expensive. Especially if you need a bunch of it and require a solid SLA. Apple updates can be HUGE; the most recent Mac OS 10.5.7 combo update clocked in at a whopping 729MB. Now imagine you have an office of 20 people all using the same internet connection to download the same package from the same place. Madness right?

They’ve just saturated your inbound link and business is grinding to a halt! If you’re in this position you’re already too late, and you’ll have to make up for it using some fancy QoS rules or blocking traffic from the Apple software update servers all together. Don’t live in fear of the next Mac OS update because now you have time to set up your very own Apple software update server!

Lets get to the good tech bits…

Free Limited Time Offer

nick@barbariangroup.com(Nick Bonadies) — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:23:05 -0400

Here is your chance to own a piece of Barbarian Group history! I have a bunch of extra buttons left over from my wildly successful mayoral campaign that I’m going to give out FREE to the internet. Just mail me a self addressed stamped envelope to the address below and I’ll mail you a button back. Also it’d be nice if you included a funny/interesting/weird something or other in the envelope you send me and I’ll can post whatever I get!

Nick Bonadies
The Barbarian Group
338 Newbury Street, 3rd Floor
Boston, MA 02115