A preponderance of yak shaving….

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It is often observed that attempting to undertake one task begets another, with the corollary that two days later you’ve built a bikeshed painted in a multitude of colours.

So, dear readers, this tale of woe begins with the need to update my blog to something useful after 18 months of neglect and more. I had been writing a travel blog from when I took some leave off work to wander the globe. For this task, a new more generic DNS entry and an upgrade to the WordPress installation and syndication with my Advogato blog. Easily accomplished and a sense of progress.

This blog entry is going to be mostly a technical one. I’ll try incorporating more of real life in other entries.

Great, now I can tell the world about my little project toying with Vagrant and Puppet.

It is called “Browser In A Box”. It is up on Github https://github.com/mtearle/browser-in-a-box

It is very simple, a Vagrant file and a set of Puppet manifests/modules to launch Chromium in kiosk mode inside a VM to hit a certain URL. This is part of planned later work to look at creating a Vagrant development environment for Concerto.

At this point, I got distracted … aside from the liberal upgrades of bash on various machines to address Shellshock

Then I accidentally purchased a new Ultrabook. My previous netbook had been getting long in the tooth and it was time to upgrade. I ended up purchasing a Toshiba Satellite NB10, a reasonable processor Intel N2830, 4 Gig of RAM and 500 Gigs of spinning rust. Those are the nice bits.

On the negatives, Crappy Toshiba keyboard layout with the ~ key in a stupid spot and a UEFI bios. It is now blatantly apparent why Matthew Garrett drinks copious quantities of gin.

Special brickbats go to the Ubuntu installer for repartitioning and eating my Windows installation and recovery partition. (The option to install over my test Debian installation got over enthusiastic).  The wireless chipset (Atheros) has a known problem where it confuses the access point.

The next distraction ended up being a fit of procastination in terms of rearranging my tiny apartment. I’ve now modelled it in a program called Sweet Home 3D. Easy and straight forward to use. Needs a few more furniture models, but perfectly functional. I shall use it again next time I move.

Finally, we arrive at the the original task. I want to start syncing my calendars between various locations (written here for my benefit later).

They are:

  • Work stream – From my Work (Exchange) to my private host (Radicale) to Google Calendar (which will get to my Android phone)
  • Personal stream – From my private host (Radicale) to Google Calendar (and back again)
  • Party stream – From Facebook’s ical export to my private host and Google Calendar

In addition, various syncing of contacts but not my primary focus at the moment.

It appears that syncevolution will do most of what I want here. The challenge revolves around how to get it working. Ultimately, I want to have this live headless hosted on a virtual machine not running a desktop.

In a fit of enthusiasm, I decided upon attempting to build it from source as opposed to using the packages provided from the upstream (to avoid dragging in unnecessary dependencies.

I need to build from HEAD due to recent code added to syncevolution to support the change in Google’s CALDAV API to be behind OAuth V2.

This was not an overly successful exercise, I ended up getting something built but it didn’t ultimately work.

Problems encountered were:

  • libwbxml2 – The upstream at opensync.org is down. There appears to be forks, so playing the game of guessing the current head/release version.
  • activesyncd – Build system is currently broken in parts. There appears to be bit rot around the evolution bindings as the evolution API has changed

I gave up at that point. I’ve since spun up a different virtual machine with Debian Jessie and an install of Gnome. The packages from the syncevolution upstream installed cleanly, but have yet to work out the incarnations to make it work. However, that my friends is a story for a later blog entry…

Oh Canada!

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Dear readers,

In my last instalment I left you having left Brisbane and arrived into Sydney ready to depart Australia.  Apologies for the lack of updates for the past few weeks, I’ve been enjoying the trip, devoting my all my brain cycles to my adventures, and spare moments to catching sleep and relaxing.

After a very long Thursday (courtesy Air Canada), was met at the other end by long time friends, A and E.   Had to remember, or be reminded, to get in the correct side of the car for Canada.  Canada not being of the 76 countries that drive on the left.   Was entertaining for the A and E to watch my reactions to being taken in traffic in the front passenger seat for the first time.

Headed off to A and E’s apartment to freshen up after the long flight.  As A famously boasts, “Closer to the airport than the nearest hotel!”.   Their apartment has a birds eye view looking out over the Vancouver Airport.  The area of Richmond that they live in is being slowly developed and turned into apartment towers.   I’m slightly jealous of the view and that it would be a nice place to spend a lazy winters afternoon looking out of the window.

Of my Vancouver experiences, two stick in my mind.

The first was ringing at my bell tower in a foreign country [1] at the Holy Rosary Cathedral.  I managed to ring there twice, once for a wedding and once for service.   Unsurprisingly, ringers are not a diverse bunch, easily spotted lurking outside towers, and fit into some stereotypes.    That said I had a great time and would love to visit them again.

The second was a trip out to the Richmond Night Markets with A, E and Z.   We worshipped at the stall supplying Rotatos (potatoes cut in a swirl on a stick and covered in cinnamon).  Yum!   Wandered past lots of other delicious food smells coming from the other vendors.   Looked at the dozens of stalls selling iPhone covers and shaking my head.   It was a great market experience.

Sadly, I had to leave Canada for the rest of my trip into the the US of A and crossed the border at of all places, Vancouver Airport.   I think I get bonus points for avoid LAX 🙂

[1] No, Queensland doesn’t count.

Crossing the coathanger

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Arrived Sydney late Wednesday afternoon into Paramatta.  Visited ringing practice at All Saints.  Lovely bells and a nice band, then headed onwards onto D’s place in Petersham.

Understandably snoozed a lot on the Thursday.    Friday, I first visited a contact who works for AARNet and touched based on a couple of projects that are under way and caught up with D and Q after they got home.

Saturday was catching up with geek friend, M.

A very good evening was had with L and A and their friend M.  M and her friend M also turned up.  Met A?.  A also dragged M along.  Lots of very yummy home made pizzas were made 🙂

Sunday was catching up with S and G for lunch, briefly met their son D.   Lots of change in their life with a new house and a change in employment situation.   The Sunday evening was spent with the cousins, who are always great company.

Monday night was ringing practice at St Andrews, and then Tuesday was getting back on the road again.

Crossed the harbour via the bridge and tunnel multiple times and got used to driving in Sydney… not that scary!

Rocketman

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20120620 2230 ZULU Woomera

Awoke this morning at the backpackers in Woomera.  Continued the morning ritual by waking, getting dressed and packing the car.

Headed into the centre of the townsite and begun wandering around the various heritage exhibits.   My mission for the trip out to Woomera was to find out what the place was like and to try and find out some history about the time my maternal grandfather spent out at the facility.  I didn’t find out much on that front, but have a few ideas how to find out more.

It was a strange place to visit.  The townsite hasn’t remained static from the heydays of its earlier activities, but neither has it reflected the orginal promise of the facility – that is, to continue to do excellent rocket and space research.   Geography got the better of the site for space purposes (not good for satellites) and perhaps a different location should have been chosen.   Rocketry now seems to be a mostly known field (at least for Australia and its allies)

Like Cook, the townsite is a creation of necessity and is not majorly dissimilar to other parts of South Australia.

Left just after 11am and headed back on the long drive to Adelaide.  Arrived a bit worse for wear with a head cold  *sniffle*

Animals seen today:  Sheep
UFOs seen today:  One

Mark

Into the desert.

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On the fourth day of the trip, the road led me into the known unknown.

Trekked out to Woomera from Adelaide via Port Augusta.   I’m visiting to find out more about the place and to establish some context around what I had heard of my maternal grandfathers time out here many years ago.

I arrived just before sunset (less than an hour) and have not seen much of the town yet.   What I have seen so far, is an interesting trip into a place of the past that is still an active facility but not as it once was.  Anachronisms abound.

Animals sighted on drive: Kangaroo, Emu and Cattle

I’m looking forward to tomorrows adventure into the unknown past and seeing what I can find out.

Enough gibber gabbering, good night!

Mark