Month: December 2005

Drilled my holes

lpaulriddle

I got kinda lazy yesterday, and didn’t get too much done on the bedroom fan wiring project. But, I did get one step closer to running a new wire from the basement to the attic. I got holes drilled in the top and bottom plates, and verified that both holes hit the same stud cavity. Fishing the wire should be pretty easy at this point.

Rules of thumb for anyone who wants to attempt this…

  1. Ensure that you own a ranch house. 🙂
  2. Tools of the trade: tape measure, stud finder, drill, 1/8″ x 12″ feeler bit, 5/8″ spade bit, flashlight.
  3. Find reference points in the basement and attic so that you can (somewhat accurately) pinpoint where to drill. Examples are: pipe penetrations, wire penetrations, ducts, etc.
  4. Locate the wall studs, and pick your drilling spots so that you don’t hit the top (or bottom) of a vertical wall stud.
  5. Measure, measure, measure! Can’t stress this enough.
  6. Drill a pilot hole first to make sure you hit an open stud cavity. I use a 1/8″ x 12″ bit for this. After drilling, leave the bit in the hole. Then go upstairs/downstairs and make sure the bit is not sticking through the ceiling/floor!
  7. Assuming everything looks good, use a 5/8″ spade bit to enlarge the hole. When drilling downwards from the attic, make sure the bit is TIGHT in the chuck.
  8. Once you have drilled both holes, put a flashlight over the hole in the attic. Adjust the light for a focused (not diffuse) beam. Go down to the basement. Turn the lights off, look up into the hole, and make sure you can see the beam.

Next: Let’s fish some wire..

Wiring fun

lpaulriddle

So, I’m doing a bit of rewiring in our spare bedroom, soon to become my 3-year-old’s new room. The previous owners put up a ceiling fan. Problem is, they didn’t bother to install an approved box. It’s one of those lovely nail-to-the-underside-of-the-studs metal bar jobbies. Rather than sit around twiddling my thumbs until the fan comes crashing down, I’m putting a new box in with a proper brace. Along the way, I’m replacing the wall switch, a fan/light control that has (putting it nicely) seen better days.

Well, nothing is ever that easy. The new fan control is slightly deeper than the old one. The power feeds through the wall box. There are 3 cables coming into the box: A 14-2 BX feed, a 14-3 BX carrying switched, unswitched and neutral to the ceiling box, and a 14-2 romex that someone added at a later date, to carry switched power to the fan (separate from the lights). So, we’ve got 3 cables and a grand total of 5 wirenuts (3 for the switch, 1 for neutral, and 1 to cap off the unused wire in the romex cable). Short story: I can’t fit everything in the box with the deeper switch.

I want to use this switch. I’ve got 2 other identical ones elsewhere in the house. So, looks like I need to do some rewiring.

I suppose I could replace the box. Nothing I haven’t done before. But, these boxes are holy hell to get out of the wall, without destroying the wall (plaster over gypsum board, or “rock lath” as it was called back in the day). No, I think I’ll rewire things and take the wall box out of the circuit, and make it a simple switch loop. Then I can cut it down to a single 14/3 cable going to the box, with a hot and two switched lines, 1 for the fan and 1 for the lights. Then it’ll fit.

So, I’ll just find a wire in the attic that’s ahead of the switch box in the circuit, cut it, and route it directly to the ceiling box, right? Sure, in theory. Problem is, there are no wires in the attic that are ahead of the switch box. The switch box IS the feed from the basement to the attic. Time for plan B. Looks like I’ll need to run a new wire from the basement to the attic. This will require me to break out my wire fishing skills. Now, having wired my own security system, I’ve done my share of fishing. However I’ve never run a wire straight from the basement, through a stud cavity, and into the attic (this is a rancher, BTW. Unfinished attic on top, drop-ceiling basement on bottom. If you’re into wiring, ranchers rock). Seems like it should be easy in theory. I guess I’ll find out. This should be fun! More later.

Legacy CorporateTime API

lpaulriddle

It appears that Oracle has totally dropped support for legacy CorporateTime servers in its recent SDK releases. I found some API documentation for the old CAPI_ functions, and as I mentioned before, some of them do appear to show up in the shared libraries. However, try as I might, I couldn’t reference any of the functions using the 10.1.1 libraries. The fact that none of them are prototyped in ctapi.h is also kind of telling. Looks like I won’t be getting any joy out of the 10.1.1 SDK. Could it be that Oracle dropped support so that more people would buy their new, expensive Collaboration Suite? Naaaah.

However, I won’t give up that easily. I have Google. I plugged CAPI_Connect into Google, sifted through a few pages of results, and lo and behold, I found a site that had the entire 2.0 CorporateTime SDK, circa 2002, for Linux/i686!!! After glancing over my shoulder to make sure Oracle’s lawyers weren’t looking, I grabbed it.

The SDK includes some example code, calendar.c, which connects to the server and allows interaction through a text-driven menu system. It built painlessly using the supplied Makefile. The next challenge was figuring out how to use it to log in. To make a long story short:

  1. First prompt: Hit return (no config file)
  2. Second prompt (name of calendar server): Enter calendar.umbc.edu:5730
  3. Third prompt (ACE mechanism): Enter 2. It seems to work fine without specifying an ACE mechanism.
  4. Fourth prompt (user or Sysop): Enter 1 to authenticate as a user.
  5. Fifth prompt (username): This was the tricky part to figure out. Enter ?/S=lastname/G=firstname/. In my case I used ?/S=riddle/G=paul/. Obviously patterned after the LDAP attributes, surname and givenName.
  6. Sixth prompt: Enter password.

Once I figured out the proper incantations, it logged me into the calendar server! I tried out a few menu options. Data seems to come through in iCalendar format, which is what I want.

This is great, it looks like I’ll be able to automate the export/massage/publish process as I had originally hoped.

More later…

The ongoing Oracle Calendar saga

lpaulriddle

Well, my initial efforts to use the Oracle Calendar SDK have been a resounding failure. I got everything installed, and was able to compile a “hello world” type program. However it appears that our calendar server is too old and crusty to work with the newer set of API functions, all of which have the prefix CSDK_. Apparently I need to use the old CorporateTime API, with functions that begin with CAPI_. Now, when I run nm * in the SDK library directory, it turns up a bunch of these functions, but I’m not sure they’re actually what I want, and I don’t have any documentation or sample code. I’ll search around, and give this one more shot, but I’m beginning to resign myself to the fact that this is going to have to be a partially-manual process, at least until we upgrade our calendar server.

On the same front, I started looking at what it would take to create my own .ics file which I could subscribe to with iCal. I started by creating a dummy calendar in iCal, publishing it, copying the published .ics file into /tmp on my linux box, and then unpublishing the file in iCal (which deletes it off the WebDAV server). I then edited the .ics file in /tmp, changed the name, copied it file back to the web server, and successfully subscribed to it with iCal. Apple sticks a GUID field, among other things, into its published .ics files, and I’m not sure how I’d generate one from scratch, so I’ll just use this file as a template and I’ll be able to build a .ics file that iCal will be happy with. So, making progress here.

Oracle Calendar API Revisited

lpaulriddle

Well.. I’ve managed to track down the Oracle Calendar SDK libraries for Linux. They’re included with the Oracle Collaboration Suite distribution, which I had originally thought only included libraries for the Mac. I did a little more digging and found this post on Oracle’s Calendar SDK message board. It turns out I need to run the installer and let it do an “official” install of the stuff. A bit convoluted given that all I need is a couple libraries and include files, but if it works…

Here’s what I did:

  1. Downloaded the Oracle Collaboration Suite distribution (version 10g) from Oracle’s web site. It came as a 3.8-gig multipart compressed tar archive (thank God for Internet2)! After running the script to assemble the parts, I ended up with a file called OCS_101200.tar.gz.
  2. I’m not interested in everything in the tar file, just the calendar stuff. This is all in a directory called calendar_standalone. So, I untarred just that directory: tar xzvf OCS_101200.tar.gz calendar_standalone.
  3. I ran the installation script, runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs. The option tells the installer to keep running even though I’m not running one of Oracle’s pre-approved flavors of Linux.
  4. Walk through the menus, select the SDK, and follow the directions.

After doing this, I ended up with the SDK (along with 300 megs of other kruft) installed in my home directory under a directory called product.

Haven’t played around with it yet, but hopefully I can write something to do a simple event extract. If that works, I can write an automated script that extracts the data, massages it, and posts it as an iCal subscription. Stick it in cron to run nightly, and I’ve got my ultimate solution for Oracle Calendar integration. Wish me luck!

Missing Sync

lpaulriddle

Well, as promised, I sprung $40 for The Missing Sync for Palm OS. I’ve installed it, set up sync with iCal and Address Book, and tried out the internet connection sharing feature. My initial impressions are good. Setup was painless. The iCal sync seems to work very well. The initial sync resulted in some duplicate calendar entries, but I think that’s because it was also pulling in my data from Palm Desktop. Once I deleted the duplicate data and got rid of the old Palm Desktop conduits, it worked great. As for the internet connection sharing, I doubt I’ll get much use out of it, but it works without a hitch.

Missing Sync also includes an app that allows you to mount the SD card on the Mac desktop as an external volume. As I don’t yet have an SD card, I haven’t been able to try this out. I’m curious as to how it works. The documentation does not reveal many details. I’m hoping it emulates the USB storage standard, which would let me mount it on my Linux boxes as well. I’d like to be able to use the Palm as sort of a “poor man’s jump drive.” Again, I may not end up using it much, but I can try it out and see if it’s useful to me, or if I’d be better served with a “dedicated” USB jump drive.

If it turns out that it doesn’t emulate USB storage, I can try out a product called Card Export II which advertises this functionality. It’s only $15 and I can download a fully functional trial version. But I’m hoping Missing Sync will do it for me.

Next up.. I think I’m going to rework my Oracle Calendar intergration a bit. I’m going to write a Perl script to take the exported Oracle Calendar data (in vCal format), tweak it a bit for all-day events and holidays, and write it out in iCalendar format. Then I can just post the resulting iCalendar file on my web site, and subscribe to it with iCal. That way I don’t have to import it into iCal, which is a cumbersome process. We’ll see how it goes.