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iCalendar timezones…
I took another look at time zone data in iCalendar, to see if I could include time zone info in my downloaded Oracle Calendar data. This isn’t a super high priority thing, as the only thing that it affects is how my Palm displays my meetings. The meetings are displayed correctly, but they include a…
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Love those non-cash donations..
Well, being that it’s tax time again, I just have to say how much I love giving our old junk away to charity. Lately, our favorite charity for this kind of thing is Vietnam Veterans of America. This is just such a win-win for all parties involved, that I can’t say enough about it. Consider:…
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More on VNC
Well, it’s been a little over a month since I first played around with VNC, and now I wonder how I got along without it. Mostly, I use it to access my Linux box in the basement office. For awhile I grabbed its main X11 display using the XFree86 VNC module. This works OK, but…
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The hassle^H^H^H^H^H^Hlegacy of PINs at UMBC
So, we have this new campus portal at UMBC. And for the most part, the launch has gone pretty well. As part of this whole thing, we’re rethinking some of our old, outdated business processes and changing the way they work under the new portal. One of these is the PIN (Personal ID Number). Waaaaay…
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Lessons learned about check deposits..
I have this credit union account, which I keep around solely because there’s an ATM I can walk to from my office. I get the convenience of using the ATM for check deposits and cash withdrawals, and in return, the credit union gets to keep a nominal amount of my money and pay me practically…
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Affinities affinities affinities…
As expected, the whole uPortal affinity thing is really drawing folks out of the woodwork. For those of you who came in late, uPortal uses a totally different scheme from the old portal to determine who sees what content. Let’s take the “Faculty Options” channel as an example: Portal You see faculty options if… old…
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Sharing address books
Now that I’ve got my calendar stuff all figured out, it’d be nice to do the same with my address book and contacts. Right now, the “reference” version of my address book is stored in the Mac Address Book application. From there, I use Missing Sync to synchronize it with my Palm, and Apple’s iSync…
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Mortgage escrow analysis demystified
Just found out what my mortgage payment is going to be for the next year, and the escrow amount jumped a bit more than I had expected. So, being the accounting buff that I am, I decided to try and figure out the formula the mortgage company is using to determine the monthly escrow amount.…
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Bluetooth and iSync
Bluetooth is a really neat technology. It’s got a lot of potential, but there are still a lot of issues with it. The pie-in-the-sky dream is that we will have all these different Bluetooth gadgets that all interoperate perfectly. The reality, of course, is not as rosy. There are lots of devices that speak Bluetooth,…
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Stalking the infinite loop
Today began with an effort to track down the infinite loop which is causing the java process to munch CPU cycles on the portal server. The problem seems to be spreading.. when I checked this morning around 6:30am, there were 4 looping threads on uportal1 and 5 on uportal2. I’ve tracked down the offending loop,…