Just a Gwai Lo

Synchronizing your calendar between devices is still a mess. My personal calendar is on one account, my work calendar is shared with my personal account, and my girlfriend shares her calender with me as well. Initially I tried NuevaSync's Microsoft Exchange server to have over-the-air synchronization, and that worked well, allowing me to create events and have them appear, right away, on the Google Calendar account without intervention from iCal. The downside of NuevaSync was that every calendar event appeared as if it were on one calendar, so I couldn't tell which was work, which was her event (imagine everybody's surprise if I were to show up to an appointment she had with a heath care professional!), and which was a personal life event.

Google had CalDAV integration in beta, and recently launched it as an official service. That worked to keep iCal on my Mac synchronized well, but I could not add events from my iPhone. Having to move events over after a sync is not a habit I'm willing to form.

Spanning Sync is the least worst option, an endorsement that probably won't appear on their site. Through Spanning Sync, I get all my events in neat calendars but still have to manually synchronize the iPhone with the computer. It's something I have to do periodically anyway, so no loss there. The holy grail, of course, is direct, instant iPhone-to-Google Calendar synchronization.

Boris schooled me to Spanning Sync's referral program, which means that when anybody clicks through his image link, he gets a cool $5 sent to his PayPal account. Anybody clicking through that image also gets a cool $5 off the product. So in the spirit of trying to get something for free in an honest way, I encourage those frustrated with the state of calendar synchronization to click the image at the very top here to get me a fin, the term for a 5-dollar bill I learned from watching The Simpsons.

This being my third technology conference, after Gnomedex and Northern Voice, OSCON beat expectations which were higher than my expectations than Gnomedex. On a subject level, it probably didn't beat Northern Voice, but on a fun level, it definitely beat both of the two, Gnomedex being the conference, out of the three, that I enjoyed the least. That was mostly because of a lack of sleep and lack of breakfast, both not a problem at OSCON. This conference was pretty cool too because there were some people I met that I had "known" already, like Eleanor Kruszewski and some "new" people, like Joi Ito very briefly, whom I "know" from the #joiito IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. The convention is over now, and while my Bryght colleagues BoF it up with other Drupalians, I'm cooling off in my hotel room and trying to figure out what, if anything, to do tonight and tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a list of all the books I've either purchased, got free, or somehow managed to acquire without paying for:

• Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim: mostly out of fanboydom for the author, who still writes semi-publicly on comments and email lists, but who wrote unbelievably great articles for his now-defunct weblog and currently-home page dive into mark. I had initially wanted to buy the book through Amazon.com through his associates ID so that as much benefit as possible would go to him, but 20% off at a conference I was attending for work was a sweeter deal. (I've linked the title above to his associates ID.)
• Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition by Ellen Siever, Aaron Weber, Stephen Figgins, Robert Love and Arnold Robbins: I think I already have a copy of this, and have exactly zero personal computers at my disposal that run it. I don't use my PC much for Windows stuff anymore, so this book will come in handy eventually.
• The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky: deceptively, this is a book by Apress, who had a booth at OSCON, and they gave me a t-shirt because, along with Dive Into Python, that constituted a two-Apress-book-at-one-time purchase. This looks really good, as a quick flip-through makes it seem as if it focusses on the human element of software development, rather than the technology or the code itself.
• Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle: it was sitting on a table with a small booklet that I must have dropped along the way. It covers PHP 5 and doesn't really seem to cover XML at all except indirectly through sections on XML-RPC and the MetaWeblogAPI.

Though not by any means a comprehensive haul, I got some t-shirts too:

• two for my friend on the East Coast. One that says "I'm a Bryght girl" (I just created a PubSub feed—RSS and Atom for those at home—to watch for people who specifically mention they are either wearing theirs or see a woman wearing one on the street) and another for "My CMS kicks your CMS's ass".
• I got one of the latter for myself, in a guy's size and colour.
• an ActiveState t-shirt for filling out a survey, telling them thanks for hosting PHP meetups at their Vancouver office every month or so
• a shirt that doubles as an invitation to a party I will probably not attend

That's it. I was complimented at least three times today on my Creative Commies t-shirt, which I bought months ago.The only sessions I attended during the week were the CalDAV session, Sam Ruby's Python session briefly (as already mentioned), and Zak Greant's session on ext/mysqli for PHP 5. No non-technical books purchased, at least not yet. Powell's is 3 blocks away, so that shouldn't be a problem. When packing for the trip, I did keep room in my backpack for a few things to take back to Vancouver with me, including a laptop cooling stand that I so desperately need.