However, Apple arbitrarily decided to disable the following features on the older 3G model (which I actually own):

• Multitasking (this is the big one, most awaited feature)
• Wallpaper on home screen (why? so it keeps its “depreciated” looks?)
• Battery percentage (What? Why on earth? — Do note that I haven’t confirmed this one, I was just told it was the case by multiple sources)

This made me cringe. While collections (folders) are actually nice, I don’t need them. But on a lighter note, PwnageTool 4.0 also came out today, and deep within its bowels, if you create a custom image, you have the option of re-enabling those features right back in. So I did.

I am pretty much convinced Apple is not doing this out of concern for performance, but rather, to create an artifical demand for the newer models. Look, I don’t mind if you pump out a new hardware model every 6 months, if it is significantly better than the previous one, people will switch. In fact people will most likely buy anything with an Apple logo on it regardless of its merits. But don’t voluntarily cripple the previous models to force people to upgrade. That’s just fucking greedy. Usually one sells a new product by putting emphasis on its merits, on what it does better — not by preemptively forcing the previous models into obsolescence, even if the new products have very little merit of their own. If that is the case, simply, you know, create a better product.

However, the iPhone 4 is currently getting incredibly good reviews all around. Engadget even goes so far as to call it the cream of the crop:

We’re not going to beat around the bush — in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package.

Granted, Engadget seems to be madly in love with anything Apple, but usually, they are still fair in their reviews and visit both sides of the hyperbole equally, the awesome — and the suck. For them to be so enamored with the new hardware, it must mean it is better, no? That alone should be enough, I think.

Then again, I am probably being incredibly naive. Either way, Apple, I am through with your shanenigans.

Mitigating factors are that the camera is really awesome, and also that I got root on it, voiding my warranty a mere fifteen minutes after unboxing it.

So far so good. The under-the-hood features are actually great, and I pretty much enjoy the tabs in terminal. About damn time. I have yet to see if special keys work by default without me hacking it up. Oh and dtrace has a really fruity front-end in the developper tools. Fairly awesome if you ask me.

Anyways, the point is, I was finding Coverflow amusing for 3 whole seconds before switching back to the usual view, and decided to browse the network. By the way, this now actually works now. So, if you pay attention to the actual icon used for Windows machines on the network…

Now that’s fairly ballsy. Not too professional, but I chuckled nonetheless.

I power up the laptop, and see this.

For those not speaking french, it means “No battery available”.

Fuck. And I’m about to go on a trip to toronto. The battery of my older Powerbook died the same way in the very same outlet. What the fuck is wrong with this power outlet, I ask you? Damn.

One new feature of the latest version that came out last week would be Coherence Mode. It is similar to running X11 applications “rootless”. I’m not sure of how to describe it. To cite David Young from StuffOnFire, who describes it in much better words than I would:

Have I ever mentioned how freaking awesome Parallels Coherence mode is? Probably not, because it’s only been out for a week. Well, it’s freaking awesome. What do you run Windows for? Visual Studio? Office? You put the taskbar on auto-hide and it’s just like using a really ass-tastic Mac application, like something made by Adobe. And it runs on your Boot Camp partition! Hell yeah. If there were a Mac Software Engineering Team of the Year award, I’d suggest that the Parallels guys get it.

I just wanted to mention how awesome it was really. No acerbic rant about stuff, or witty comments, really. Just a plain “Oh shit it’s awesome, I want people to know this and belch, fart and shit their pants at the same time when they see this”.

I’ll post a screenshot later on.

/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.3/cc1plus
/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.3-fast/cc1plus
/usr/libexec/gcc/i686-apple-darwin8/4.0.1/cc1plus
/usr/libexec/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.1/cc1plus

That explains why there’s a crapload of things I can’t build on my intel Mac.

C compiler cannot create executables, yeah well, that makes sense. I guess I could possibly cross compile, but that’s too much hassle. I’ll just have to wait for someone to update the ports.

So if you’re wondering why that occurs to you, it’s because there’s no gcc 3.3 for x86 on OS X 10.4. You have to use gcc 4.

What drove me insane was that, while you can publish your calendars to a WebDAV server for others to see and subscribe to, you cannot edit the calendars that are published — unless you have a .mac account. While I sincerly hope this will be in Leopard, I’m not holding my breath.

You see, I run Linux on my desktop at home, and Mac OS X on my laptop, for work. I just wanted to find a simple way to share my calendar between the two machines, and to be able to edit them on any machine.

And it just so happens I just have the solution.

Configuring the WebDAV server

Now, vast amounts of documentation can be found on the subject of setting up the WebDAV server. I’m not going to insult those who already worked on the problem by needlessly rewriting the instructions here. However, I will give you pointers.

• Enabling WebDAV on Apache [serverwatch.com]
• WebDAV on OS X With iCal [gregwestin.com]
• iCal Exchange (Free ics hosting)
• Free WebDAV Hosting [box.net]

So you could go ahead and setup your WebDAV server on *nix or OS X using the two first links, or you could just get free WebDAV hosting using the two others. Any will do.

For the sake of completeness, I will add my own WebDAV configuration below, on Gentoo Linux with Apache 2. I just installed mod_dav on apache2, and added the following configuration to /etc/apache/modules.d/10_mod_dav.conf:

<IfModule mod_dav.c>
  DAVLockDB /var/lock/mod_dav/Dav_Lock
  Alias /ical /var/dav/davroot
  DavMinTimeout 600
        <Directory /var/dav/davroot>
                Dav On
                Options +Indexes
                AllowOverride None
                AuthType Digest
                AuthName "ical-webdav"
                AuthDigestFile /var/dav/htpasswd.digest
                Require valid-user
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from All
        </Directory>
</IfModule>

Of course, I just then added a user using htdigest. You could use “AuthType Basic” if you don’t use mod_digest.

I tested the WebDAV functionality using the OS X “Connect to server” Function. Just enter the path to your webdav location.

I was prompted for authentication. Upon submitting my credentials, the drive was mounted on the desktop.

You should test to see if you can write files to the WebDAV folder. Once that’s done, we can move on the beef of this article.

Setting up iCal

You should take care of iCal first. First thing first, go ahead and share your calendar via iCal, as usual. Enter your WebDAV server information.

Once all is published and well, according to the little icon next to your calendar (), you have successfully published your calendar in a perfect read only fashion.

Making iCal Sync from the server

This is the sweet part, the core of this article. Now, we want iCal to also download the changes from the server. For this purpose, you must find out the Path of your corestorage.ics file for that calendar. Go have a look in ~/Libary/Application Support/iCal/Sources/, right now. (That being the “Library” folder from your Home Directory).

You should see some folder(s) with ugly names, one per Calendar you have. There’s no easy step to this, but you have to find out which is which. You can judge either by creation dates, or by opening the .ics file in your favorite text editor to see if you recognize some of the contents. Of course, if you only have one calendar, things are simplified, you will just have one folder, and one file.

In any case, write down the absolute path to the folder containing the ics file, it’s important. For instance, in my case, it turns out to be:

/Users/supernaut/Library/Application Support/iCal/Sources/2FBCA21F-80E0-44FD-B47A-ED34AE652010.calendar

ical_sync.sh

I have then written two scripts that take care of downloading, comparing and synchronizing your calendars from the WebDAV server. You will need the following utilities installed, most are available from Fink.

• wget
• md5sum

Download and place the following script somewhere on your system. I created a folder named “bin” in my home directory and placed it there.

Next, edit the script and change the variables to match your situation, eg:

ICALPATH="/you/core/ics/folder"
WEBDAV="http://www.yourserver.com/path/to/dav/folder/calendar.ics"
LOGIN="yourlogin"
PASSWORD="yourpassword"

WGET="/sw/bin/wget"
MD5SUM="/sw/bin/md5sum"

Remember! The value for $ICALPATH is actually the one you wrote down earlier. Don’t worry if you mess it up, the script will warn you.

Once that’s done, run it in terminal. It should tell you if ANYTHING goes wrong and back off. I made it extra careful, it would suck to wreck your calendar because the server is down or answers strange things.

This will indeed download and update your calendar on your Mac from the WebDAV server. But how will you make this happen automagically? Well, I have taken care of that too.

Working the Applescript magic

Turns out I have written a second script, this time, an applescript one. You can download the source over there.

Open it or paste it in Script Editor. You should then change the line

do shell script "bash /Users/supernaut/bin/ical_sync.sh"

to match the location of the ical_sync.sh script and then hit “compile”.

Once that’s done, just save it somewhere, but make sure you save it:

• As an Application
• Make sure the startup screen is unchecked

Once that’s done, simply replace the iCal icon in your dock by this script. You can add a pretty icon to it to make it more bearable.

Everytime you click on iCal then, it will sync up the calendar from the server, and tell if you if anything goes wrong. It will then proceed to launch the real iCal for you.

The AppleScript will show a dialog box if, say, the network is down, or something went wrong. For example:

You can then take action. As a precaution, in the event that it wasn’t what you wanted to do, the script will ask you if you still want to launch iCal.

I made it that way because, sometimes, you might want to look at your calendar without being connected to the internet. Makes sense, right?

Now, onwards to other Calendaring software.

Configuring Other Calendars

Nearly any other Calendaring software will not only fetch the lastest ics file from a webdav server, but will also write it back on change, or upon instruction to do so. This means, no problems whatsoever.

I use Korganizer in conjunction with Kontact on my KDE based desktop. Evolution and Sunbird could most likely do this as well.

I just added a calendar for a web source, and configured it with my WebDAV information:

Please excuse the craptacular quality of the screenshot. It was taken while forwarding X11 to my Mac over an SSH tunnel, and as such, fonts are screwy.

Then, it just worked out of the box. No problem whatsoever.

In conclusion

This is somewhat of a cheap and dirty hack, but it works fairly well. I’ve been using it for three weeks and it’s a dream. I sincerely hope that this has been somewhat useful to at least someone

Drop me a comment if you liked it, or if you have problems. Feel free to ask, really.