Urania

Finally there is a free way to synchronize your Google Calendar and you iCal! Google has added support for CalDAV! So if you are running Leopard, you can now (in theory) synchronize iCal and GCal without paying a third party or pulling out our hair for some of the private solutions The detailed instructions for getting iCal talking to GCal are here.

Unfortunately, it looks to to be as twitchy as running your own Darwin Calendar Server. I’ve been using CalDAV on my own personal server for a few months and I have to admit it has been a bit twitchy, but getting better as time rolls on. I tried to synchronize this afternoon to Google Calendar and got the following error:

The server responded with
"HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error"
to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation.

I got this error when trying to create a new calendar in Google from iCal. This is actually a documented error, but it didn’t go away for me like Google suggested it would. I am also getting that error when I try to import items into my GCal calendar via an “import” of the ics file I “exported” from my old calendar. I saw this same error on my server some time back. I needed to update my Darwin Calendar Server source code before I could fix it. In any case, I hope this is only a temporary issues since I could be very happy with the idea that I can now drop the maintenance of Darwin Calendar Server on my own computer and hand that task over to Google.

Followup (July 30): I noticed all of the errors occurring during the import were for old classes last semester. So I forced my way through them by clicking “Revert to Server” for every one of the errors. There were probably 20 of them. Once done, I compared my calendar on my computer and Google’s Calendar, they were identical. So for now, it looks like GCal’s CalDAV server may serve my needs after all. I could have avoided all this by directly importing my ics file into Google through their web interface.

Followup (August 27): So I got an iPod Touch and discovered that CalDAV calendars are loaded on the iPod Touch as “Read-only”. If Apple really wants to back CalDAV as a standard, you would think they would support it more fully on their own products. For now, I found that BusySync works quite nicely for syncing my iCal calendars with gCal in such a way that the calendars are hosted on my Mac and the iPod Touch then can treat the calendars are read-write. This, along with the lack of native ToDo list synchronization on the iPods are about the stupidest bits of inconsistency I have seen in using the iPod Touch. Luckily the ToDo list being missing from the iPod Touch doesn’t affect me as much as I am using OmniFocus, which works very well on the Mac and iPod Touch and allows synching between both.

I can attest the Aqua version of SAOImage DS9 version 5.3beta does indeed play nice with Apple’s dopey firewall behavior (see here for notes on version 5.2’s incompatibility with the Leopard firewall). However, the command line version that uses X-windows DOES NOT play nice with the Leopard Firewall. If you run the X-windows version of “ds9″ on a Mac running Leopard’s built in Firewall in “Set access for specific services and applications”, you will end up with a completely hosed ds9 executable which will not launch ever again.

As such, for now, since I prefer the X-windows version of SAOImage DS9, I am leaving the the Firewall off for now, I’m not too concerned.

Today I noticeed two interesting software updates for Mac-based professional astronomers.

The first one I noticed was the updating of Xquartz to version 2.3.0. Xquartz is the updated version of X11 for the Mac OS (even ahead of Apple’s own installed versions) that I prefer to use, largely because bug-fixes get rolled in here before they appear in Mac OS. This version requires Mac OS 10.5.4 and has a couple of caveats attached to it for programmers, notably:

The software supporting the deprecated imake build system is not provided in this package. If you need imake and xmkmf, please install the X11 package that came with your Leopard DVD before installing this version. Alternatively, you can compile these packages on your own or get them from a third party such as Fink or MacPorts. The darwin configuration files used by the imake build system are outdated and not supported. Developers using this build system are advised to migrate to autoconf.

[Added July 24, 2008: Apparently, this version of Xquartz changed the X11.app Icon so it now X11 looks like this

when it is on the Dock. Interesting, but it threw me for a second. The only documentation I found of this change is in a Ticket filed with XQuartz's bug reporting system. Still, I think this is a good idea, as it gives a visual cue that you are using XQuartz as opposed to the default X11 installation.]

Along with a bunch of library changes, the key update appears to be having the Xserver updated to the 1.4 branch of Xorg. There is also “support for adding new $DISPLAY sockets after the server is running” (which I think means using the DISPLAY variable will not break things) and “/usr/X11/bin/Xquartz is just a stub that will ‘do the right thing’,” whatever that means. I have upgraded to it and as a reminder, if you upgrade MacOS after installing Xquartz, you will need to reinstall Xquartz to get it back.

The other interesting software release for Mac-based astronomers I noticed today was SAOImage DS9 which has released version 5.3beta, which appears to be, based on the statement on their homepage that “MacOSX 10.5 users with firewall enabled, please use version 5.3 beta”, geared toward addressing the issue I noticed this April with version 5.2 where launching SAOimage DS9 with a certain firewall setting on the Mac could result in the the application becoming irreparably damaged at launch.

When I moved the my Scisoft OSX mirror to a new server, I messed up the permissions on the files, preventing users from downloading the Scisoft OSX packages from the mirror. This has now been fixed.