Author Archives: Ken Judy
Technological fiasco enablement
From Gothamist, “NYU Accidentally Makes Fools Out of 489 Prospectives”
NYU sent an email to nearly 500 students this week that they should pack their bags and get ready to make their way over to Greenwich Village this fall as members of Wagner School’s next graduate class. An hour later, the school sent another email telling those same students to scratch that—they were actually rejected.
Internet crime up 33%
From the Associated Press:
Reports of Internet-based crime jumped 33 percent in 2008, according to a group that monitors web-based fraud.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center said in its annual report released Monday that it received more than 275,000 complaints last year, up from about 207,000 the year before.
The total reported dollar loss from such scams was $265 million, or about $25 million more than the year before.
GhostNet
From the New York Times article, Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries, by John Markoff
Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.
The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.
Outlook -> Office Online -> [insert icalendar hack here] -> Google Calendar -> Google Sync -> Blackberry
I have reason to want an exchange calendar sync’d to my blackberry. Problem being, the blackberry is not on that exchange server’s enterprise services and blackberry internet service doesn’t sync calendars.
Happily, Office Online offers the ability to publish calenders in an icalendar format. With Google Sync for Blackberry and Google Calendar I could subscribe and sync to my blackberry.
At some point, this broke.
Unhappily, it appears the Office Online feed has started failing in Google’s icalendar parser. It also fails in the iCalendar Validator by Steven N. Severinghaus.
Google has just released an Outlook add-in to sync calendars but I have restricted permissions to install software on my Outlook pc. So, I decided to try to solve this on my own.
Using http rather than webcal iCalendar Validator was able to flag the following:
Error: Error was: Error at line 68: Unparseable date: "2"
Looking in the feed, I found word wrapping breaking dates and guids:
EXDATE;TZID="GMT -0500 (Standard) / GMT -0400 (Daylight)":20090316T140000,2
0090323T140000
After finding other services that could parse the feed but none that would sync over the wire to my blackberry calendar, I wrote a short php script to make the feed comply with Google’s parser.
<?php
//request the icalendar file
$output = file_get_contents('http://[path to calendar ics file]');
//clean up the icalendar content
$output = preg_replace("/[\n|\r]+\t/m", "", $output);
//print out the result
echo $output;
?>
Now I can subscribe to the calendar via my script’s URL and google reads and syncs it to my blackberry. Happiness for now – at least until this kludge train derails again.