So now it’s time to move my calendars. I run out of 3 calendars, one for timetables (hours worked, uni classes etc), one for due dates (projects, assignments) and one for everything that doesn’t come under either of thsoe 2 categories like personal dates.

I expected it to be an annoying and arduous task, but low and behold, it is extremely simple!

First you need to log into your Gmail account, click settings up the top rightm, choose the calendars tab and export all your calendars.

Unzip the file and keep the .ics files somewhere handy.

Next, log into your Google apps calendar and create the neccesary calendars.

Then click the little arrow next to Add and choose import calendar

From here you select the file you want to import, the calendar you want to import to and voila! Calendar moved from Gmail to Google Apps for your Domain.

If I had to sum up the movie for someone going to see it it’d be like this:

“Dude… y’know what’d be cool… if people could shoot bullets and bend them…”
“Yeah, that’d be awesome, let’s make a movie about it!”
“Yeah sweet. We better make sure Angelina Jolie is in it.”

I’m not going to spoil the ending or story line twists or anything, but I will list my favourite and least favourite parts.

FavBits:

• Angelina Jolie getting out of the bath
• Angelina Jolie pashing the guy in slow motion for about 45 seconds
• The main guy smashing the keyboard across his mates face.

Least fav:

• When they flip the cop cars (cool) and land on the bus (still cool) then they magically do a mono/wheelie off the bus and land smoothly on their rear wheels (stupid - made me question my sexuality).
• The bit where the train snapped off and they were in the carriage that crashed ~50m down into a cliff, and survived easily
• The last line of the movie “What have YOU done today?”… Well I sat next to a really fat guy on the train home, and I ate schnitzel, then I went to watch a movie that was almost great, but in the end, just ok…

Overall I didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought it would be.

I hate when an umpire 1. doesn’t know they rules of the game they are umpiring, and 2. deliberatly makes decisions in favour of the team they support (cheats).

There has only been one other centre we have played at that has had an umpire that cheats until now, and she did it both times we played there, blatantly. This frustrated us, but we know to expect it now.

After tonight, I would prefer to play there every week than ever play at North Gong with that umpire tonight. He gave 2 calls of ‘not out’ for the home team where the batsman was at least 1m out. AT LEAST. These were not close calls that went in their favour, these were blatant disregard for the spirit and rules of the game. It made our team angry. We are happy to accept that umpires make mistakes, and not every call goes your way - but when he is clearly basing his decisions on which team is batting, it is wrong. I suggested to a team mate that it is no wonder they make the semi’s every year playing half their games in front of this joker… A guy from the sideline said “yeah, but we’re ahead of you on the table”. I turned and told him “you were ahead of us last year… until we beat you  twice by 100 runs in the semi finals andwe finished second..”

Getting sledged by people from other teams pisses me off. It happened again later on, after bowling a great over, a guy from the sideline sledged the shit out of me. Normally I would flash him a smile and get on with it - but he was a guy that had attacked me before. I walked over to where he was sitting and asked “when do you bat? oh… that’s right, you’re not good enough to play top grade… oh well.. it’s probably more satisfying being the best player in 3rd grade.” He stuttered and had no comeback.

There were a few funny moments - a wanker from their team faced up to the first ball of the over, then missed it, turned to the umpire and asked how many left. I walked over and said “8 minus 1 and you can’t work it out yourself, that does explain a few things”.. He then tried to hit the ball at me and got out. Score 1 to us.

At the end of the game the umpire began to have words with our team (after the 4 nationally accredited umpires questioned the rule he made up). I got the shits, gave him a spray and left.

I am pissed off with cheaters, we lost the game, the umpiring was shit, I have a massive bruise on my leg, yet still - I can’t wait for next week… Am I a sucker for punishment? Yes… but fuck I love my cricket

I decided to post some of the code for anyone interested in how I did it.

The bot is written in Python, and uses the python-twitter library for the Twitter API calls. I will apologize upfront, the code is probably disgusting, but this is only the second thing I’ve ever written in python, so I’m still an L plater.

The first thing we want to do is import the 3 libraries we need; re, twitter and urllib2.

import twitter
import re
import urllib2

Next we need to authenticate with the twitter API, then we’ll get the replies in the form of a Status object.

api = twitter.Api(username='lyricbot', password='nottelling:)')
status = api.GetReplies()

Now that we have all the replies sent to that user, we can iterate through them to decipher what people have said:

for stat in status: #iterate through replies
lyric = stat.GetText()[10:] #strip the ‘@lyricbot ‘ from the front and grab the text
userN = str(stat.GetUser().GetScreenName()) #grab the name of the user that replied
idno = stat.GetId() #the unique id no of the message. This is for ensuring people don’t get multiple replies for one request

Next I parse the string for use in the URL and get the html:

lyric = urllib2.quote(lyric)
f = urllib2.urlopen(url) #open the URL into the stream
html = f.read() #read the url into a string


Once I have the html of the search results, I need to use regular expressions to find the song names from that site.

#compile the regex that finds the first 3 song names returned
re_lyr = re.compile(’[123].([A-Za-z0-9].{10,80}).Lyrics‘, re.DOTALL)
#find the matches for the expression in the html
newRes = re_lyr.findall(html,1)
songs = ”


Once I have the (1, 2 or 3) song results stored in the newRes tuple, I need to check how many (if any) it found, or deal with none being found.

reslen = len(newRes)
if reslen > 0 :
songs = songs+newRes[0] #append to the string that gets sent
if tuplen > 1 :
songs = songs+’ ‘+newRes[1]
if tuplen > 2 :
songs = songs+’ ‘+newRes[2]
else : #if there were no songs found
songs = ‘Sorry I couldn\’t find that one!


Now that we have a string to post (either the song names or the fail message), it’s time to send:

api.PostDirectMessage(userN, songs)

That’s about it really.
There will be another post after I launch it properly, probably with some updates.

Navigate to
C:\Users\Brendo\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent
and back up the entire directory. (In Vista, not sure of the exact directory in XP)

Then navigate to your downloads folder
C:\Users\Brendo\Downloads
in my case, and back that up too.

Once you have reformatted/moved and installed uTorrent, simply drag those two directories over the top of what is already there and voila! your torrents are back how they were.

Now to finish setting up this computer to puuuurrrr…

It starts with Rage Against the Machine, which actually started waaay back in 2007 (more…)

I had submitted my CSR and got the certificate back in an email, so I copied it and pasted it into a .cer file ready to SSL my applet, but when trying to import the certificate, I got the following error:

keytool java.security.cert.CertificateParsingException: signed overrun, bytes = 139

After much searching of forums and Google, I could not find any reference to this specific error message other than something about copy and pasting from the wrong format. I thought that maybe it was something to do with Outlook, so logged into Gmail and copy and pasted from there, voila!

I decided to make sure Outlook was my problem before slaying it all over the intarwebz and sure enough, copy and pasting from Outlook again threw the error, but doing it from Gmail did not. I no longer copy and paste anything important out of Outlook.

First there was the fact that a self signed certificate wouldn’t do. This wasn’t a big surprise, but it wouldn’t even allow me to test my app to ensure it was working before I forked out the big bucks for the proper SSL certificate.

I had an idea, I have a code signing certificate from Thawte that is worth a pretty penny, surely it will at least allow me to test my app, if not be my solution. Strike 2. A Code-Signing certificate can only be used to sign code (JARs in my case), not for authentication – again, no real surprise.

So an SSL certificate was purchased from a company we have a good relationship with, so we got it for wholesale price and away we went… almost. Java’s Virtual Machine looks in a certain spot for trusted certificates, but unlike the major browsers, only has about 15 in there. Of course the certificate we bought was not one of them. Strike 3 - back to the drawing board. For anyone reading this because they are experiencing similar problems, use:

keystore –list –v –keystore %JAVA_HOME%/lib/security/cacerts

Password: changeit

to view the certificates that are in that cacerts file. This is the default file java will look in if you do not specify a trustStore property when calling your applet/application.

We found a certificate in here, were able to obtain a refund on the previous and now it was time to invoke methods remotely over secured sockets and love life… nearly.

The first test of this saw love. The problem was that test didn’t bring browsers into play. I ran the RMI Registry and the Server Implementation, downloaded the jar and ran it from the command line on my PC. Voila!

Hello World!

I was ecstatic. Until I ran the applet from the same jar and got an error telling me “bad certificate�. This didn’t make sense as the root CA of the certificate we were using was certainly in the browser (both Firefox and IE7). A bit of looking around the forums provided very few answers so I decided to post myself (I very rarely post on java forums as the answers to my questions are there if I look hard enough).

It turns out that the Root CA certificates in the browsers have a property that specifies what actions a certificate using that Root CA can perform. The certificate we were using was marked for Code Signing, Server Authentication, Email Authentication. Notice Client Authentication missing. *sigh*.

This was getting thoroughly annoying as I have now spent 3 weeks trying to test code that only took me a couple of days to fully merge with the older code.

I tried checking the Client Authentication box in the browser for out certificate provider, but this didn’t fool the browser for a second, and I was still denied. After a long chat with an RMI expert, it was concluded that it is not currently possible to enable client authentication in RMI using SSL in an applet. If the application is not running from a browser however, this works as it should. The reason is that when you use the browser, it looks for the certificate there rather than in the parameters specified by the applet.

The work around is buy one of the (I think) 2 certificates that support client authentication, though this is untested as we added security other ways and as such, didn’t purchase one of these certificates.

The applet is now running with SSL enabled using Remote Method Invocation. Hurrah!

The trip started well, after booking my first consultation at 4pm, my 2 hour drive from Mackay airport after the plane landing at 3pm was always going to be a struggle. I got into my new pretty red little car and punched the details into my GPS. 2 hours, 5 mins… Looked like mostly straight roads, maybe with a bit of ah… tactical acceleration I could make it in an hour and a half and not be too late.

I got about 20 minutes into the trip and looked at my phone, realising I needed to call ahead and let them know I was going to be late, no reception. Weird, didn’t think I was THAT far out of town, but ok, I’ll call when I get to my stop. You don’t get traffic when you are in a hurry in this sort of place, but you do get animal crossings; Cows, twice. Not just 5 or 10 cows either, I’m talking what seemed like one hundred or so.

Eventually I got to town and tried to call again, but still no reception. Oh well, better hurry; checked in, got changed and headed off 5 mins down the road to the appointment. They had been trying to ring me, as had the sales rep, and my boss – I was advised then that there is no reception unless you are with Telstra, and everywhere was closed after 3pm. I guessed that my second appointment was still going to be on and turned up anyway – it was. After that, I decided to take the fast food route for dinner – only Red Rooter was open… Oh well, drive through will be nice and quick. Not.

25 minutes I sat with the buzzbox off waiting to move. There was only 1 car in front of me. Eventually I ordered, gave the girl $20.45 for my $10.45 meal and got $9 change. I counted it, looked at her and she just looked very vacant. I wasn’t in the mood to give a primary school maths lesson, so I just left… the $1 was a tip for the uh… service.

The rest of the trip wasn’t nearly as interesting as the first night – which was ##exampled by one family saying “so what do you do during the day in boringbah?� Besides a bit of a workout at the gym, I did bugger all during the days.

The most memorable parts of the trip were as follows (in random order);

• One boy asked his mum a question, that she answered “I’m not an octopus, how do you expect me to remember that?â€?

• Ordered a pizza one night, after telling the girl my name was Brendan, she put down Bruno. I waited 40 minutes for the pizza, yet there was no one coming or going from the shop, and when they gave it to me it was supreme – I ordered meat lovers. They re-made it and called my name “Brunoâ€? I took the pizza and told the girl she could call me Brendan and gave her a wink.

• Was craving fish and chips one night, so went to the restaurant attached to the hotel, a Chinese Restaurant that had a whole separate “Aussie Menuâ€?. The heading was “Aussie Menu – all meals served with chipsâ€?. Brilliant, so I ordered one fish and chips to be told “sorry, we don’t have chips anymoreâ€?.

• At an appointment with a mum and daughter (in yr 9) and asked “what is 6 times 6?â€? Before the girl had a chance to think, the mother yells “12!â€? so the girl agrees. I asked “Are you sure… 6 TIMES 6…â€? only to be told by the mother “yeah, it’s bloody 12, stop trying to trick herâ€?. The girl looked on the wall at her timetable poster and told me it was 36, to which mum chimed in “Oh, I thought you mean 6 with a little 2 up above itâ€?.

• The final point to remember was in subway, a guy came in with his ear pierced, one of the big holes, about the size of a 10c coin, only to have the loudmouth busy body woman behind him snarl “is that the thing these days?… big bloody holes in your body… looks bloody stupid to me.. I don’t understand you kids… did it hurt?â€? He ignored her, and a wise decision I think.

The trip ended much more uneventfully than it had started and I was home before I knew it, back to the real world. I love the trips away, as much because its eye opening as anything else.