Category: Technology

How and why to #quitFacebook

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After logging in to Facebook yesterday and seeing yet another notice about how Facebook is going to swap my data with just about any site they feel like, I realized I don’t want to have to check their extremely complicated privacy settings every week or two to make sure they haven’t changed something I care about.

Besides being an incredible waste of time, it’s futile: they have made a practice of making significantly bad changes you can’t do anything about. Some of these changes can have real consequences down the road, and I just don’t need that. Moreover, it is not clear what real effect the settings have, in practice. So, since I didn’t grow up with Facebook and I’m not going to go through social withdrawal, it’s out.

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Best Groupwise calendar app for iPad so far…

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Novell’s Groupwise version 7 is not compatible with the iCalendar (.ics) format. This makes viewing your Groupwise calendar a challenge on an iPhone or iPad.

In the past, I’ve used a kludgy method of syncing my Groupwise calendar to iCal by delegating any received appointments to a Google calendar, then subscribing to that calendar with iCal. This was hardly a perfect system: appointments would get missed or doubled sometimes. So it was nice to finally find a better solution: “GW Calendar” from Ghost Pattern Software.

GW Calendar allows you to see your Groupwise calendar in realtime in either one-day or week views. It also allows you to forward, accept and decline meetings, but not create new ones or do busy searches. There is no month view yet. And most importantly, no Push notification of upcoming meetings. However it is quite useful for accurate viewing of your Groupwise calendar over the next few days.

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Style Confluence with CSS using a back-door approach

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I recently had the task of creating a new theme for a Confluence-based corporate wiki in time for a big launch date.

There were a few restrictions on how I could do this, including:

  • There is no user access to the Space’s Page Layout features, which means that any changes needed there must be sent to an administrator to be added to the site. 
  • There is no user access to the server, so editing stylesheets would have to be through the application or by giving them to the admin to upload. We could put assets on another server but sometimes this can cause security issues with browsers, coming from mixed security level domains. Similarly, every image to be used at the Space Page Layout level would have to be sent to an admin for upload. 
  • The Documentation theme was not available to us yet. 
  • ThemeBuilder was not available yet. 
  • And – it goes without saying – the schedule was tight.
Our first challenge was to add a collapsible navigation tree on the left side of the page, similar to the Documentation theme does, but without using the Documentation theme, since we do not have that option yet.

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Use SC Plugin for OS X to browse Subversion repositories in the Finder

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If you need to browse source code repositories to get the latest build of some application (e.g. the JW Player), one of the easiest ways is to use the SC Plugin for OS X by Tigris.org.
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The SCPlugin is a free system extension that allows you to use the Finder’s “Connect to Server” command to connect to the repository as if it were another drive.

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Umbraco installation error: The virtual path ‘/install/steps/welcome.ascx’ maps to another application

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After installing “Umbraco,” you may get the following error:


The virtual path ‘/install/steps/welcome.ascx’ maps to another application, which is not allowed.

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This is because you have installed Umbraco in a virtual directory (not at the web root of the “Default Web Site” in IIS terminology). It is a path problem, easily corrected by fixing the paths in the web.config file.

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