The best bit is that it is completely transparent to the end user and doesn’t require them to forward messages with headers intact to a weird user-spam@example.net address in order to conduct training.

If you find it useful or make changes, please let me know in the comments below.

The code

Hopefully Rafal Wojtczuk, the libnids author, will publish these changes on the Sourceforge site soon.  Until then you can grab a patch between the two versions or a complete distribution tarball below.

Download

libnids-1.24.tar.gz – the complete tarball
libnids1.23to1.24.patch – a unified diff between the last release and 1.24

I thought I would share my experience of submitting a module to CPAN for the first time. In summary: it’s stupidly easy and if I can do it, so can you.

I’m not the best Perl coder and therefore I rely heavily on CPAN modules to do the real work. Every now and again I stumble upon bugs, many of which are simple to fix after a little debugging. However, some modules aren’t heavily maintained and some haven’t been touched in years. Bugs that are filed on RT can go unanswered, gathering digital dust while your development machine is riddled with heavily modified modules.

The solution? In my case it was as easy as discussing a few changes with the module author, who added me as a co-maintainer. That allows me to upload new versions, fix tickets in the bug queue and probably many other things I’ve not discovered.

Uploading a new module requires logging into PAUSE and pointing it at a file on your local disk or a remote HTTP server. A few emails later and a short wait and the changes appear on the CPAN website itself.

Some useful things to consider when uploading a new module:

• Does it still build? Run make clean (or make realclean) and check from scratch!
• If applicable, do the changes break any tests (run make test)
• Is the MANIFEST file up to date?
• Bump the version number in all files that use it (the .pm itself, README, META.yml etc) – grep is your friend here
• Document what is new in the Changes file
• Remove any other files left over from your development, then tar it all up
• Go and resolve bugs on rt.cpan.org that you have fixed and take some credit!

(I’m sure I have missed some important ones, please add them below!)

I noticed when replying to a bug ticket that there is a “minutes spent” field. In all honesty, the above probably took no longer than 10. And that’s how long it takes to have the whole Perl community benefit from your newly broken nicely updated module.

As another quick plug: this is also my first blog post to blogs.perl.org. It was also stupidly easy so if you don’t fancy coding, get scribbling instead!

Firstly, you need something on the phone which will support SyncML, the standard that allows different devices to exchange data.  To sync, install the iPhone Funambol application (iTunes store link) which is currently free and works really well.

The Funambol application itself is very simple, adding an account is easy:

• set the “Server” field to something like http://example.com/horde/rpc.php (replace the location appropriately)
• set the “Username” and “Password” fields to the same ones you use to login normally
• in the “Contacts” section of the setup, the “Remote Name” should be set to card

The “Sync Direction” can be set whichever way you prefer. A cavaet: I only do one way synchronisation.  That is, I sync my contacts from iPhone to server, but not the other way. Whilst it does work both ways, I haven’t tested it extensively. It is possible that rabid zombies will eat your firstborn if you change something on the server and try to update the iPhone.

Once these settings are updated, you can go back to the main screen and hit the big “Sync Contacts” button. If it succeeds, you will see your contacts appear on the Horde server. If not, you can always view the log from the settings menu to work out what went wrong.

One of the coolest (but most useless) features is that any photos associated with contacts will also be uploaded to the server.

Note that some fields aren’t automatically used by Horde, such as the “Home Email” and “Work Email”. This is very easy to fix, but you’ll need to ask your system administrator to have a look at this post on my blog.

Feel free to leave me a comment if you get stuck and I will endeavour to help you fix it.

• define an attribute (e.g. it is called “Home Email” and is of type “email”)
• add it to list of fields that Turba uses (so it is displayed in the right place)
• add the backend storage (so Turba can query/save the values)

For this example, we are adding the home and work email fields, which are compatible with the iPhone contacts.  This post assumes you use a database backend, if you don’t then step 3 will be slightly different.

1: Define an attribute

Firstly, check the file turba/config/attributes.php and make sure the following is present:

$attributes['homeEmail'] = array(
'label' => _("Home Email"),
'type' => 'email',
'required' => false,
'params' => array('allow_multi' => false, 'strip_domain' => false, 'link_compose' => true)
);

This defines the field “Home Email”. In recent versions of Horde this should already exist, so you shouldn’t need to modify the config. If you are creating a different type of field that does not exist already, it is easiest to copy the definition of something similar and change the label and attribute name.

2: Tell Turba we want to use this field

Next the file turba/config/sources.php needs to be edited. Find the line 'email' => 'object_email' and add below it the following two lines:

'homeEmail' => 'object_homeemail',
'workEmail' => 'object_workemail',

This tells Turba that the fields homeEmail and workEmail come from the database fields object_homeemail and object_workemail, respectively.  We also need to modify the list of tabs so that Turba knows to display our new values in the right place.

Email addresses should go on the “Communications” tab, after the existing email field, so we modify the array and insert the attribute names like below:

_("Communications") => array('email', 'homeEmail', 'workEmail', 'homePhone', 'workPhone',
'cellPhone', 'fax', 'pager'),

3: Add the backend storage

Assuming you use a database backend, this is as easy as creating two new fields in the database.  They should be named according to the values in sources.php that we defined above and should be similar to an existing row of the same type.  As we are creating email fields, we can use the same data type as the object_email row.

For this example, the following SQL will modify the database appropriately:

ALTER TABLE `turba_objects`
ADD `object_homeemail` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL AFTER `object_email`,
ADD `object_workemail` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL AFTER `object_homeemail`

The same process above can be followed for other fields that might be missing, post a comment if there is something that you’d like help adding.

On a sensible Debian or Ubuntu install, getting denyhosts is as simple as running:

denyhosts should work as soon as it is installed. However, a few options can be tweaked to make it work nicely. The configuration file is at /etc/denyhosts.conf.

Firstly, set a proper administration email by changing ADMIN_EMAIL. The option RESET_ON_SUCCESS might also be important to you, by setting it to yes the failure count for an IP address will be reset if there is a successful login. If you want the blocks to expire (which is more important if you use synchronisation) then you should tweak PURGE_DENY to a sensible value, for example 1 week.

Synchronisation is one nice feature of denyhosts that means that information on IPs that attempt SSH bruteforcing can be shared between servers. Information about synchronisation can be read in the FAQ but enabling it is as simple as uncommenting the SYNC_SERVER line.  By default, your server will share information on bruteforcers and receive it from other administrators who run denyhosts.

You can check how denyhosts is working by watching the logfile at /var/log/denyhosts.  You can see newly added blocks logged as a line like the below:

new denied hosts: ['202.107.228.xxx']

Of course, you don’t need this as you’ve already disabled SSH password logins and your firewall disables access to port 22 from anywhere except a specially crafted list of IPs.  But for 5 minutes work, it provides some peace of mind.

As I was lazy and wanted a quick GUI way to do markup, I found an XML editor from XMLmind. It is written in Java so should run in most places and, except a few quirks, seems really good. An hour later I had a few chapters written in Docbook markup ready to be published.

However, I couldn’t find many sites that gave a quick and easy example of how to convert from XML to PDF or HTML. It seems that for Docbook XML you need a toolchain, which means understanding in a lot of detail what each stage does. With Docbook SGML there were a number of nifty docbook2x programs which did the work and gave HTML, PDF or text output (amongst others).

To duplicate this quickly and easily with Docbook XML, I found that xmlto and dblatex were the solution. To create an HTML document, it couldn’t be easier than:

# Make a one page per chapter HTML book
$ xmlto xhtml MyDocument.xml
# Make a one page HTML document
$ xmlto html-nochunks MyDocument.xml

For PDF, it is as simple as:

# dblatex defaults to PDF
$ dblatex MyDocument.xml

Both of these packages (as well as the Docbook stylesheets) have been available in Ubuntu since 8.04. In order to make (X)HTML output prettier, you might like to look at this page which gives a great tutorial.

“Canon will support its laser printer, multifunctional, fax and personal copier products with Windows 7. Detailed information will be available closer to start of sales of Windows 7.”

Well Canon, that was a few weeks ago, time to wake up. HP’s statement if you choose Windows 7 from their official support page is similarly unenlightening:

“HP is committed to providing the best experience for HP products in the Windows 7 operating environment.
Today, a solution for your product is not available in Microsoft’s Windows 7. However, a full solution driver download will be available in late November 2009.”

Apparently the HP P1006 can be coerced to install with a bit of work and the original driver CD. Fortunately I have a multifunction printer that is fine and no real urge to force drivers onto my shiny new install. Neither the Canon or HP site offers an email notification when drivers are available, which is rather inexcusable from two of the biggest companies around.

The reason for these printers not working eludes me. Whilst the HP P1006 is not a “real” printer (instead it relies on software that runs on the PC to send a sequence of dots) the Vista drivers apparently do work, so it should just be a case of testing and signing the drivers for Windows 7. With the most open beta program that Microsoft have ever run, this shouldn’t have been hard.

All this aside, Windows 7 is a really nice upgrade from XP. Microsoft have put in a lot of effort to make it work first time and it’s a real shame that Canon and HP botched this with a serious fail.

To begin with, login to Remember The Milk and proceed to the tasks overview page. Make a note of the link highlighted in the picture below, with the text “iCalendar (Events)”. Note that you don’t need to copy the part after ?tok, or it would be very long to type into the iPhone!

Remember The Milk iCalendar export

You should end up with a link like this:

www.rememberthemilk.com/icalendar/username/12345678/events/

Make sure your username and the unique number are correct. Now head over to your iPhone and follow the steps below.

• Open Settings and choose “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
• Choose “Add account…” and then “Other”
• Choose “Add Subscribed Calendar”


Adding a subscribed calendar

• Type in the link you got from the Remember The Milk website into the “Server” field and select “Next”
• The iPhone should now tell you the account requires a username and password, use your Remember The Milk credentials (the same as for their website) and press “Next”


Confirming iCalendar account details

• If the phone says “Subscribed Calendar account verified”, you are good to go! If not, double check you have an internet connection and that the link, username and password are all correct.
• Press “Save” and head back to the iPhone calendar
• Find a day where you have a task due in order to check it worked. On my phone, they appear as red events


Remember The Milk events in the iPhone calendar

If you like this, please comment. And don’t forget to subscribe to Remember The Milk! I will probably do so in a few days, it is a really useful service.