Girls of PSU Calendar
November 1, 2006 | 5 Comments
I was recently shown this by a friend. Apparently a student/alumni at Plymouth State has put together a Girls of PSU calendar featuring students of Plymouth State University. Most of the young women are seniors and juniors and many of the pictures feature them in familiar Plymouth locations (Lamson Library, Lucky Dog, etc). The site and calendar both seem to be tastefully constructed.
From their MySpace page:
THE GIRLS OF PSU” 2007 Calendar is available for pre-order purchase! Two dollars from the sale of each calendar goes directly to a charitable organization that has been selected by each of the models. Also included are invaluble monthly coupons for incredible discounts at “The Common Man” restaurants! Estimated street date for this calendar is October 24.
They seem to have missed their release date. When it does eventually come out, you can buy it through PayPal for $15.00 + $4.00 shipping. I am impressed that they are donating some of their revenue to charity. As odd as this may seem, in many ways a calendar such as this could be good PR for the university…
Tags: calendar, common man, girls, girls of psu, lucky dog, plymouth, plymouth state university, psu
Debugging/Fixing Sun Calendar Permissions
July 5, 2006 | 2 Comments
As part of the Luminis Platform, we run the Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server, previously called SunOne Calendar Server, previously known as iPlanet Calendar Server. As expected, this calendar server has a fairly robust (read complicated) permission system. Invariably, users make setting changes that cause undesirable behavior with their calendar. A common symptom would be that suddenly no other users can find their calendar when searching for them and in turn can't subscribe to the calendar, even if they have the privileges to do that.
So, over the years I've developed a semi-effective process for debugging the calendar permissions from the backend.
- SSH to your calendar server
cdto the calendar server/bindirectory (for Luminis this is$CP_ROOT/products/SUNWics5/cal/bin)- use the cscal utility to query the trouble user. ex
./cscal -v list jpseudo - in the out put you get you'll see a line called 'aces' it will look something like:
CODE:
-
aces=@@o^c^WDEIC^g;@@o^a^RSF^g;someuser^a^rsf^g;someuser^c^^g;anotheruser^a^rsf^g;anotheruser^c^wd^g;someoneelse^a^rsf^g;someoneelse^c^^g;@^a^^g;@^c^^g;someuser^p^r^g;anotheruser^p^r^g;someoneelse^p^r^g
-
- This is the access control list or ACL, it is obviously very hard to read. I use EditPlus to do a regular expression find (;) and replace (;\n) on the permissions to clean it up a bit.
- Now it reads:
@@o^c^WDEIC^g;
@@o^a^RSF^g;
someuser^a^rsf^g;
someuser^c^^g;
anotheruser^a^rsf^g;
anotheruser^c^wd^g;
someoneelse^a^rsf^g;
someoneelse^c^^g;
@^a^^g;
@^c^^g;
someuser^p^r^g;
anotheruser^p^r^g;
someoneelse^p^r^g - Now for a brief aside explaining these individual permissions called access control entries or ACEs...
The ACE consists of four distinct elements separated by a caret (^):- Who - the user or type of user the permission applies to. Valid entries are:
- username
- @@o - all owners
- @@p - primary owner
- @@n - not an owner
- @ - anyone
- What - the thing being accessed. Valid entries here are:
- c - calendar component, events or tasks
- p - calendar properties such as name description owners and so forth
- a - entire calendar including components and properties
- How - what actions are permitted. Valid entries are:
- r - read
- w - write
- d - delete
- s - schedule or invite
- f - free/busy or availability
- e - accept or decline invitations
- i - send invites for events on the calendar
- c - cancel
- Grant - this determines whether or not the ACE is a grant (g) or deny (d)
Now that we have a clue what these ACEs actually represent, how do we go about finding a problem?
- Who - the user or type of user the permission applies to. Valid entries are:
- If the issue is about a single user experiencing trouble with the jpseudo's calendar, then extract only the ACEs that apply to that user or apply globally. If instead it is a generalized issue, eliminate all user specific ACEs and only look at global ones. Either way you should be able to drastically reduce the number of rules you are looking at.
- If this issue is the example originally given where the user's calendar cannot be seen by any users, then we are looking for a permission like @^p^r^g; or something similar. If the problem is not readily apparent, it is often useful to compare another user who you know works against this problem user.
- Now it is time to modify the permissions. More specific entries should be ordered first, this allows them to override entries that come later.
- Once you have the entries ordered properly, the command you need to execute will look something like this:
CODE:
-
./cscal -a "@@o^c^WDEIC^g;@@o^a^RSF^g;someuser^a^rsf^g;someuser^c^^g;anotheruser^a^rsf^g;anotheruser^c^wd^g;someoneelse^a^rsf^g;someoneelse^c^^g;@^a^^g;@^c^^g;someuser^p^r^g;anotheruser^p^r^g;someoneelse^p^r^g;@^p^r^g" modify jpseudo
-
- Hopefully the change you made succeeds and life is good, if not, rinse and repeat!
Tags: ACE, aces, ACL, acls, application administration, calendar, iPlanet Calendar Server, java, luminis, luminis platform, Sun, Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server, sungard, sungard higher education, SunOne Calendar Server, system administration
Google Spreadsheets Sneak Peek
June 6, 2006 | 3 Comments
I just signed up for the trial version of Google Spreadsheets. At this point the screenshots look pretty cool, I'm sure the interface will be similarly sweet. With Writely purchased and calendar launched, I'm basically free of Microsoft Office all together these days.
Tags: calendar, google, google calendar, google spreadsheet, microsoft, spreadsheet, writely
Google Calendar Beta Available
April 13, 2006 | 1 Comment
I found out from Matt today that Google Calendar is now available! Matt has been waiting for this for awhile. If you have been too, go get your account, it's easy and worth it.
The interface on this new product is great, very similar to GMail or any of the other Google services. However, I do have a couple complaints.
They did not implement any sort of desktop plugin for synchronization. I've been playing with Airset for a few months now, and it has this functionality. As a guy who needs to use our institutional Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server to interoperate with co-workers, Outlook is my glue, and desktop sync would make my life easier.
My other complaint is that there is basically no integration between Calendar and GMail. I want similar functionality to how Zimbra is able to detect dates inside emails you receive and allow right click capable add to calendar. If you haven't seen this yet, go watch their demo, it's slick.
OK, so these are frosting, but I expect perfection from Google! I'm sure these features and more will be slowly rolled into the product over time.
Tags: airset, calendar, gmail, google, google calendar, Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server, web 2.0, web20, zimbra