multiple calendars in iPhone Calendar App

A wanted to sync his calendar as well as the studio recording calendar on his iPhone, and asked me how this could be done. Googled it and found that apparently the procedure for multiple calendars is using Google Sync.
http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139206

The method for setting up Google Sync on an iPhone is given at
http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740   But we didn't follow through with it, since his phone took a very long time to sync over spotty GPRS.

javascript issues with 000webhost.com

Helping out someone on 000webhost.com which offers free web hosting, found that some javascript menus were just not working. The exact same page on another host was working. Then found that many people had trouble with 000webhost and javascript, as seen in this forum thread. Even disabling the analytics code did not help with the javascript menu, though other javascript code was running on that page. Finally worked around it by just not using the javascript part of the menu.

a post about not using Antivirus

This slashdot post seems to validate my stand about not using antivirus.

Best AV is almost as good as nothing at all
  The only thing AV provides is a false sense of security. With AV, you're waiting until AFTER an infection occurs and then HOPING the AV company you've chosen has A) seen the malware before, B) bothered to add a signature to their definitions list, and C) is actually capable of removing the virus.

Better ideas: Turning on AppLocker & running most of the time as an unprivileged user. Check out OSSEC for use as a File Integrity Monitor and Host-based Intrusion Detection System. Disable unnecessary services, remove unnecessary programs, use an ad-blocker, a "default deny all" firewall policy and get a 3rd party patch manager to keep all your non-MS bits up to date. Secunia PSI is a free patch manager/vuln scanner for home use - there are others.

For a detailed description of just how bad AV is at protecting systems, check out the blog post at computer-forensics.sans.org

revisiting awstats - streaming audio stats

Had earlier configured awstats for analysing the streaming video logs from the Wowza server and for the web-server statistics on media.radiosai.org. Now added configuration for streaming audio - icecast log analysis.

Also made a change in the media.radiosai.org analysis conf, changed LogFormat from 4 to 1 so that user agents can be parsed.

For the icecast logs, just copied the web server analysis conf, and changed the following parameters:
LogFile
LogType
LogFormat
SiteDomain

"Listen now" page needing compatibility mode in IE

Many Internet Explorer users had trouble with our "Listen Now" page.

This link works with browsers which have flash plugin installed and javascript enabled, or with browsers which have HTML5 mp3 support like Safari on iPad/iPhone. But this link has problems with Internet Explorer on Win7 and above. Or perhaps the issue is with IE7 and above. On some machines, the page needs compatibility mode enabled in order for the audio to play. On some machines, the player does not display until the page is refreshed, even though the audio is heard.

We had not made much headway in solving this bug for the last one year. Then we sent this to a volunteer, who suggested the following links,

http://jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#jPlayer-option-ready

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8661469/issue-with-multiple-instances-of-jplayer-in-ff-and-ie

The second link  refers to multiple instances, probably that is not our issue.


The first link  seems to be addressing our issue at the bottom of that page:

Internet Explorer 9 Beta (Win)
The Flash is disabled in jPlayer by default due to bugs with Flash's ExternalInterface in this browser.

The IE9 bugs listed there, and at places like here , here, and here seem to be the issue. We tried one of the workarounds mentioned on one of the posts, ie adding

!DOCTYPE html (within angle brackets)
to the top of the php page. That was not enough. Then our volunteer pointed us to this page, and accordingly we added the meta tag
http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"
to the top of the php page.

And that seemed to solve both the issues in IE, by forcing IE to use compatibility mode.

finding large attachments in gmail

P sent me this labnol link for using findbigmail to find and delete large attachments in gmail accounts. It uses IMAP and a temporary token to connect.

Edit: Jan 2021 - An easy way would be to use GMail's search - examples - 
has:attachment larger:10MB

has:attachment larger:10M

size:10M

etc.

side load apps on android

A sent me this makeuseof link, for downloading and installing apps on android devices which don't have the Google Play Store. The useful part of that article is the mention of the apk downloader chrome extension - a useful tool, though it breaks Google's terms of use.

PHPlist - issues with spaces into words

Our Sai Inspires emails has had this problem for years - some random word(s) will have spaces introduced in them. Instead of 'message', for eg, it would be seen as 'mes sage' or something like that. Apparently this was due to the long message string, the MTA seems to put in a newline by itself. This problem was discussed here, but we did not implement it in our setup since PA thought copy-pasting the text separately would solve the issue. But of course, it did not, so PB implemented this solution now.
$htmlmessage = wordwrap($htmlmessage, 60, "\r\n");
in admin/sendemaillib.php @ line 634

connection issues and workaround - more notes

In my earlier post, I had mentioned restarting management services on Cyberoam as a workaround for connection issues with BUTT live audio streaming. This is of course a very crude kludge, P tried to make a better solution using Firewall rules a couple of days later, giving the TCP packets to the relevant ports to the relevant ip address a higher priority and guaranteed bandwith.

Unfortunately the problem persisted. A couple of weeks later, I had problems. Got disconnected many times in the evening during live. Reconnected within 10-15 seconds every time. My guess is that other usage was dropping the connection due to congestion - it was getting disconnected when Cyberoam shows the peak usage, upload.

I tried making some more firewall rules, by putting in a Bandwidth policy, Other_Usage, and putting it to the rule number 1 on cyberoam firewall rules, ie Any host to Any host all services accept. This bandwidth policy allows 100 kbps guaranteed, 4 Mbps burstable, but with priority 2. The live streaming rules have priority 0 as P had created.

Even this did not solve the problem, sometimes even now there are connection issues when there is a lot of video streaming (youtube etc) traffic from Studio. Probably using only essential services and not doing bandwidth hungry tasks during the live times would be the solution.

projectors in Mandir

Today the permanently installed projectors in Mandir were inaugurated. They are 17000 lumen Panasonic projectors, PT-DW17KU. Unfortunately, due to suspected ground loops in the signal, the live mix could not be displayed during the evening program. Long cable run and lack of isolation from the audio console which uses a different line for AC power might be possible causes.

Radiosai Playlist emails

P made a change to the accessdb2/display_playlist.php file to make it show an editable text file - he now edits the AsiaStream playlist email before sending in the case of Thursday, to accommodate the live broadcast during the day.