The Eclipse Project’s web site is notoriously difficult to navigate and find New and Noteworthy information so I started grouping them together here. The proof is in the pudding and these pages have been extremely successful. The Eclipse site is getting better but they are not quite there yet.
This page is blog glue to join together all the Eclipse - New and Noteworthy pages.
It took me a while to figure out how to set up calendars for a company using Google Apps. Part of the problem was that I had not completely understood how the calendar is created and therefore could not understand the mechanism that allowed the calendar to become visible to employees of that company.
I hope this document helps you to understand how to set up Google Calendars and explains different policies that you might adopt to make the best use of Google Calendars.
I had incorrectly assumed that there would be an administration page that allowed me to create a company wide calendar, once created this calendar would just appear in every employee’s calendar view and all would be good. This however is not the case and it took me a while to realise that this is quite different to other software providers’ calendar applications.
Google works by allowing a user to create a calendar then assigning visibility of it to other people. This is opposite to what I had expected. I had expected the company administrator to create a calender that all members of the company would automatically have access to. Simply put: Google has calender at the centre instead of the company.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing; speaking as a software implementer this is definitely an easier way to manage things, I’m just saying it’s not what I was expecting. In fact now that I have used it this way, I kind of like it better!
I’ll take you through a common scenario to help you understand how this might work. In these examples I will assume that everyone in your company has their account under one Google Primary domain account.
Let’s say that your company is split into 2 administrative companies, for example a head office and a sales office which are geographically separated. People in both companies would like to see each other’s calenders so that they can make appointments and meetings between themselves more easily. For the most part both offices run as individual entities. The head office is not really interested in all the sales meetings and the sales office is not really interested in all the bean-counter meetings.
In this case we will set up 1 separate calendar for each office.
- Log into the calendar application at: http://calendar.example.com.
- On the left of the screen in the My calendars section click Add.
- You will be presented with a form on the Create New Calendar screen. So fill in the name as HQ Office you can choose what ever makes sense to you.
- Fill in the Description. This is free text so it could be something like “Calendar for all the people at HQ”
- Fill in the Location to your geographical location. This is free text so it could be London or Floor 6
- Next there is a space for time zones which will pick up the default that your administrator has set already.
- Finally we must set the access permissions. There are 4 options:
- Not shared: This will be a calendar that only you can see.
- Company only: Anyone in the company can see this calender.
- Public: Anyone in the world can see this calendar.
- Named: Only listed people can see this calendar.
- Finally click the Create Calendar button.
- Next to the Add link there is a Settings link, click this.
- Click the name of the broken calendar which will be something like example_com_random_letters@group.calendar.google.com.
- Change the Calendar Name back to what it was supposed to be e.g. Sales
- Click the Save button and everything should look normal.
- Clicking Back to calendar will take you back to the calendar screen.
- Log into the calendar application at: http://calendar.example.com.
- In the My calendar section (on the left) click the Settings link.
- Click the calendar’s name link.
- At the bottom of the page in the section entitled Calendar Address the Calendar ID is listed. This is the global address of your calendar.
- Cut and Paste it into an email.
- Do the same for the other company wide calendars e.g. sales.
- Email the references to everyone in your company.
- Log into the calendar application at: http://calendar.example.com.
- On the left-hand side in the section Other calendars cut and paste the calendar reference from the email into the text box and press return.
- Creating a department wide calender: on the Create New Calendar screen, just include the list of department members in the section Share with specific people when creating the calendar.
- Creating a public calendar: If you organise events for the public you might want to allow anyone to see your calendar so when creating the calendar set the Share this calendar with others to Make this calendar public.
I loved the music to the Guinness advert featuring the Irish men playing hurling. It has a very traditional Irish feel to it mixed in with a very modern build-up and dance theme. I searched high and low across the internet to find the music and the album.
The first place to check is YouTube a veritable mix of weirdness and usefulness. It didn’t take too long to find:
So I then used search terms like Guinness, hurling and advert (amongst others) but I just couldn’t find any information about it. The only reference I found were forums and comments where other people were asking about it - with no answers.
So I put my original research hat on and asked Guinness!
Firstly Guinness is my favourite tipple! Secondly I would like a little bit of information about the music you have used in your Guinness Hurling advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Diqm25NAE I’ve searched across the internet to no avail. The various forums and comments sections of YouTube and similar are filled with people asking but no answers. There is no better source than the horse’s mouth so I thought I’d ask you directly. Please can I have the title and artist of the music in the Hurling advert or even the name of the advertising agency that produced it.A couple of days later I had a very nice email back from someone in Diageo Consumer Relations:
Dear MrN, Thank you for taking the time to contact us and for expressing your interest in Diageo. In regards to your query, this advert is called ‘Free-In’ from the ‘Believe’ campaign produced by Irish International and dates from 2001. The music was specially composed for this advert, so does not have a specific title. I apologise if this is a source of disappointment to you and i’d like to wish you all the best from Guinness. Yours Sincerely, Diageo Consumer RelationsSo now you know!
Ever come across the situation where you need to search for sets of values in a (MySQL) database? SQL along the lines of:
SELECT col1, col2 FROM table1 WHERE (col3 = 5 and col4 = 6) or (col3 = 10 and col4 = 12) or (col3 = 15 and col4 = 3)I come across it all the time and it occurred to me that I am searching for a set of data and all of SQL is based on sets and subsets of data, so why can’t I search for a set in the same way as I search for a column? and you can! Here’s an example of how to do it. First up we’ll need some test data. I’m using MySQL but it’s standard SQL and should work on anything. So we’ll create a database, table an add some data:
CREATE DATABASE bigsoft_set_test; USE bigsoft_set_test; CREATE TABLE tab( a VARCHAR(1), b VARCHAR(1) ); INSERT INTO tab(a, b) VALUES("a", “b"); INSERT INTO tab(a, b) VALUES("b", “c"); INSERT INTO tab(a, b) VALUES("c", “d"); INSERT INTO tab(a, b) VALUES("d", “e");Ok, lets start with an example of the old method:
SELECT a, b FROM tab WHERE (a = “b” and b = “c") or (a = “c” and b = “d");This gives us the middle 2 rows from our table:
+------+------+ | a | b | +------+------+ | b | c | | c | d | +------+------+ 2 rows in set (0.00 sec)Now let’s try it using sets:
SELECT a, b FROM tab WHERE (a, b) in (("b", “c"), ("c", “d"));Surrounding a comma separated list of values with braces creates a set. Our set could equally be a sub-query for example:
SELECT a, b FROM tab WHERE (a, b) in (SELECT * FROM tab WHERE a = “b” OR a = “c");The star “*” in the query means all columns which on this table is “a” and “b". The sub query returns a narrowed list of values to the outer query which is just passed upwards. Similarly we can create a 3 step set query as follows:
SELECT a, b FROM tab WHERE (a, b) in (SELECT * FROM tab WHERE a in ("b", “c"));But why would you want this? Well there could be a couple of reasons:
- The main one is that of verboseness. Having to define the fields in a AND/OR/braces takes up a lot of space on your query line which is limited.
- Parse speed. The smaller the query, the less time it takes to parse, and yes it does make more difference than you think. Pre-parsing slowness is the reason we have the prepareStatement commands in all the connectors.
- Code simplicity. I deal with ranges of values and by dealing with them as sets, not caring about there individual components I have simplified my code base significantly.
September 2010 was a very busy month for us so I didn’t really have time to write my usual 4 blogs a month. I’m 2 down at the moment so I thought I’d publish this one as it’s been sitting in my system for a while waiting for me to pad it out with one of my nice stories you like ;)
Windows is a bit of a pain when it comes to networking. All that additional security they’ve added is a bit pointless and to be honest I don’t really know anyone who uses it. Anything more than user, group and other adds unnecessary complication. Un*x has survived for the last 30 years without much problem and has helped administrators build working environments which are easy to manage and straightforward to look after. When was the last time you were shouting “Why are you not working” at your Micro$oft machine. It’s seems like a daily event. Don’t even get me started on MicrosoftNLB with multiple NICs - Jesus! But that’s a story for another time.
Anyway before I get too carried away I’m adding this to my pet gripes. How do I list all the folders (or shares) I have? In the wonderful world of Windows where there’s no such thing as a command line there’s no way to get this information - you just have to remember yourself. Well if you manage more than 1 machine then things start to get a little more difficult. So here’s what you do, drop to a command line - that’s the black box thing which lets you do all the really useful stuff and type:
C:\>net share Share name Resource Remark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IPC$ Remote IPC D$ D:\ Default share ADMIN$ C:\WINDOWS Remote Admin C$ C:\ Default share projects C:\projects installer C:\MyStuff\Installer\AdvInst q C:\Shared The command completed successfully.