Every day, I receive emails, newsletters and catalogues informing me about some small subset of the thousands of potentially interesting things on in London. If I’m really paying attention in the moment, I might actually get around to typing some of them into my ipaq and maybe even get around to booking. More usually, though, the moment that I see the information is a moment when my attention is mostly occupied with something else: looking though email for an important messsage from a client, or opening letters in the hope of finding a long-chased invoice. Most event invitations simply get trashed because they simply arrive at the wrong time for me to pay attention to them.

Sound familiar? This is much the same problem as we faced catching up with news and opinions pre-RSS syndication/aggregation. Would that there were a similar tool to take care of our diaries for us.

But of course there is: RFC2445/iCal is a nice, simple(ish) specification for internet-friendly (and more importantly aggregation-friendly) scheduling. With RFC2445-compliant client software, it is straightforward to publish a calendar on the internet, and equally straightforward to subscribe to multiple calendars and aggregate them as you wish. So, for example, I could have my own personally-aggregated diary comprised of the iCal diaries published by all my favouriite venues and organisations: no more scanning through endless newsletters to see what’s on and when.

Apple even provide, as part of their .Mac hosting service, easy online publication of personal or organisational calendars straight from their iCal application.

So why hasn’t calendar syndication really caught on?

I’m guessing that it simply hasn’t yet reached tipping point. Apple may be ahead of the game, but they’ve not really lit the fire of hype under the whole idea, and robust iCal calendar clients for other platforms have been slow in development. I’m guessing that all of that will change soon: Mozilla’s Sunbird is coming along nicely. And there are webby RFC2445 clients such as phpiCalendar which do a fine job of rendering aggregated diaries online. Even better, phpiCalendar also generates RSS feeds based on daily/weekly/monthly schedules, all ready for aggregation via any RSS aggregator/ticker. Surely the calendar revolution must be almost upon us?

Or at least: there must be a first mover business opportunity in there somewhere. I think Apple have missed out: I like their .Mac personal hosting service (which I think is actually a bit bigger and slightly more clever than it initially appears (more later)), but they just aren’t pushing this hard enough. In any case, calendar syndication seems, to me, an obvious adjunct to hosted blogging. Time to get on the phone and see who is interested…

I guess I should be putting my money where my mouse is: my own calendar (mostly London-based music and art), hand-aggregated from various sources, can be subscribed to using an iCal-compatible client using this link. Or, there’s this web view, with daily and weekly RSS feeds. Have fun. Of course, in a world of federated calendars, I wouldn’t have to prepare this by hand: I could just point you at some OPML-ish XML with my favourite diary sources wrapped within.

I’ve been looking at the practical details of open calendar services and schedule aggregation/syndication. Seems, at the moment, that there are sufficient tools to make calendar syndication possible, and a gentle bubbling-under of interest in the idea. Personally, I’m of the opinion (a more reflective post on why to follow shortly) that schedule aggregation might well be the Next Big Hyped Thing, so I’ve wanted to check out the state-of-the art. So far, iCal and SunBird seem the best mainstream tools for creation of standards-based, internet-accessible calendar information (over the web via webDAV). The best tool for web-based publication (of locally-stored iCal stores) seems (so far) to be PHPicalendar, which even automagically generates RSS feeds (daily/weekly/monthly up-coming events). Nice. More on this soon.

As part of a (larger, speculative) project, I’ve been looking for a simple, relatively secure technology to extend file system access out to roaming client machines, without the weight and complexity of a VPN. For now, webDAV seems to be working nicely, in the simple applications with which I’m working. A few notes for anyone interested in getting this to work with Windows clients:

Under Windows 2000, webDAV shares can be added as ‘Network Places’ — under XP, pre SP2, you supposedly need to use syntax similar to http://myusername@my.web.address:80/share, but that doesn’t work on any of the machines I tested. Under SP2, Basic Authentication is disabled by default, so to have any chance of getting it to work, you need to set a nonzero value to the DWORD registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/ CurrentControlSet/Services/WebClient/Parameters/UseBasicAuth. But that still didn’t get me anywhere, so I went out in search of clients.

Novell’s NetDrive is apparently free, and works well on XP. Netdrive also enables selection of basic cacheing and locking parameters (a good thing). The only problem I could find with Netdrive is that on a non-domain machine with multiple users attempting to mount network drives simultaneously, the Netdrive service dies, which is a little unhelpful.

Netdrive, it seems, is an OEMed version of South River Technologies’ commercial WebDrive product. WebDrive offers more options, supports more backend services and proxies (including SOCKS), and is robust on multi-user machines. It’s simple, straightforward, and it works.

I haven’t yet looked at mounting webDAV shares under OS X and Linux. Supposedly there are bugs in early versions of OS X with this (no surprises there). Under Linux, davfs seems to be the OS-level answer. Evidently the Nautilus file manager can also mount webDAV shares directly.

So much for the client side. On the server I’m running Apache/mod_dav. For the application I have in mind, I will probably need dynamic generation of content: currently Slide from Apache loosk the most promising way forward. More on that later.

Stencil on White’s Row on the weekend.

Indescribably beautiful glitch on my music server tonight, randomly time- and pitch-shifting parts of tracks as they playback. A reboot cured it, but seemed completely appropriate for a day when that idiot and by extension his wranglers ended up still in place, perverting the world…

[adapted from an email exchange with Axel at SMLXL]

It’s funny how bottom-up, transformative organisational change is usually portrayed as a gung-ho, networked culture youth thing…

When I worked for (as it then was) Yamatake-Honeywell in Tokyo, we used to go out to places like the Nissan car factories, where the kaizen quality control systems were entirely bottom up — individual guys on the line had almost complete freedom to find ways of improving process, and the organisation had very well organised systems and communities in the corporate hierarchy to make sure that those tweaks and improvements got picked up, assessed and incorporated. But there was no cultural change as a result — the insight of bottom-up improvement had been built-in into the most rigid corporate/cultural hierarchies in the world. The workers on the line were empowered only in that one, specific, process-improvement area. You might think that the same communities of practice would scaffold the collective action of, say, all the welders, who would then get together and form some kind of craft guild->union/mass action structure. But it doesn’t (seem to, I might be wrong!) happen like that in Japan — union activity seems driven from hard-left radicals, rather than bubbling up (like process improvements) from the shop floor…

So I think it’s a mistake to see the bottom-up thing as self-evidently the start of a great wave — it may well be contained within a particular area of activity within a business: which is actually, when I think about it, the cause of my reservations about ‘the IT guys loving blogs’ necessarily being an advance marker of the start of something big organisationally. The IT people love blogs because it’s cool tech, and because knowledge-sharing is part of their world: 90% of 90% of IT jobs is about engineering and problem solving: perfect domains for bloggish collaboration…

On the other hand, and with even less evidence, I still believe the Cluetrain credo, that communication across corporate firewalls (via blogs and so on) can (not will) fundamentally transform the relationship between brands and consumers. Still, that doesn’t mean that for a particular business, at a particular time, there is any clear route to actually using a given technology or strategy to get that scale of cultural change forced through… and although it would be nice to believe that it can really bubble up, I’m not yet convinced (see above). More on this later.

You can never have too many recipes for a cheap, easy-to-administer mail server. Especially if it’s based on a modern code-base, includes aggressive anti-spam and anti-virus tools, and has a webby interface for (multiple) domain and account administration. The system outlined at web-cyradm.org is well on its way to serving as a good reference install for small-to-medium sites. To simplify installation for those who are more interested in evaluating the system than in the mechanics of its building, we’ve written up a set of notes for its installation on Debian Sarge, using ‘off-the-shelf’ packages for everything but the core Cyrus services. The notes are hugely indebted to the HOWTO on the web-cyradm site, and should be read in conjunction with the HOWTO, rather than instead of it.