I finally found some time over Christmas to solve the onak issue with dynamic backends (#413762). It took a lot longer than it should have to get something new out. And TBH that's pretty much the way onak has been. It gets spurts of development activity when I find some free time, and then nothing happens for months (or years) on end. However, as I've been asked if it's a dead project, it's not. I know that SKS is a perfectly acceptable keyserver and probably the one that's most used out there, but I still have a soft spot for onak and various ideas about things that need done for it. And I'm always happy to receive comments, suggestions or (even better) patches.

The mail client that made me realise there were worse options than Outlook was Notes. The operating system that's making me realise there are worse options than Windows is AIX. What are IBM on? In particular, please tell me how I can list all the SCSI devices connected to an AIX box, including those that AIX is refusing to talk to. Or, ideally, tell me how to get AIX to bitch about SCSI devices it finds but can't talk to. Solaris manages a useful (if cryptic) error message. Windows manages to have a way to list devices, once you realise it can't cope with luns beyond 254. Linux has the lovely sg interface. AIX just has bloody silence.

Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand was really a much bigger step. A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.

• We moved house to Castlerock. We knew this was likely for Katherine
  (she spent her first year at UU living in Portstewart and had been
  looking for somewhere new), but I didn't think I'd be moving back to NI
  just yet. Unfortunately we're still trying to sell the house in Norwich. :(

• Simon and I sold Black Cat. Really couldn't have predicted that this
  time last year.

• I got a new job with 3PAR in Belfast. I suppose
  that relates to the BCN sale, but if you'd asked me last year if I'd be
  looking for a new job, let alone have one, this year I'd have said no!

All in all I think I'm in a better place than I was last year. 5:30 starts are painful (it's 2 hours door to door with trains at 6am or 8am and nothing in between), but at least I get to come home to Katherine rather than an empty house, and it's nice to be working in an office again rather than on my own. We will eventually get the Castlerock house sorted (there are still lots of things in boxes, the TV isn't even hooked up, the wireless coverage is patchy in the study, the kitchen isn't quite finished yet, the living room is barely started yet, need I go on?). And I'm sure it'll stop raining for at least one day during the year. Please?

At work we're currently in a managed office, which means we don't control the network in any way. As a result we're all individually VPNing back to the lab network in the US. Not a great situation, but it does the job while we work out what's happening with our own building and a local lab. The HQ end is running on a Nortel Contivity. This causes a bit of a problem; I need a working VPN setup in order to work, but the Nortel stuff is non standard. How to get it going under Linux so I can switch from XP to Debian? I found 3 options, in order of preference: vpnc There's a Nortel branch of vpnc, though it's from an old release (0.3.2). There are some reports of it working ok, and quite a few of problems. vpnc gains points for being entirely Free software. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=441042 has some further details. Novell VPN client Novell have a hacked up version of ipsec-tools that adds http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?turnpike, a framework for different types of IKE. They have a novell-nortelplugins package that has a binary plugin supposedly supporting Nortel VPN access. Not quite as nice as vpnc, but it's still userland and does use the kernel's IPSEC stack. Apani Nortel client Apani do a commerical Nortel VPN client for Linux, as well as Windows CE/MacOS and Solaris. It's not that up to date (supports up to kernel 2.6.18, though there are patches that get it working on 2.6.22) and involves a binary blob kernel driver, but they do claim to offer support for it and it's where Nortel will point you for single client licenses. I have, of course, ended up with the (paid for) Apani client. I tried vpnc and the Novell client but couldn't get any degree of success from them. VPN remote ends don't really provide a lot of feedback (which is understandable - it hardly wants to tell me if I'm failing on a username, password, or something entirely different) and I don't have any access to the Contivity device to read its logs. I think the main issue is that my connection has no IPSEC group id or password, and both vpnc and the Novell stuff ask for that. The Apani client is happy with just my username and password, which I think is used for some corruption of xauth. At some point I'll try fighting vpnc again, but for the moment I have my VPN connection working under Debian and thus I'm back to Debian at work. As an added bonus the reaction of my coworkers has been good - instead of "Why would you want to?" I've had comments like "I wish I'd installed Linux when I started." and "Actually, I might do that myself after Christmas."

If you should discover, while sitting in a airport departure lounge, that your TomTom has lost its SD card, don't despair. Provided you have a spare SD card (I stole the one from my camera) and have the laptop you've used TomTom Home with to hand, all might not be lost. I was able to do something along the lines of:

cd /media/disk
cabextract ~noodles/TomTom/HOME/Downloads/navcore_7.131.8483.one.cab
mkdir "US - Western Region"
cd US\ -\ Western\ Region/
cabextract ~noodles/TomTom/HOME/Downloads/US_-_Western_Region.cab 
cd
umount /media/disk

which got me up and running again. Of course it doesn't have the UK maps that came with the device, but as I was on my way to the US that's not so important (and Katherine has found the SD card anyway, so I can just replace it when I return). I was quite pleased with myself. And then I ended up with a rental car that had GPS of its own anyway... (Oh, yes, I'm in Fremont, CA, flying back on the morning of Saturday 18th November. I am currently jetlagged and trying hard not to go to bed. If you are in the area, know me and would like to meet up for food/beer/whatever feel free to drop me an email.)

On Wednesday 17th October the majority of my belongings will leave Norwich, to arrive in Castlerock at some point the next week (exact day to be confirmed). I will then start work for 3par as a software developer in Belfast on Monday 29th. It's been 6 years since we moved to Norwich and I'll be sad to leave it, and all the friends I've made here, behind. I'd have stayed a bit longer but 3par were keen for me to get started. I imagine I'll be in the Fat Cat on Saturday 13th if people are around. And I expect visited in NI once we get settled in!

The new house has a prepay electricity meter. My initial reaction was that I'd have to get NIE to come out and replace it with a normal meter, as I have a perception that card meters are awkward and expensive. However some investigation revealed that a keypad meter gets the same 2.5% discount that paying quarterly by direct debit does. The only way to get a larger discount (4%) is to pay a fixed amount monthly by DD. That would still leave the annoyance of having to remember to top up, but it can be done over the phone with an automated system (you get a 20 digit number to key into the meter) and won't turn off supply overnight or at weekends apparently. Plus, and this is the real reason I'm giving it a while before switching away, it has a nice little satellite keypad/LCD unit. Connected to the main meter unit via a 4 core low voltage style cable. Bets on those being power, ground, rx and tx? You can query the meter on various things, some of which are crying out to be hooked up to a Munin plugin. The meter is made by PRI and seems to be a Liberty 1E. PRI have a vague page about comms, but little useful information about how to do anything or if the end user can buy anything suitable. I'll drop them an email, but it might just be a case of trying to reverse engineer the keypad protocol so I can talk it. The processor in the satellite is just a Mitsubishi M38223M which has some serial pins, so hopefully it'll be RS232 at TTL levels and something fairly basic over that. However, before I go about doing this, has anyone else any experience of these meters and care to share details?

Brett, JD and I went to Domino's this evening for pizza. The Domino's in Norwich does any large pizza for £9 if you collect, but the Brighton one doesn't seem to have this. In fact, if you order online and get delivery you can get a 20% discount. Which means it's cheaper to sit at home and be lazy that it is to turn up and collect on the way home from the pub. Er, what?

Given that the new house is a body of water away I decided I wanted to draw out some floor plans that were to scale, so I could remember how things were laid out and try to get a feel for what will fit where. I'm sure there should be something out there which is easy to use and will allow this, but I ended up with inkscape and vim. I couldn't figure out how to get inkscape to let me specify the size (height/width) of a rectangle, hence ending up with vim to edit the raw xml. Hardly ideal. So. Am I missing how to do this in inkscape, and does anyone have any better suggestions for drawing floor plans? Preferably things in Debian or easily compiled up for it.

One thing I forgot to mention in my post about newthe is that I had a play with SATA hotswap while testing it. I'd ordered the second drive separately, as it worked out a lot cheaper. The main machine arrived first so I configured it up and when the new drive arrived I pulled a spare drive caddy, screwed the drive into it and slotted the drive into the machine. And then wondered how to get it detected (I've memories of rescan-scsi-bus for SCSI drives). I didn't find anything conclusive, so I had a prod around. And eventually realised that it had Just Worked without any action on my part - the /dev/sdb device node had been created and I could setup the new drive and add it to the RAID array. Nice. Pulling the drive also got detected fine - on a reinsertion it became sdc but that's not an issue as I have MD and LVM sitting on top so raw device nodes don't matter so much. This is with the ahci driver on an Intel ICH7 chipset FWIW. And the decision for software RAID was a conscious one; I've seen drives fail more than once under RAID1/MD and get correctly kicked out of the array while the machine continues running. There are too many different interfaces to hardware RAID from what I've seen, such that you don't get the same level of control and information reporting.

Jonathan McDowell wonders how to take aptitude’s knowledge about auto-installed packages from one computer to the other. Well, I looked into the issue for a few minutes and I found a solution though it doesn’t look nice.

for i in
    # grep installed package names
     COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l   grep -E '^ii'  awk ' print $2 ;'  
do
    # find package in /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
    # check for the right state (1 seems to mean
    # auto-installed, 3 manually installed)
    if
        grep-available -s Package,State 
                       -F Package 
                       -X $i /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates  
          grep -q 'State: 1'
    then
            echo $i
    fi
done

Results in a list of auto-installed packages AFAICT. If you change the “State: 1″ into “State: 3″, it seems you get only manually installed packages. So if you take the latter and feed it to “aptitude install”, your database should be right. If you take the former, you feed the list to “aptitude markauto”. A cleaner solution (which works even if /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates changes formats) would involve checking “aptitude show” output, evaluating the “Automatically installed:” field. However, simply feeding “aptitude show” output to grep-dctrl (or any equivalent) resultes in the rather irritating error message “grep-dctrl: -:14: expected a colon.”, with the 14 changing to a different line in the packages description (usually a line directly following an empty line). So I’m just giving you an idea here.

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I'm worried that my Debian Planet credentials are a bit weak, so have a technical post rather than one discussing the fact I'm unemployed in 3 days, or that I'm going back to NI for a week after that to try and get the new house sorted. Oh. Wait. Ooops. Anyway. While I still have easy datacentre access to my colo box (the.earth.li) I thought it might be a good time to think about upgrading it. The most limited resource has been disk space; it was a Dell 2550, so dual PIII-1GHz + 2GB RAM which is nice, but SCSI hotswap drive bays. So nice disk, but anything large is expensive. I think SATA has come along nicely, so was happy to change over to using that instead. As it turned out the old machine was over 5 years old (doesn't time fly!) so there's been a disk performance boost anyway from using new technology. I ended up buying the new machine from Sentral - their website isn't great, but they're very helpful by email and Black Cat had bought machines from them in the past with no problems. It's a Core2Duo E6600 with 4GB RAM and 2 * 750GB Seagate ES SATA II drives in hot swap bays. I pondered a quad core chip and an extra drive (there are 4 bays total), but decided I didn't really need them at present and keeping power consumption down was a good idea. Last time I upgraded the I just did a straight copy of the data over to the new disks. This time there were a couple of things that meant I didn't want to do this. Firstly, I decided to go 64 bit. The chip can do it, I have 4GB RAM, it seemed like a good idea. That meant a dpkg --get-selections on the old box followed by a dpkg --set-selections on the new one, followed by an apt-get dselect-upgrade. Is there a way I could have kept my aptitude knowledge about auto installed packages? I did have a look, but didn't see anything obvious. That gave me the same packages. I also installed ia32-libs to ease the transition for my users who had self compiled bits. Then I had to copy the rest of the data over. /home was easy enough, plus a few other filesystems that didn't have packaged data on them. I manually reviewed changes in /etc but there wasn't anything non obvious thankfully. /var was trickier. I was pleased to discover that Mailman config appears to cross archs quite happily. A pg_dumpall did the trick for PostgreSQL. Rebuilding the overview database for inn took all night. Maybe I should move away from tradspool. There were a few other things to fix up (I hate Berkeley DB), but by and large it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Oh, except that copying that much data across takes a long time. And rsync isn't that much help when the data includes lots of mail folders, some of which are over 1G big (and receiving mail, so constantly changing). I'd started out with a 100M link between the old and new machines, as I hit the e1000 Tx Unit Hang bug. Disabling the power management solved that, giving a 1G link. Still took ages. The second major change with the new box is I've decided to go Xen. That should let me hand out machine slices to users who want to do weird stuff, without me really having to support them. And allow me to throw up test machines when I need to. This was actually really easy to install. I did a basic etch install onto a 2G partition, installed xen-linux-system-2.6.18-4-xen-amd64 and then rebooted and had a dom0 up and running. I gave the main VDS (ie replacement the) a 600G partition, access to both processor cores and 2G of RAM - ie still quite a few more resources than it used to have. Then it got a bit tricky. I wanted lvm to be available within the VDS. So I did all the VG creation and a base install (using debootstrap) from the dom0, then added a filter to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to exclude /dev/md2 (the 600G partition). And tried to boot the domU. Which was fine, until it tried to mount the root fs at which point the initramfs complained it couldn't find / and bombed out to a shell. The confusing bit was that doing vgcreate -a y found and brought up the lvm partitions fine, at which point the rest of the boot process would complete. Very odd. Much digging eventually led me to discover that the LVM initramfs script only gets run if the specified root partition has a - in it. Argh! I prefer the format /dev/<vgname>/<lvname>, but once I changed to /dev/mapper/<vgname>-<lvname> it all worked fine. The new machine has been in service for the past week and so far it all seems fine. I don't notice the fact it's a Xen instance and it still feels quite nippy. Plus the extra disk space is great as I don't have to worry so much about things getting full. Yet. I haven't noticed a change with the 64 bit side either, but I think on a server that's going to be much more the case - I haven't moved my desktop to 64 bit primarily due to the lack of Flash and Java plugins (I don't see the point of a chroot as there's not really a pressing reason to go 64 bit if it's going to be hassle). I threw up another domU instance to test out some bits and that went smoothly too (I'm using an LVM VG on the dom0 to share out to the other domUs, which will all have a less complicated setup than the main one). So all in all I'm pleased with both the hardware, and the software - I hadn't expected setting it up to be so easy. My last Xen experience was under sarge where it hadn't all been integrated in the same way as it is under etch. Oh, one other thing I did; I rebuilt the AMD64 netinst Etch CD to output to the serial console for both isolinux and the actual installer. And then did the install over the serial console, even though the machine was beside me. The CD is still in the machine which means that I have a fallback if it all falls over horribly - I can access the BIOS, tell the machine to boot from CD and then hopefully prod and see what the issue is. Or even do a complete reinstall if necessary. It was surprising easy to modify - I just had to edit isolinux/isolinux.cfg and add SERIAL 0 9600 at the start and then console=ttyS0,9600 cdrom-detect/eject=false to the append lines for kernel parameters. Definitely worth considering if you have a colo box properly serial consoled up.

Following many months of faff, today Katherine and I completed on a house in Castlerock. I say Katherine and I, but really I did very little. She started looking after she'd started at UU, before we knew Black Cat was going to be sold. My sole involvement was to be dragged round a few places (including this one) when I was back in April. The initial plan was that Norwich would remain our "home" and this would be somewhere that Katherine would be able to live during term time, that I could also work from now and then. Given recent events it'll no doubt become "home" and we'll leave Norwich. To that end I've been looking at the job market back in NI. I've found (and applied for) a few things in Belfast, all software development roles. I may even have an interview; had a phone call today that felt very much like a phone interview and ended with talk of getting a formal interview sorted for when I'm next over. All scary stuff. Belfast is a bit far for a commute, so I may end up living there during the week. Or I might not get anything in NI and have to look further afield. Anyone know anything going in Derry? That may be a more managable daily journey.

Further prodding with my Logik IR100 has revealed that not only does it already have (afaict undocumented) Ogg support, it also has IPv6 support enabled, meaning that when I plug it into my normal wireless segment it suddenly gains a real IPv6 address, thanks to radvd. Of course, this is absolutely useless at present, but it's pretty cool. The Ogg support is more useful; I've now installed samba on my music holding machine and the Logik quite happily scans the share and plays the tunes in the kitchen. Now to see if it passes the Katherine usability test...

For a while now I've wanted a standalone internet radio; something that only required power and had wifi and would then stream audio from my desktop machine. A bit like the Slim Squeezebox but without the need to plug it into a HiFi setup. I'd found the range of devices based on the Reciva Barracuda module, but they all seemed a bit too expensive to impulse buy. Currys are now doing the Logik IR100, which uses this module, for £49.99, at which point I decided it was worth a look. I'd already done some investigation about the module. It runs Linux, Reciva do the Right Thing and make their code available, and it can have its firmware upgraded. There used to be a wiki of info, but it's disappeared recently. Richard Kalton has a blog of his progress - he's got a shell, but doesn't seem to have found any serial console pinouts and seems to have gained the info required to get a shell (which he doesn't disclose) from reading the flash off the board itself. 'bill888' also has a general Logik IR100 page. The radio itself seems quite consumer friendly. You plug it in, press the on button and tell it to search for networks. It then shows a list of ESSIDs which you can select from. It'll let you enter a WEP/WPA key if necessary, but I setup an unencrypted wireless network for testing. It then downloads a station list and you can chose what you want to listen to. Seems to do exactly what it says on the box. It doesn't support Oggs though. And all my music is Ogged. So I want in. As a first approach I'm trying not to take it apart - it doesn't seem like anyone's got serial access, or confirmed JTAG as working, so there doesn't seem to be anything to be gained by opening it up yet. So I decided to watch network traffic, in particular what it does when you ask it to check for new firmware. The initial request is for: http://copper.reciva.com/cgi-bin/service-pack.pl?serial=<serialno>;sp=<current service pack>&hw=<hardware id>&sv=<serial firmware>&check=1 This then sends a redirect to: reciva://copper.reciva.com:6000/service-pack/sp-wrap-cache/sp.255-c-158.tar Now reciva:// is an encrypted custom protocol it seems, that passes the serial number to the server, which then returns a challenge, which the device then hashes up and generates a session key, passes back to the server and asks for the file. You can see this in lib/rtp.c from the curl tarball on the Reciva GPL site. Unfortunately there are bits missing - several files (rtp_encrypt.h, rtp_encrypt.c, sernum.c) and it appears to want to talk to some sort of sernum daemon. As such I haven't been able to get a copy of the firmware upgrade tarball. :( However, if I could get one and have a look to see the format (is it a full file system image, or just changed files? Is it relative or absolute paths?) then I think it should be possible to build a new firmware image, hijack the connections to copper.reciva.com on my local network, and redirect to a http:// URL rather than a reciva:// URL, thus avoiding having to do the encryption stuff. Assuming, of course, that the upgrade isn't itself signed or encrypted. More prodding required...

So. In a month's time I become unemployed. Which is something I couldn't have predicted a year ago. This is going to mean a lot of changes for me, most of which I haven't really been able to even start to plan until the news was out in the open. Scary stuff.

I've spent the last week and a bit in Edinburgh, at DebConf7. I found it took me a couple of days to adjust for some reason, but after I'd managed to lose all sense of time everything went much better. I'll probably spend the next week recovering and catching up with real life. I have to say I don't feel I achieved a whole lot while I was there. When I went to my first DebConf (DebConf4, in Brazil) I spent a lot of time hacking and making progress on things. I didn't manage to do so well in Finland, nor this year. I'm not sure that's entirely what DebConf is about though. I saw a lot of people; the UK crowd who turn up to most things, people I hadn't seen since Finland, and those who I hadn't see since Brazil (and must try harder to see more often). And of course several names I was able to put to faces. This is a really useful part of such events - I find it's much easier to deal with people online once I've met them in real life and have an idea where they're coming from. Having said I didn't achieve much I did many to leave with a lot of things in my personal todo list. I had the calendar conversation a couple of times again, at greater length, resulting in being told that I should just do it. So I need to think about a proper design. I started looking at Just Writing Code, but the problem is such that I believe a more rigorous approach is required. Another item was ARM hacking; I sat in on the ARM BOF and caught the end of the Emdebian stuff, as well as talking to Wookey and Neil Williams quite a bit about it. Wookey's convinced me that working on mainline Balloon2 support is still useful, even if everyone is more interested in Balloon3. And I thought a bit about starting to do some AM work again, assuming I can find enough time to do a decent job of it. Mao was sadly lacking; I got a couple of games in, but not the number I'd come to expect from previous DebConfs. I think the trick is to find Marga sooner... In addition to the travel to Edinburgh we ended up with a daytrip to the Isle of Bute - thanks to Patty Langasek for organising this. We managed not to lose anyone, and had a visit to a public loo from 1898. Post DebConf a bunch of us ended up in Solva for a party to celebrate Daniel and Rob's civil partnership. It was well worth the travelling, and good to see people who hadn't been at DebConf. Finally, on the way back home, we detoured via Stonehenge. Anyway. Now I'm back home, Katherine's turned up for a bit and hopefully I'll manage to do some of my todo list. See y'all next year in Argentina, assuming I can find the funds.

I have to say "Yes" to the BBC. People say things about redheads they would think twice before saying about any other discriminated group.

Dear Lazyweb, I am prone to downloading random documents (usually PDFs) from the interweb. Often these have helpful filenames like 30430.pdf. Renaming them helps, but I seem to collect lots of them. Is there a simple document management system I can import them into that will let me at least categorise things, and then search for titles etc (bonus points if I can actually search the text in the documents, but I can cope if I need to manually enter the info on import)? PDF is the most useful format for me, but I'm sure I'd end up using Word or whatever support too. apt-cache search dms turns up MyDMS and Owl though both look a little heavy - I only need it for local personal use.

I keep having what I've started to think of as the "calendar conversation" with various people. I start by outlining what I think are some fairly reasonable requirements. I'd like to have multiple calenders viewable by different sets of people. So Simon would be able to view my work calendar, while Katherine could see my personal calender (and possibly small bits of work calender where I was going to be away from home). I also want to be able to view my calenders from a variety of devices. My desktop, my phone and my laptop, for example. A web interface might be nice too, though less important to me. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask. My general hope is that whoever I'm boring about this will then say "Oh, you need to look at foo and maybe bar". After all, that's the case with most software related things I need - it's already been done, and there's a good solution available. What actually happens is the person I'm talking to nods in agreement and says they'd like the same sort of things but don't know of anything that manages it. I think the problem comes down to syncing. Sharing my calendars with other people is effectively allowing them to sync their calendar(s) with mine, with some sort of filtering so we each see only what the other wants to see. Likewise, multiple devices is all about syncing. Changes made via one method need to be visible on all of them (ideally as soon as possible). Decent syncing also brings another advantage; client independence. If I can reliably sync my information to a variety of devices/clients then I can try a different client with little risk. We have this already for mail - anything that can talk POP3, IMAP and/or mbox is easy to try out and if you don't like it then you can just change back to what you had before or try something else. Calendaring doesn't seem to have that. I don't think that the interface a client exposes needs to be complex. At a basic level what you need is a way to find out what the client thinks has been added, removed or changed. You also need to present this information in a standard format. Unfortunately iCal (RFC2445) appears to be what we've got here. I think it's a bit overly inclusive, which seems to lead to incomplete implementations. Is there a complete iCal parser library out there? The best hope for syncing that I'm aware of is OpenSync. And I haven't been that impressed; while I managed to get it to move the contacts from my SonyEricsson v600i to my Nokia E70 some of the details got mangled on the way. And lack of things like recurring event support in some of the plugins (eg the Google Calendar syncing adaptor) or warnings about data loss in the Sunbird plugin aren't encouraging. Speaking of Sunbird, I'm not impressed. Last time I looked (and it doesn't appear to have moved very far since then) it didn't make any attempt to support syncing. I'm sorry, WebDAV isn't a syncing system. It's a way of storing files remotely. Sure, I found the interface ok, but I need to make my calendaring data accessible for it to be useful. The Windows approach to all of this seems to be ActiveSync and the use of Outlook. I don't believe that it really handles more than the desktop client and a remote device though? And group calendar sharing requires an Exchange server? Not exactly the flexible solution I'm looking for. I think a key point is that all of this needs to be reliable. I didn't spend time debugging my OpenSync contact syncing issues partly because I didn't notice straight away that there was a problem (it was with additional details like email addresses rather than names/numbers IIRC), but also because it was a lot of work to delve into the code and find out just what on earth was going on. A while back I started looking at writing some calendar syncing code (called Pony) and hit a problem with complete inconsistency in handling time zones between clients that put me right off. If it's not reliable it's not useful. If it's not useful people won't test it and fix it. I think a starting point is a reliable iCal implementation that can handle everything in the spec. From there you can write plugins that will take whatever bastardised variant your device/client supports and translate to and from it. The syncing tool will need to keep a master copy of all the data, because there's no guarantee anything else will be able to support all the fields. A local complete copy should enable appropriate frobbing of data to/from any device/client without losing the information if a new device/client that can handle the data is added. Of course almost all the above applies to contacts as well; I have work contacts, personal contacts, boring house contacts (plumber, garage etc). vCard is the appropriate interchange format for that (why did vCalendar become iCalendar, but vCard not change?), but contacts feature similar issues to calendars I believe. Does this seem reasonable? Please tell me someone has already done it. Point me at Debian packages that will let me sync my phone, my Google Calendar and a local client and make me very happy. I have visions of a suite of tools all chatting over DBus; a little client that looks for my phone to appear over bluetooth and then syncs when it does, a little client that monitors Google Calendar for changes. Sunbird reporting when something changes (and accepting notification of changes). Some other client ([Dates http://www.pimlico-project.org/dates.html]?) doing the same. Another sending the data over WebDAV or SFTP so that my laptop can pick up the info when I'm on the move. I don't think I'm the only person looking for this sort of stuff. Where is it?