Uniden DECT 6.0 DCX100 is pretty stupid

A while back I wanted to replace my current wireless phone system with a new one, so that I could have more phone extensions. After a little research I chose the Uniden DECT 6.0 DCX100. I got it home, fired it up, and immediately found some problems. These problems were not so serious as to force me to return the phone, but they are very annoying.

One serious/annoying problem is that the speakerphone has the squelch set incorrectly. By squelch, I mean the volume the remote person must speak at to engage the external speaker on the phones. Generally, unless the person I am listening to is a serious loudmouth, the speakerphone is unusable because I only hear part of every other word. The related lack of an external headset jack makes this more serious.

A very annoying problems are all related to putting people on hold, transferring calls, and conference calls. When you put anyone on hold either to put them on hold or to transfer the call to another phone, you get some really really silly fake (MIDI or similar) carrousel music. This is silly but fine when you are talking to friends or family, but when you are on a conference call or a customer call, it really is pretty embarrassing.

The phone documentation suggests that conference calls are impossible except involving the base station. Silly me, I believed it. However, in preparing this rant I looked into the base station documentation to see how that worked only to discover that it tells how to conference between two phone. The method is non-intuitive, but it does work. You still are forced to hear that silly music, though.

Some of the menuing is pretty lame/confusing, but this is kind of normal I fear.

The other features seem fine. Range is good. Battery life is fine. The ability to push phone list changes around is good (though at least in my environment, the requirement that you have to do stuff on both phones to push a change is annoying so a shared address book would be better). I still have not decided whether or not the beeps on all phones when there is a message is good or not. The key lock so that you can put the phone in your pocket is good.

The moral of the story? Hmm. Even when the documentation says it is impossible read more documentation? Try try again? Uniden documentation sucks? Writing well researched rants can sometimes lead to enlightenment? Well, something like that.

Fighting exchange calendaring

My company decided to outsource email for reasons that surpass knowing. What I do know is that mailstreet must have decided to do everything in their power to prevent any normal method of accessing the raw data for third party applications from working. Even getting outlook working requires jumping through hoops well beyond the normal. Since I don't have windows on my desktop, and even if I did, outlook doesn't have the very simple features I demand from a calendaring application(*) I wanted to force the data to something that could.

A little investigation proved that google calendar seemed to fit the bill. While their documented help suggested that it was impossible, it actually turns out that you can convince google to auto-accept the appointments you send it with your primary calendar. This told me that my goal was possible, but still google would not auto-accept calendar events if I forwarded them from exchange via outlook rules. I was confused by this for some time since I eventually got all of the mail headers to be exactly the same, but then I realized the distinguishing factor google was using was actually in the MIME calendar body. Well, there was nothing that forwarding from exchange was going to do about that, but I already was pulling email down to my desktop using fetchmail, so I could simply slip in a procmail rule, write a perl script, and be on my way. The perl script was more complicated than I truly desired, possibly because I was being a bit anal about working with the various ways that Exchange has been known to to send events as opposed to the absolute minimum necessary. Still, I'm now able to export most events automatically from Exchange get them imported into Google calendar automatically, and then get them downloaded into my phone automatically. I then get a 5 minute beforehand reminder from my calendar and a 15 minute beforehand email. What more could I possibly want?

Well, this only works for calendar events people schedule me for and for calendar events that I schedule for an alias I am on. Any appointment I create for myself or meeting I create for individual addresses including my own address does not get forwarded by exchange? Why? Only Microsoft knows. Other outlook rules fire, just not forwarding emails. So, if I want to create an appointment for myself, I need to cc my gmail account directly.

(*) At a minimum, I demand my calendaring application sends email at a configured time before the event to an email address, like say a SMS address, of my choosing. At the maximum, allow calendar downloads with the same configurable reminders to my semi-smart phone (smart enough to synchronize calendars, not smart enough to run windows mobile--or is that smart enough to not run windows mobile?)).

Don't take this as code I am particularly proud of. It seems to do what I need
and really I have already spent too much time on this puppy anyway. Also it looks like blogger.com was not set up to include code snippets and some bits may not have been included properly (sigh). If you have problems, let me know and I'll see if a cleaner copy can be made available.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#
#
use MIME::Tools;
use MIME::Parser;
use Data::Dumper;
use Getopt::Long;
use MIME::Decoder;

my($USAGE) = "Usage: $0: <--to emailaddress> <--from emailaddress>\n";
my(%OPTIONS);
Getopt::Long::Configure("bundling", "no_ignore_case", "no_auto_abbrev", "no_getopt_compat", "require_order");
GetOptions(\%OPTIONS, 'debug', 'to=s', 'from=s') || die $USAGE;

die "$USAGE" unless ($OPTIONS{'to'} && $OPTIONS{'from'});

my $msg = <>;
$msg = <>; # Skip leading line
my $envelope = $msg;

while (<>)
{
 $msg .= $_;
}

exit(0) unless ($msg =~ m^Content-Type: text/calendar^);

my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->ignore_errors(0);

eval
{
 my $entity = eval {$parser->parse_data($msg)};
 my $error = ($@ || $parser->last_error);
 if ($error)
 {
   die "$error\n";
 }

 my $head = $entity->head();
 my $body = $entity->body();

 for($p=0;$p<$entity->parts;$p++)
 {
   my $part = $entity->parts($p);
   if ($part->mime_type eq 'text/calendar')
   {
     my $io = $part->open('r');
     my @lines;
     while (my $line = $io->getline())
     {
       if ($line =~ /^ (.*)/s)
       {
         my $cont = $1;
         chomp($lines[$#lines]);
         $lines[$#lines] =~ s/\r$//;
         $lines[$#lines] .= $cont;
       }
       else
       {
         push(@lines,$line);
       }
     }
     my ($seen_attendee) = 0;
      for(my $i = 0; $i < $#lines; $i++)
      {

#       print "LINE $lines[$i]";
        if ($lines[$i] =~ /^(ORGANIZER;.*MAILTO:)[^\@]+\@[^;: \r\n]+(.*)/s)
        {
#print "Switch from\n";
          $lines[$i] = "$1$OPTIONS{'from'}$2";
        }
        if (!$seen_attendee && $lines[$i] =~ /^(ATTENDEE;.*MAILTO:)[^\@]+\@[^;: \r\n]+(.*)/s)
        {
#print "Add from\n";
          # Add myself as first person with same arguments as old first person
          splice(@lines,$i,0,"$1$OPTIONS{'to'}$2");
          $seen_attendee = 1;
        }
      }

     $io->close;
#print @lines;
     $io = $part->open('w');
     $io->print(@lines);
     $io->close;
#      $entity->add_part($part,$p++);
   }
 }
 $entity->print;
};

if ($@)
{
 # Log error and output unchanged message.
 chomp($@);
 my $err = $@;
 print STDERR "$@\n" if ($@);

 $parser->filer->purge;

 exit 1;
}
$parser->filer->purge;

exit 0;

On blogger.com and internationalization

Well, this is obviously in the nature of a test, but I do have a complaint: blogger.com doesn't seem to support ISO format date (e.g. 2007-11-02 20:28:35). It seems to support bits and pieces (e.g. 2007-11-02 or 20:28:35) but not both at the same time.

Perhaps it is just my desire for more trivially parsed timestamps which sort, all of which is irrelevant in this context, but why have multiple date formats supported and not support an international standard?

Well, whatever.