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    • New note by bobjonkman 30 May 2023
      I'd be more inclined to say "people voting the way the polls said they should..."
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by hubert 30 May 2023
      RT @hubert I have to laugh and shake my head at Smith calling it a "Miracle on the Praries". No, you were leading in the polls pretty much the whole time. You're in a strongly conservative province. I mean, if you're saying that it's a miracle that the majority of Albertans chose to ignore your […]
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by blacksam 28 May 2023
      RT @blacksam I’ve been getting more into the game Gaslands with my son and also with adult friends. It’s a Mad Max-esque tabletop game where you’re expected to create your own game pieces by kitbashing with toy cars. I already have all the crafting, painting and 3d printing supplies I need from my other wargaming […]
    • Favorite 28 May 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by blacksam: I’ve been getting more into the game Gaslands with my son and also with adult friends. It’s a Mad Max-esque tabletop game where you’re expected to create your own game pieces by kitbashing with toy cars. I already have all the crafting, painting and 3d printing supplies I need from […]
    • Favorite 28 May 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by blacksam: Here are a couple more cars I've made for #gaslands
    • Favorite 28 May 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by tobias: I'm in need of a little Nerd-Pr0n... what little useful thing comes into your mind as tool of at the Linux command line? Not a super-nerdy command to sophisticated resolve a problem, but a tool for actual problems that would also be useful for n00bs to take their fear about […]
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by tobias 28 May 2023
      RT @tobias I'm in need of a little Nerd-Pr0n... what little useful thing comes into your mind as tool of at the Linux command line? Not a super-nerdy command to sophisticated resolve a problem, but a tool for actual problems that would also be useful for n00bs to take their fear about using the CLI?So […]
    • Favorite 23 May 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by steve: From mcnees@mastodon.social on Mastodon: If you aren't too busy, take a minute to look through NASA's Project Apollo archive on Flickr. https://www. flickr.com/photos/projectapoll oarchive/albums This is a totally safe use of your time, you definitely won't look up two hours from now and ask where your morning went. Images: NASA
    • bobjonkman repeated a notice by geniusmusing 9 May 2023
      RT @geniusmusing @lnxw48a1 I have my own workaround for just this issue. I raise my hand to the "Stop/Hold" position. Get to a point where I can stop and leave myself a note on the next thing to do. Then let them interrupt me. I have even done this to my former boss and the […]
    • Favorite 9 May 2023
      bobjonkman favorited something by lnxw48a1: https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/focus/ This is me.

OpenDataDay Hackathon at Kwartzlab

Posted by Bob Jonkman on 27th February 2013

Open Data Waterloo Region

 

On International OpenDataDay four teams of hackers from OpenDataWR gathered at Kwartzlab to work on Food Premise Inspection Data, modelling new transit routes and route changes with GTFS data, improving the server for the Catchr transit app, a proof-of-concept pushbutton app for Android, and creating a Get Map button for OpenStreetMap in the Thunderbird Lightning add-in.


Hackers at Kwartzlab OpenDataDay Hackathon at Kwartzlab. Clockwise: Koo (back to camera), Ralph, Michael, Mike, Brett, Jonathan. Missing: Darcy, William, Katherine, Bob.

 

William and I worked on the Get Map button. Although we had hoped to create some working code, we got only as far as making a mock-up of Lightning’s Edit Event screen:

Screenshot of Thunderbird Lightning Edit Event screen
Lightning “Edit Event” screen, showing the new “Get Map” button

 

The first hurdle we ran into is that Lightning source code is kept in a Mercurial repository. Although William was familiar with Perforce (another code revision system), I haven’t used Mercurial until now. And the repository contained all of Thunderbird, Firefox, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla addins. We certainly didn’t want to clone the entire Mozilla code base! So William found the Lightning tarball, which I unpacked in a new folder. This let us poke around the source files to find where our new code should go.

Then we found that Lightning isn’t straight Javascript, it’s mostly XUL. XUL is close enough to XHTML, CSS and DTD files that we could figure out what needed to be done. But we had a limited amount of time, and I didn’t want to spend it waiting for source code to build. So I created a new profile in Thunderbird, installed a fresh copy of the Lightning add-in, and we hacked at the installed files directly. This gave us instant feedback on the changes we made, just by restarting Thunderbird and running Lightning. Some of the changes were in plain text files, but others needed to be made to files in JAR format. One of those was the localized language file. We weren’t sure which language file we were using, en-GB or en-US. Of course, we picked the wrong one to start with, and spend maybe two hours trying to debug a misleading error message about a missing entity definition while we were working on the wrong file.

But it all turned out OK in the end. Now we need to take the work we did on the installed files and replicate it on the source files from the Mercurial repository, properly build Lightning from source, and offer our changes to the Mozilla Calendar project. And, once we’ve got it working, we’ll make the changes available on this site too.

–Bob and William.

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Posted in code, FLOSS, Open Data, Software | Comments Off on OpenDataDay Hackathon at Kwartzlab

Calendaring Server Software

Posted by Bob Jonkman on 12th October 2012

I’m looking for a free/libre calendar server to run on a GNU/Linux server.

It needs to have CalDAV connectivity, so that I can use Evolution, Sunbird or Thunderbird/Lightning as my only client. Ideally, it will also have a Web interface for both administration and calendar viewing, exports to iCal (.ics) files, supports iMIP, and offers Atom/RSS feeds of calendar items.

Here’s what I’ve found so far. If you know of others, please leave a comment.

There’s also a list at CalConnect’s CalDAV Servers

Name WebUI Export iCal (.ics) CalDAV
Admin View Edit iCal (.ics) iMip Atom/RSS
Kolab              
DAViCal              
phpGroupWare       No     No
Chandler Project              
Bedework              
Zimbra Yes, but.. Yes Yes Yes   No Outlook only
EGroupware Community Version              
WebCalendar             No
Darwin Calendar Server              
Tryton Calendar              
ownCloud Yes Yes, but not Public, Read-only Yes No No No Yes
Citadel ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Baikal ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Horde ? Yes Yes Yes ? Maybe Yes

WordPress Plugins

The other calendars I’ve been trying are WordPress plugins. There is much promise in their description blurbs, but so far I’ve rejected most:

Name Export iCal (.ics) CalDAV Notes
iCal (.ics) iMip Atom/RSS
Calendar JCM         Rejected: no longer supported
Event Calendar / Scheduler         Rejected: missing .php modules when running
The Events Calendar         Rejected
WP Events Calendar Yes, with iCal for Events Calendar plugin   No No Works
My Calendar Only lists current month   Partial  
CalPress Pro ? ? ? ? This is a commercial plugin;
All-in-One Event Calendar by Timely By tweaking the “Add to Google” URL ? ? WebCal Possible privacy concern
  • 11 January 2011
    Originally posted
  • 26 March 2011
    Added Linuxaria’s suggestions
  • 16 April 2011
    Added WordPress plugin info; added CalDAV column; filled in some attributes
  • 11 October 2012
    Updated feature list for Zimbra
    I’ll be writing a review of Zimbra Open Source Edition soon, detailing some of my experiences (eg. requires Flash for the administrative Web interface)
  • 12 October 2012: Put WordPress calendars in table format, added My Calendar
  • 5 November 2012: Added Dosch’s suggestions
  • 16 November 2012: @Encyclomundist dents about Citadel.org
  • 26 September 2013: I’ve started to use ownCloud 5.0 as a calendar repository accessed with Lightning using WebCal. ownCloud doesn’t publish an iCal feed or have a public read-only view, but since it’s Free Software constantly under improvement I’ll stick with it for a while.
  • 9 November 2013: I think @postblue turned me on to Baikal: Using #Baikal to sync tasks, contacts and calendars…
  • 9 November 2013: I’m now using Timely All-In-One on some blogs, will be upgrading others. It’s not the perfect iCal plugin, but the best one yet.
  • 9 November 2013: @McScx and @lxw37 both introduce me to Horde.
  • 13 August 2015: Just discovered Blaise Alleyne’s post on Degooglifying (Part IV): Calendar. This is pretty much the same solution I’ve settled on; ownCloud + Thunderbird and Lightning. I’m not quite as advanced as Blaise on the mobile front, though.

This is a “living” post, so it will float back to the top of the blog as I update it.

–Bob.

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Posted in Calendars and Schedules | 11 Comments »

 
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