This Blog Is Not For Reading

 

Last year William and I started a project to add OpenStreetMap links to Thunderbird’s Lightning calendar. We didn’t finish, so that’s one project to work on this year. Also, since last year I’ve been dabbling with the Food Premise Inspection Data to add the restaurant location data to OpenStreetMap. And I hope to be taking lots of pictures and video of the event.

Come join us! Here’s the bumf:

Event: Open Data Day Hackathon
Date: Saturday, 22 February 2014 10:00am to 4:30pm

There’s an Open Data Hackathon in Guelph too, 24 hours long with a contest and prizes and everything!

Event: Open Guelph Hackathon
Start: Saturday, 22 February 2014 at 9:00am
Finish: Sunday, 23 February 2014 at 1:00pm
Location: Atrium, Science Complex, U of Guelph, 50 Stone Road East [Map2]
Website: Open Guelph Hackathon – City of Guelph
Register: Guelph Hackathon Registration, Guelph – Eventbrite
ODD2014: Open Data Day Wiki – Guelph

Be sure to register before Saturday to get in.

Ubuntu Hour at the Egg Roll King Restaurant in August 2013

The first Ubuntu Hour of the new year for Waterloo Region will be at the Egg Roll King restaurant this coming Thursday. Here’s the details:

Event: Ubuntu Hour Kitchener
Date: Thursday, 13 February 2014 iCal
Time: 7:00pm to 9:00pm (yes, I know that’s not an hour)
Location: Egg Roll King Restaurant, 85 Courtland Avenue East, Kitchener, Ontario Map
Organizer: Bob Jonkman
Register: on the Ubuntu Canada LoCo Portal (optional, but appreciated)

Join !Ubuntuca in the Fediverse, or follow @UbuntuWaterloo on Twitter.

Picture of Ubuntu Hour by Darcy Casselman. Creative Commons — Attribution — CC-BY

 

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:

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.

Tux the Penguin, official mascot of the Linux kernel

More GNU/Linux Resources

People have asked me about GNU/Linux resources in K-W, so here are some of them, gathered in one convenient place. This is by no means an exhaustive list (yet). If you know of others, please let me know in the comments.

KW Linux Users Group — http://kwlug.org

The KWLUG mailing list for general discussion is where all the action is, along with a “Help” list for specific questions. Microblogging as @kwlug and !kwlug on Identi.ca and also @kwlug on Twitter.

Ubuntu Canada KW chapter — https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CanadianTeam/KitchenerWaterloo

There’s a low traffic Ubuntu-CA-KW mailing list. Microblogging on Twitter as @ubuntuwaterloo and on Identi.ca as @ubuntuwaterloo too, with a group at !ubuntucakw. Some members can also be found on the IRC channel #ubuntu-ca-kw on Freenode.net.

Ubuntu-CA-KW has regular Ubuntu Hours in Kitchener (first Friday of the month) and Waterloo (third Wednesday of the month) announced on Identi.ca, Twitter, and sometimes the mailing list.

Ubuntu Canada — https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CanadianTeam

Again, the Ubuntu Canada mailing list is where the action is, but there is also a web forum and the Ubuntu-ca.org website. Check out the Ubuntu Canada events listing. There’s an !ubuntuca group on Identi.ca, and many people can be found on the IRC channel #ubuntu-ca on Freenode.net.

Computer Recycling — http://theworkingcentre.org/at/comp_recycling/comp_recycling.html

Computer Recycling at The Working Centre sells refurbished computers pre-installed with GNU/Linux, and offers a repair shop with staff and volunteers who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about GNU/Linux. Every Saturday is Ubuntu Day: 10:00am to 4:00pm, Hours are Tuesday to Friday, 10:00am to 5:00pm, at 66 Queen St. S. in Kitchener (use the entrance on Charles St).

Kwartzlab — http://kwartzlab.ca

You’ll also want to keep an eye on Kwartzlab, the local makerspace where many of the Ubuntu events are held. There’s a discussion mailing list for members and non-members alike. Visit the workshop on Tuesday Open Night, 7:00pm to 10:00pm at 283 Duke St. W., Kitchener.

Watcamp Calendar — http://watcamp.com

Also check the Watcamp calendar for other GNU/Linux and many other tech events happening in the Waterloo area.

That should keep you going…

Bob Jonkman <bjonkman@sobac.com>         http://sobac.com/sobac/
SOBAC Microcomputer Services              Voice: +1-519-669-0388
6 James Street, Elmira ON  Canada  N3B 1L5  Cel: +1-519-635-9413
Software   ---   Office&  Business Automation   ---   Consulting

Update 6 June 2012: Clarified microblogging names and groups

Image of Tux by Larry Ewing, copied from Wikimedia Commons. Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge Larry Ewing lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks.