I’m gathering up various bits and pieces of gear before heading out the door and taking the Metro down to PyCon. The schedule is impressive, and that’s not even counting a lot of the ad-hoc goodness that will be going on in the open spaces.
I plan on blogging as much as possible and will keep link to my posts throughout the day from this meta-post. The official backchannel is #PyCon on irc.freenode.net, and I’ll be there.
Day 1 posts:
The title says it all. I’m looking for a Javascript-based What-You-See-is-What-You-Get HTML editor that doesn’t suck. I fell in love with HTMLArea when I bought my copy of Radio back in 2001. I’ve since used HTMLArea 2 which is pretty decent but is IE only. Until recently I had been tracking the HTMLArea 3 pre-releases which worked in both IE and Mozilla and were beginning to deal with things like copy/paste content from newer versions of Microsoft Office products that embed all that nasty XMLish markup. The other day I went to htmlarea.com to see if there was a new beta release only to find that the lead contributor had mothballed the project:
htmlarea 2 and 3 have been discontinued. They were free wysiwyg editors that were distributed on this site. Visit the directory to find similar products.
What a bummer. The source is still in CVS, and I’m hoping that a leet Javascripter will take over the project, because HTMLArea 3 seemed pretty darn stable and quite near release. I’ve looked quickly at a bunch of possible replacements, but each one seems to have a showstopper. RTE is quite good for when you need a small, simple, compact editor, but it has its quirks. For instance, it’s an editable iframe instead of a layer over textarea, so there are some limits to the script-fu you can do with it. Don’t get the post title wrong, RTE does not suck at all, but it has its limitations.
And so I ask you, dear reader, what the heck are you using these days for something like this? While I take the time to look closer at the lists of editors that I’ve glossed over before, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me a line (matt at ooiio dot com) or take a look at my JavascriptWyswiygHtmlEditors page and add your two cents. Please help, I’m at my wits end!
I’ve got a crappy little inkjet printer. It does a darn decent job at printing a page or two in black and white, but anything beyond that is just too much for it. Stuff usually prints, but not always. Sometimes it’s a bit smudged. Other times the paper jams up. Sometimes the cats run off with or otherwise mangle the printed page before I can get to it. The darn thing seems to take a lot of union breaks.
A few weeks ago I was doing research on a paper for my computer organization class. I did much of my research at the University of Maryland’s awesome Engineering and Physical Sciences library, taking notes, xeroxing some pages, and checking out a book. There was also a weath of information available to me at the ACM Digital Library. I ended up downloading 150 or so pages of papers and articles from the vast ACM library.
As much as I love technology, I’m just not able to skim text and read for long periods of time on a computer screen. I decided to print out the 150 or so pages, but had absolutely no desire to do that on my crappy little inkjet printer.
I’ve wanted to give Mimeo a try ever since I learned about them a few years ago. They allow you to upload documents to their servers, preview them online, and then they print ia try. I stumbled upon them a few years ago and ship it to you. It’s a very cool idea, but it was Saturday and my paper was due Wednesday.
Enter Fedex Kinkos. They have a similar service called File, Print Fedex Kinkos. After you download their software (win32 only, sorry), it creates a printer driver and integrates itself with Office. They offer the option of shipping your order to you, but more importantly they allow you to pick it up at your local Fedex Kinkos location.
I spent a bit of time seperating the various articles I wanted to print with bibliographic information and eventually combined them all in to one big PDF file using Adobe Acrobat. I sent the job off to the File, Print Fedex Kinkos printer and chose options for my order. Since I was going to be flipping through all of the pages, I decided to go with double sided printing on the cheapest possible paper with three holes already punched. The el-cheapo worked out to somewhere around 6-8 cents or so (I forget) per printed page. I flipped through the preview and entered my billing information. It took a few minutes to upload the document to their servers, but after that was done I got a receipt to print and an email in my inbox. About an hour and a half later I got another email saying that the order was ready to be picked up.
It’s not perfect though. Their premium laser paper is about 20 cents a pop and their options for binding are a bit limited. Their system is only set up to deal with one document at a time, so if you want to make a bunch of different copies of a bunch of different documents, you’re going to have to upload, set up, and pay for each one seperately. If you’re looking for more binding and layout options or for better handling of multiple documents, I’d strongly suggest that you check out Mimeo. Non-Windows users should check out the FedEx Kinkos web interface which looks to be multiplatform aside from some basic Javascript requirements.
FedEx Kinkos is doing a very smart thing with this service. They’re taking advantage of the fact that they’ve got locations all over the US for pickup. They can also call on the FedEx infrastructure for shipped documents. They’re also making it easier for users to send them orders, reducing employee time spent on taking in orders. They are also probably keeping printers busy that might have otherwise been idle.
I’ve been a big fan of Jon Udell‘s screencasts of various products and hacks for as long as he’s been doing them. Screencasts can be curious oddities but are more often extremely helpful. For example, this screencast covering the setup of Ruby [quicktime] adds a ton of value to the HOWTOs and install documentation on the Ruby on Rails site.
That’s why I was especially excited by this flash screencast by Dan Winship demonstrating the basics of Stetic, a Mono-based Gnome GUI designer. After viewing the screencast, I noticed that he produced it with a program called vnc2swf:
Vnc2swf is a screen recording tool for X-Window (X11), Windows and Mac OS Desktop. Vnc2swf captures live motion of a screen through VNC protocol and converts it a Macromedia Flash(TM) movie (.swf).
The program is available in source and binary form for OSX and a few flavours of Linux. It’s defeinitely not a program polished for end users (it looks like installation may be tricker than many casual Linux users would be comefortable with), but it’s great to be able to produce quality screencasts using open source tools. SWF isn’t the most open format on the planet, but let’s look past that for now. I’m sure that you could convert it over to mpeg or something a little more “open” if you really wanted to.
I see screencasting as a possible “next big thing.” I don’t think it’s going to be the next weblogging or podcasting, but it has tons of potential. I’d love to see little thumbnail screencasts fly by my aggregator when I read the freshmeat feed.
I caught the announcement of another Weblogs, Inc. weblog the other day: Divester. You guessed it, it’s all about SCUBA diving. I used to dive, though it’s been a few years since the last time I got wet with a tank strapped to my back. Fearing information overload, I haven’t subscribed to the Divester RSS feed yet, but I’m going to pop in every day or so and check out the website, and reevaluate my RSS position in a few days.
The design is quite striking. Big splashes of blue (as one might expect on a diving blog) and the sillouette of a diver. The coolest thing (I think) is the use of the Google Ad up top as a full fledged design element rather than something grafted on later.
The February 2005 issue of Linux Journal contains a gem of an article by Robert Love called Get on the D-BUS. I didn’t notice it until I was trawling through the ACM Digital Library while working on a paper for my computer organization class. All tangents aside it’s a great article and anyone who uses Linux on the desktop should check it out, as I think that you’re going to see D-BUS do a lot of heavy lifting over the next few years.
I’d strongly suggest reading the LJ article for a full definition, but to summarize: D-BUS is an interprocess communications system that is (or soon will be) used in both Gnome and KDE environments. It allows apps to send and receive messages to and from each other in a happy object-oriented easy-as-it-should-be way. The Gnome Mono codemonkeys are using it with Beagle, and probably other apps. There’s a D-BUS package and several apps that use it backed in to Hoary. There’s even a Security Enhanced DBUS built in to Security Enhanced Linux.
The APIs and the software are under constant development, but there are already working libraries for C, Glib, and (yes I checked) even python. Here’s example-client.py (edited slightly to fit in my layout):
#!/usr/bin/env python
import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
remote_service = bus.get_service("org.designfu.SampleService")
remote_object = remote_service.get_object("/SomeObject",
"org.designfu.SampleInterface")
hello_reply_list = remote_object.HelloWorld("Hello!")
hello_reply_tuple = remote_object.GetTuple()
hello_reply_dict = remote_object.GetDict()
print (hello_reply_list)
print str(hello_reply_tuple)
print str(hello_reply_dict)
It looks like D-BUS (or DBUS if you would prefer to abbreviate it that way) is going to be adopted in both the Gnome and KDE camps, which is A Good Thing. I think that it is going to lead to better interaction with applications on the desktop. I imagine a sexy Growl workalike telling me about all kinds of things that I may or may not want to know in a cute and unobtrustive way. As the technology is adopted, I see apps talking to one another and reacting to one another more and more. I see apps and frameworks taking advantage of external web services flowing over DBUS.
Keep an eye on this list of apps that use D-BUS expand quickly.
I’ve been hearing the word Quicksilver being thrown around quite a lot lately in Apple circles. After looking at the website I can’t help but think that there will be an eerily similar feature in OSX 10.5
Congrats to C.K. whose weblog I’ve been reading forever now. It was great to see his first post of The Unofficial Apple Weblog in my aggregator this morning.
One Mono app that I didn’t mention last night in my Hoary post was Beage. This was an oversight. Beagle isn’t included in Universe, so I tried to build Beagle using these instructions from the Ubuntu Wiki. I managed to get it built after fiddling with the configure.in file (it was looking for dbus 0.23.1 and all I had was 0.23, but couldn’t get it to do anything useful.
From the screenshots that I’ve seen, Beagle is probably the most useful Gnome Mono apps, and is the one with the biggest cool factor. I’d really love to see Beagle included in Hoary Universe so that we can play with it and use it without building from source.
The fresh 0.0.7 release might just make that easier.
I guess that explains why Jeremy has been so quiet about work lately. While wait for my tea to brew, take a look at Jeremy’s list of required reading, including the Yahoo! Search Developers Network and the O’Reillynet article on the subject.
Rock on.
I’m a Debian guy. I didn’t start out a Debian guy. I started out with Slackware back in the dowload images overnight and rawrite them to floppy days. Then I looked around and noticed everyone else using Red Hat, so I picked that up around 5.2 or so. I lost faith in Red Hat sometime after 7.3 and floated around a bunch of different distros until I finally drank the apt koolaid and settled on Debian and Debian-based stuff. I qualify that with “Debian-based” because there are a lot of excellent distros that build on the Debian core. For example, I try to have a copy of Knoppix or a Knoppix-based distro on me because you never know when a live Linux cd can come in handy. I’ve also been on a heck of an Ubuntu kick lately.
I’ve got a couple of boxes that I frequent during a typical day. There’s a Debian-testing server that I have a screen session to on whatever machine I’m on. The machine I spend the most time on at home is a PIII-600 running Debian-testing. I’ve also got a Dual PIII-733 that boots Windows and as of yesterday the upcoming Ubuntu release, Hoary Hedgehog.
It. Freaking. Rocks.
Hoary feels a lot like Debian-unstable. There are rather major package updates every day or so. That’s okay though, because there’s a super friendly update manager that takes care of everything for you:
Available Updates
Downloading Updates
Installing Updates
I can’t tell you how seamless it is and how right it feels. I guess that I shouldn’t be that amazed. Red Hat and Fedora have had a similar feature for years. I really like that I don’t have to pay for updates or have to register and confirm my email address and all that jazz. It’s just there, baked in, quietly doing its thing.
Another thing that I love about Hoary is that they fixed my one big gripe. Now when you install an application via apt or Synaptic, it actually ends up in your Applications menu. I can’t say that this is the case for all applications, but for several Gnome and Mono apps that I installed, all of them ended up in Applications. This totally rocks! The lack of newly installed programs going in to some place in Applications was the only thing that really bugged me about Warty.
Speaking of apps, I updated my /etc/apt/sources.list and pointed it to Universe. After that I promptly started playing around with a bunch of the Mono apps that I had heard about but hadn’t had a chance to look at. Here are a few screenshots from my playtime:
I’ve got to say that I’m really impressed by the level of polish of these Gnome Mono apps. If I were on the same Linux box all day I would replace Instiki with Tomboy. I may augment my notetaking habits to work Tomboy in a bit while I’m home. You know what would be killer? Tomboy+WebDAV.
I also played a bit with Inkscape. It reminds me of Illustrator with all of the path stuff. Blam is a solid 3-paned aggregator. Of course, because it’s a 3-paned aggregator it means that it’s not for me. I also fired up MonoDevelop and would love to spend some downtime reading Mono: A Developer’s Handbook and hacking on some GTK# stuff.
Enough rambling. Here’s the reader’s digest version: Ubuntu rocks. Gnome rocks. Mono rocks. Man I love Linux!
Every once in awhile my plain jane Debian workstation amazes me when something just works as it should. Tonight’s realization is that Nautilus plays extremely well with sftp:// URIs. I’m running version 2.8.2 which is relatively up to date but no bleeding edge. On a whim I decided to try using it to upload some pictures for my previous posts. scp:// failed but sftp://worked just fine. Since it uses SSH I already had the host key cached and it just prompted me for my password. Just as with SSH, you have to use sftp://username@host, otheriwse it assumes that you’re using the username that you are currently logged in as.
Speaking of Nautilus (and Gnome for that matter): I love the minimalism and clean lines. I’ve spent some time in the eye-candy KDE camp, but I’ve got to tell you: I’m a Gnome guy. It does such a good job at getting out of your way and just letting you do what you need to get done. KDE is nice, but it’s a little candy coated and busy for my tastes. Of course I’ve got both Gnome and KDE installed on this particular box because there are some things that KDE does better than Gnome, but for everyday use, Gnome is where it’s at.
Don’t let the subject of this post fool you: Thunderbird can import emails and folder and all that from Outlook, but not neccesarily in the best way. I’m not sure how this works on the Macintosh, but at least one Windows, you can’t just point Thunderbird at a .pst file as I was hoping.
I’m in the process of migrating between two corporate boxes, and thought I’d take the opportunity to switch from Outlook to Thunderbird. I ended up trashing my profile and starting from scrach (it has a nice spring cleaning feel to it). I wanted to switch over to Thunderbird immediately, so I installed it and went searching for how to point it at my Outlook .pst.
It turns out that it’s not that simple. You can’t just point Thunderbird at a .pst and run. You need to have a copy of Outlook installed, as aparently Thunderbird relies on it for the import process. That approach is probably the easiest way to get the import done, but it would be really nice to remove Outlook as a requirement for importing old Outlook data. I would have prefered to not have to reinstall Outlook on this particular box and stuck with a Firefox + Thunderbird + OpenOffice environment.
This isn’t the end of the world, and definitely not a showstopper, but gosh darn it I’d like to be able to import my Outlook messages without requiring Outlook to be installed.
I love Pathway to Glory. It became my primary game and took up all of my taco time for a month or two. I made excuses to play it. I told myself that I would get back to doing something productive after I restarted this level one more, okay two more times. It’s worth every penny of $34.99
After a lot of dedicated play (and a couple of really tough levels) I beat the game. I actually beat it twice, because the first time I lost two of my maxed out snipers in the process of winning. I couldn’t bare being without them so it took another few days of downtime play to beat the game to my satisfaction.
My snipers were good. I would commonly play 2 of them even when the game urged me not to. After awhile my two best guys could quite literally be counted on for 4 confirmed kills a piece per turn. They could hit just about anything on the map within their range using 6 time units per kill. They were monsters.
After I beat the game the only interesting thing to do is hop online for some N-Gage Arena play. Our apartment is a dead zone, so no Arena there. I tend to be too busy at work and usually spend part of my lunch break catching up on my feeds, so no Arena there either. Once it warms up a bit I can probably play outside before class, but right now I spend time before class inside. Of course the buildings are virtual faraday cages, so I’m lucky to get FM reception for Marketplace let alone enough signal for GPRS.
At this point keeping the Pathway to Glory MMC in my phone just doesn’t make sense (I’m back to picking up tapes and sucking less at Tony Hawk). There’s a better reason besides boredom: Pathway kills my battery life!
I’m a casual N-Gage gamer. I usually have a game paused in the background, sometimes for days at a time. When I’ve got a few minutes to spare, I Alt-Tab as it were by holding down the little swirly key and selecting my game. This usually happens a few times a day when I’ve got downtime. Every other game that I’ve played has been fine with this. As long as the game is in the background I can get the usual couple of days out of a full charge.
Pathway just doesn’t behave the same. At first I wasn’t sure that it was Pathway, but I noticed that the taco was powering off completely at odd times. Maybe it would be first thing in the morning after the charge. Other times it would be later the same day. I thought that maybe my battery was going bad, but as soon as I stopped idling Pathway in the background I popped back up to my usual coupe of days of use per charge.
Has anyone else experienced this? This behaviour doesn’t make me love Pathway any less, it just makes me less likely to keep it in my taco running in the background. I’m more likely to have another game running in the background rather than waiting for Pathway to start up, start/resume a game, choose my guys and loadout and then start playing. A lot of the time my casual gaming time would be up before I had a chance to make a move. I’m hoping to have some more downtime while I have GPRS coverage, as playing Pathway on N-Gage Arena is total killer. I’ve only done it a few times but it’s lots of fun to play against a real human on your mobile phone.
A week or two ago I tried to post something to del.icio.us for the first time from a new box. I logged in and went to drag the bookmarklets to the bookmark bar in Firefox. I was excited to find a new bookmarklet called experimental post to del.icio.us on the del.icio.us about page.
I dragged that on to my bookmark bar and haven’t looked back. It sounds cheesy, but the experimental bookmarklet adds a lot of value to del.icio.us. If other people have posted the link to del.icio.us the tags that have been used in the past show up in recommended tags at the top. All of the tags that you have ever used are listed below, with the recommended tags highlighted. Below that are a list of some of the more popular tags that may apply to what you’re bookmarking.
This rocks on so many levels.
First, it’s great to get instant feedback as to how other people are tagging something that you’re about to post. At first I thought that this was a drawback and might confine new links to be posted within a universe of existing tags. After using the new bookmarklet I’ve found myself looking at the existing tags but often diving in to my list of tags and just as often using a tag that I’ve never used before. Second, it makes tagging easier. Just find the tag you want in your list and click on it. It’ll be automatically added to the list of tags in the form. It’s also a great prompt to remind you exactly what variation (singular, plural, e tc) of a word you have previously used as a tag. This way you’re not tagging stuff that you would post in the same category (such as blog/blogging/weblog/weblogging) to one category one time and another category the next.
I think that this new bookmarklet is going to make the del.icio.us experience even better than it already is. I’d suggest that everyone who uses the service go to the about page and snag the experimental bookmarklet. Trust me, you’ll never go back.
One of the gems in the latest edition of Symbian Community News is a link toward the bottom to the Orange Code Camp in Sarasota, Florida. It’s scheduled for April 18-20 and sounds like an amazing bargain at $249 for 72 hours of hardcore learning and coding. From the program it looks like they’re going to cover the spectrum from basic technologies to Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Symbian development. It looks like there will also be resources set up to assist you in hacking together that killer mobile app.
The bang/buck ratio seems quite good here. $249 seems extremely cheap for a 3 day coding intensive miniconference. If money were no object I’d be there, but I’ve already commited to attending PyCon, another conference with an awesome value factor. I’m hoping to get a Python for Series 60 BoF session together during PyCon. If anyone attends the Orange Code Camp, please please please blog about it.
It’s becoming quite obvious that the connected calendar is reaching a sort of tipping point. There have been all kinds of blips on the radar about calendars, calendar programs, calendar servers, calendar services, and just about anything that has to do with calendars. Frank lists the attributes of a perfect calendar in reaction to Jeremy Zawodny’s post on the subject. They’re both spot on. The world is in desperate need for calendars that sync to and on multiple paltforms, allow easy sharing, public and private events, access anywhere, and interop nicely. To put it bluntly we really need a calendaring system that doesn’t suck.
There are a lot of calendars out there, many of them quite good. But when you get down to it they all suck in one regard or another. Some are paltform specific. Others work well as long as you stay within walls of their system. Others sync with half the platforms that you’d like but not the other half. Heck, I even hear that Hula is getting some people laid.
I’ve looked at a lot of different calendaring systems and would rather not laundry list them. Some have been very close to being ideal. I set up calendar sharing over WebDav with Sunbird after its first public release. I tried Hula the day it came out. I tried unsuccessfully to compile and install Open-Xchange. Webcalendar is a solid webapp written in PHP, but it’s lacking in sync.
Like I said, we’re at a tipping point. We could go over the edge if Google really is working on a rich-web UI calendaring system that rocks. I doubt that they would be able to work in the synchronization that I’d really kill to have, but you never know.
Until the killer calendar comes along and slaps me in the face, I’ll be trying each one that has promise in hopes that it’s “the one.”
While I was in middle school, I spent a fair amount of time on CapAccess (the local Freenet. Yes I had to get my parents to sign the application form that I printed on the Okidata) and ViBES, The Virtual Interactive Blair Environment System. I was going to Sligo at the time and was nowhere near as cool as the Redland middle schoolers. I went by the name Prometheus. I had an office with some useless stuff in it that you had to teleport to. I wandered the virtual halls of Blair and vaguely remember something about a Perfectly Spherical Holographic Cow. I could be hallucinating though.
How did I get here? Oh right. Go North.
The whole ViBES mention is a tangent on a tangent on a tangent. It all started when I refreshed the Hack the Planet tab in Firefox (on my Debian box). I finally clicked on the PDF about peer to peer event notification which I had been meaning to do since yesterday. After glancing it a name near the top stuck out: Dan Sandler. Where the heck have I heard that name before? Reference the first paragraph of this post in which I rememberd ViBES and two of the god-like admins: Dan Sandler and Danny Gould.
I was curious what Dan had been up to since I vaguely knew him (virtually) in middle school. All is well aparently. He’s working on his PhD in Computer Science at Rice and working on the FeedTree project [pdf] that got me started with all of this googling in the first place. He’s also got a weblog which I’ve subscribed to via RSS. I wasn’t sure that he was the same guy I knew years ago, but this reference to ViBES confirmed it for me.
It was nice to stumble across old names and remember the good old times when we used to surf via gopher. It’s great to know that some of the kids I hung out with online when I was a kid are doing well. It also makes me realize that I’m still working on my BS in Computer Science while others from my childhood are working on their Masters and PhDs. I really need to slack less and code more.
My apologies for the trip down virtual memory lane. Don’t even get me started on green CRTs and 1200BPS modems, I could go on for days.
The other week I was glued to the monitor during the first day of 3GSM. Lots and lots of stuff was going on. One of the highlights for me was the announcement of the Nokia 6680, 6681, and 6682. They are compact, state of the art Series 60 devices. There’s full-on UMTS for the parts of the world that do that sort of thing, and EDGE for us in the mobile backwater better known as the United States. Even better, the release date for the US variety should be sometime during 2H 2005.
After the initial excitement I dove in to the tech specs a little bit. I then realized that Series 60 can mean quite a range of things. At the low end you’ve got the 7650 and my 3650 which I’ve never been able to clear out enough memory to actually run Opera. (I’ve managed to misplace my 3650 somewhere too and probably haven’t seen it in a few weeks.) On the other end of the spectrum we’ve got devies like the 6630 and now the 6680, with newer versions of Series 60 and with additional Feature Packs. Somewhere in the middle there are devices like the taco and 6600/6620.
Yes, there’s a lowest common denominator in there somewhere that you can refer to when you say that something is Series 60. After that you have to think to yourself What version does that run? and Is that Feature Pack 2 or Feature Pack 3?
At the same time I think that most of this confusion is inevitable. Series 60 has grown up quite a bit in the last few years, from the 7650 slider with no external memory capability to the latest devices with lots of on-board memory sporting the latest in low voltage RS-MMC cards.
What really worries me is the confusion that will come when the Series 90 technology is rolled in to Series 60. Then Series 60 might mean anything from the classic 7650 to the latest bleeding edge stylus input or QWERTY device in addition to whatever the latest single-handed unit may be.
What can be done about this brand dilution? Off the top of my head I can’ think of anything. Nokia could try sub-branding the different variants: Series 60 Classic for the old stuff, Series 60 One-Handed for the main stuff, Series 60 Stylus for pen-based stuff and Series 60 Keyboard for the QWERTY stuff. Of course that would probably just cause more confusion than If it looks like Series 60, walks like Series 60, and talks like Series 60, call it Series 60.
*Sigh*
I was excited to hear Nat and Miguel talking about The Hula Project yesterday as I was catching up on my feeds.
Hula is an email and calendaring server. I think they’re taking the right approach: instead of trying to do everything for everybody they’re going to focus on email and calendar. They’re going to try to make the best darned email and calendar server out there. They’re also looking to make of Javascript and DHTML to create a rich web UI.
I have to say that I’d love to have something like this. A month or two ago I spent a few weeks off and on banging on OPEN-XCHANGE. I tried several times to get the prereqs right so that I could build slapd from source and then build OPEN-XCHANGE in order to be able to configure all of the stuff that needed to be configured. At first I got stuck near the top of the Debian install instructions. Then I got stuck in the middle, and by the time I had written a shell script to do most of the dirty work, I got stuck at adding the LDAP user. I also looked at installing OpenGroupware but a lackluster attempt at figuring out what to do with nightly build .debs I gave up.
I’m going to repurpose a box and put Debian unstable on it (testing has an older version of automake) to play with Hula, as it seems like it has the easiest build/install process so far:
./configure
make
su make install
Granted there is some configuration to do after that, but from what I’ve heard in #hula on freenode the process is quite easy.
That’s not to say that I’ve stopped looking at alternatives to iCal-over-webdav or Exchange or an exchange workalike for my calendaring and general togetherness. I’d love to see a livecd with openexchange already running on it. For now I think I’ll build Hula and see what the buzz is about. I’m confident that it’s going to progress and improve quickly.
