DevOnLinux

I have recently discovered Evolution Mirror, an interesting Thunderbird add-on that aims to mirror Thunderbird calendars to Evolution Data Server. This lets me to manage my calendars with Thunderbird as usual and to see my events in the Gnome Clock applet.

It is still in development but it is a great intitiative of Teester because it’s a good way to integrate Thunderbird with Gnome.

The plugin is written in Python, and it needs the python-evolution binding. Now i will explain you how to install it. I am using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex 64 bit version.

Obviously you need on your system Thunderbird and its calendar extension: Lightning.

Open Synaptic and install these packages and their dependencies:

python2.5-dev, python-gtk2-dev, libecal1.2-dev,
libgdk-pixbuf-dev, libebook1.2-dev

or using a terminal:

sudo apt-get install python2.5-dev python-gtk2-dev libecal1.2-dev \
libgdk-pixbuf-dev libebook1.2-dev

Download the evolution-python binding from Conduit site.

Open a terminal and digit:

tar zxvf evolution-python-0.0.4
cd evolution-python-0.0.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

Well done, now evolution-python bindings are installed. Now download Evolution Mirror add-on and add it to your Thunderbird Add-ons.

Open Evolution, create an account. You have to do this because it creates some basic data such as the Personal calendar.

Now open your Thunderbird and start add Tasks or Events and you’ll see them on the Gnome Clock applet.

As i have already said, the plugin is still in development, for now it does not add events and tasks that has been already inserted before. It also merge all calendars’ data in one unique Evolution calendar. These are some missing but i think and hope that they will be fixed soon.

Anyway is a great work! I hope to have time to help the developer in this add-on, also because it will be very useful with my still-in-development tool called SyncIt. Take a look on my Trac to know something about it even if it is not updated and poorly documented.

Today i’ve decided to add to my Eclipse IDE the Mylyn plugin, an add-on that lets manage bugs and planning of a project inside the IDE itself. Mylyn can be used with a lot of bug tracking tools and since i use Trac i’ve decided to link them together inside Eclipse.

I assume you have installed Trac on your local server, or on your Dreamhost account. To enable communication between Trac and Mylyn we have to install and enable the XmlRpcPlugin that you can download from trac-hacks.

After the download, copy your plugin on the system where Trac is installed. Uncompress the archive and go to the 0.10 folder if you have Trac 0.10 or trunk folder otherwise.

Now digit these commands:

chmod 755 -R *
python setup.py bdist_egg

Wait until the Python egg is created and then copy it into the plugins directory of your Trac environment. The egg file is in the dist directory created during the egg building.

Now go into your Admin account of your Trac web interface and go to Plugins page. You’ll see a TracXMLRPC 0.1 field. Clicking on it you’ll see some component. You have to enable these components as shown in the next figure.

Well we’ve almost done. Now we have to install Mylyn and Mylyn extras into Eclipse.

Start Eclipse and click on Help -> Software Updates. Click on the Availabe Software tab. Click on Add Site button and paste these two “repository”:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/extras

Now select to install these features:

Wait until Eclipse asks you to restart to update changes and then you’ll be able to use Mylyn with your Trac environment.

E allo stesso modo in cui cent’anni fa la gente non si curava dell’inquinamento nella
corsa alla realizzazione dell’Era Industriale, oggi non ci curiamo delle informazioni nella
corsa alla realizzazione dell’Era dell’Informazione.

Bruce Schneier (cryptogram march 2009)

Spesso la difficoltà maggiore nello spiegare a persone poco “informatiche” quale sia il reale problema della privacy e dei nostri dati personali che quotidianamente diffondiamo online ed in ogni transazione mediata da un computer, riguarda proprio l’incapacità di saper comunicare con poche ed efficaci parole l’importanza di tali informazioni ed il perchè dovrebbero preoccuparsene.

O forse, come sempre, è semplicemente dovuto alla natura umana di fare le cose senza pensare ai possibili effetti collaterali. Solo dopo ci si accorge.

Recently i’ve watched an intresting speech by Miško Hevery.

He explains how to use the correct polymorphic approach instead of a succession of if/switch statements. Polymorphism is better because it lets everybody to understand, to extend and to test the code.

Watch the video at: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2008/12/by-miko-hevery-google-tech-talks.html

In the past few days i’ve spent my time at work setting up a Linux server with Oracle database. Since i have had some problems i have decided to write how to install it without any trouble.

In our company we have bought two Dell servers QuadCore with 4Gb of Ram and 2Tb of hard disk. We have decided to use one of them as a powerful machine to execute some automatic tests on a complex project that requires a lot of computation.

Since the project uses Oracle database, Oracle Warehouse Builder and Oracle Data Integrator, available for Linux and Windows both, i have decided to setup a Linux machine instead of a Windows one to get the more benefits i could.

I admit, i like Ubuntu too much, so my first try has been an Ubuntu Server 8.04 installation, but i’ve had lots of problem during the installation of the database.

So i’ve decided to switch to a more supported Linux version and the solution has been Centos 5.2 AMD64. Read more…

From Pirate Party:

The Pirate Party of Germany got a secret Document of the bavarian Ministry of Justice from a Whistleblower. In this Document, the Ministry discussed the Price of using a “trojan horse”-malware to wiretap Skype. It looks like the bavarian has already used such a Software, but that would be illegal.
The Price is interesting: 3500€ per month and use. Only mass use could produce such a low price.

And after this announcement the German police have searched the office of Pirate Party and now is searching the people who have liberated this information.
World is upset… Spy on private communication is anti-constitutional in Germany or not??

The Big Brother is here, and if you disagree they install you a trojan horse.
Good

For other info visit wikileaks or the register.

ps. If you want privacy (ah ah), don’t use skype or other proprietary closed software.
First rule is: no security through obscurity.
And before all, use GNU/Linux.

The “default” Xandros distribution installed in eeePc is quite good but there are some lack.

For example there aren’t installed  many driver for common printer. In my case, the Samsung ML-1520 (it’s a Laser Printer) didn’t works even it’s recognized correctly (splix driver arent’t installed…).

A simple solution it’s to install the Unified Linux Driver offered directly by Samsung. Just extract the tar.gz, run ./autorun and follow the wizard.

Because Open Source is better than closed source software…

Great italian article about Neelie Kroes and her talk about Open Source in the European Union.
The focus is on the formats interoperability (for example, ODF actually is the only ISO standard implemented and working correctly for the documents) and the freedom of choice.

Because Our Passion is greater than money of Microsoft or other big software companies.

Since we wanted to install Trac on our DreamHost domain we have followed the Natmaster tutorial. Anyway we came in trouble so here we describe how we have installed Trac. The proceeding is quite similar to Natmaster one, but we found some missing pieces that we describe below.

Here is the list of programs that we have installed:

• virtual-python
• Trac 0.10.4
• Clearsilver 0.10.3
• SQLite 3.5.2
• PySqlite 2.3.5
• Swig 1.3.31

If you have already tried to install Trac remove all installed programs in your directory (ex: packages) and remove the other files created (ex: .pydistutils.cfg) or paths setted in .bash_profile or .bash_rc.

Let’s start with a new installation! Read more…

Directly from MIT, Seek, simple faceted browsing of your mailbox.
This plugin is released for Mozilla Thunderbird.

There is also a good screencast: watch, download the plugin, install, love it…

Open Source Innovation, of course!