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Exchange to iCal/Sunbird via Perl

I’ve got something I call vcalxical.pl, which is a perl script that logs into an Exchange server running IMAP, and then reads a mailbox that is really a calendar, and pulls out the VCALENDAR parts, and formats them into an ics-type file. You can import this into Apple’s iCal or into Sunbird.

Now, it’s far from perfect, but it works for me. Your Windows guys would have to have IMAP enabled, and I’m guessing it doesn’t take much to break things if they really want to. (For instance, at some point in time things changed from plain text to HTML, who knows!?)

The idea is this, when stuff gets scheduled in Outlook/Exchange (which you don’t use cuz you don’t use Windows) it’ll show up in iCal or Sunbird after the script runs via a cron job. Theory, anyway… I think it would be better to have the calendar on available via webdav, as I don’t know how the apps like having the file changed on disk willy-nilly. That way it really is a remote calendar.

I’ve been using it on and off, but not testing it too heavily. iCal seems to be popping up alarms to stuff. Sunbird, I’m not sure yet…

Still, we hack on…

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dir.licio.us

So you’ve learned how to backup your del.icio.us data with something like this: 

curl -o delicious.xml -u username:password "http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000"

(Well, the 10000 most recent entries anyway!)


(Note: Since originally writing this, a new method was added: http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all might be used instead. See the API docs for details.)

Now what?

Obviously you run some sick and twisted Perl code on it and you get an HTML page that lists all your posts, by tag, with posts displaying under each tag they belong to…

Anyway, that’s what dir.licio.us does…

(It ignores the timestamp and extended field, but you could hack those in if so inclined…)

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OOo to the CMS

In a thread titled OOo conversion to XHTML for CMS import, we learn a few things, like OpenOffice.org documents (ending with .sxw) are zipped, and you can upzip them and there’s XML and images in them thar files!

More importantly, we learn that people are finding ways to get documents parsed and into other systems. I mean, we did this in the past, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they need some sort of “Microsoft Word to CMS conversion/importer” and then there’s much hand-wringing and thought and discussion.

I often forget about OpenOffice.org because to me, office documents just aren’t as exciting as other things, but I’m glad there are people working on it, and who knows, someday I might find office documents totally fascinating!

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Apple and Mozilla

Apple has Mail.app, Safari, and iCal. They all run on Mac OS X. Well, iCal requires Mac OS X 10.2 I believe, and I’m sure future versions of Mail.app and Safari will require an appropriately recent version of Mac OS X.

(I’ll assume the “standard” apps for Windows would be IE and Outlook, both of which seem to be the source of much trouble for many people…)

For web browsing I tend to use Firefox (and before that Mozilla.) I started using Mozilla back when the versions had things like M1 assigned to them, so I’ve grown fond of it over the years.

At home I’ve been using Apple’s Mail.app for quite a while, and it does an awesome job of determining what is junk, but I also use Thunderbird, which is great at doing IMAP, and I really like the way it handles multiple accounts. At work it’s all Thunderbird all the time. (I won’t touch Outlook!)

Now, when it comes to iCal, I was a bit split. When it came out, it was cool, but I resisted, because I was still using a PowerBook pretty often, and that PowerBook was stuck on Mac OS X 10.1.5, and could not run iCal. I toyed around with the early Mozilla Calendar extension, but now it’s getting closer to being the real deal in Sunbird.

So do you see a pattern? Apple does a great job of producing nice, clean, well-done applications, and if you exclusively or primarily use Mac OS X (the most recent version) you can be “all set” as the kids say. For the average user, there isn’t really anything lacking. Email, web browsing, and calendaring is handled.

But… for the folks who use Windows, Linux, etc. instead of, or in addition to Mac OS X, Mozilla’s got you covered. They put you in the “all set” mode with their offerings. Ah, one more thing, as Steve Jobs likes to say… For the hackers among us, those who like to push things further, extend. enhance, customize, tweak, and just turn inside-out, the Mozilla apps provide such a thing. The list of extensions for Firefox is impressive, and Thunderbird, and (I’m assuming) Sunbird will also follow with a nice list of extensions to do what the makers did not think of, have time for, or did not choose to do.

The Mozilla “platform” is a ripe field for the hackers to plant those seeds…

I would like to thank the Mozilla Foundation, and the supporters of these apps… They’re making computing better all the time.

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Skype, SIP, and the VoIP

I installed X-Lite last week, though I’ve still yet to really give it a good whirl, other than simple testing…

I also (finally) got Skype working. I say finally because it seems the version I first tried to install was buggy, and forced me to try all sorts of firewall/port forwarding voodoo that was not needed. I just needed to download a newer version. Still, I’ve not actually used Skype yet to talk to anyone…

As far as VoIP, I’m still not too educated on the whole thing. SIP seems to be a standard of some sort, and X-Lite uses that, but people seem to love Skype which is some sort of proprietary thing that “just works” and works well…

Anyway, if you use either of these and want to test, or try talking to me, let me know.

My amusing sidenote to this is, I remember testing something like this out around 1995 or so, with the guy from Michigan whose name I cannot remember. He was on a university connection, and I was on dialup at 14.4. It sort of worked even!