There’s this great package in KDE that has a really cool name called Akonadi (pronounced Ahh-Kon-ahh-dee if you want to impress your friends!). But more than just a cool name it does cool things – particularly in the realm of syncing data on your desktop with a remote server. Ooo yeah, including Google’s servers. Akonadi is one of the ‘pillars’ of the KDE platform and here’s how you can use that pillar to prop up your schedules and calendaring with KOrganizer-Google integration. It’s easy on Kubuntu Karmic!

– Install the Google data package for Akonadi
sudo apt-get install akonadi-kde-resource-googledata
– Ensure the Akonadi Tray Utility is running by performing the following steps
– Search for Akonadi in the search box of the Kickoff Launcher (KDE’s “Start” menu). Click the Akonadi Tray Utility that is found
– Go to the tray on the bottom right of your beautiful KDE desktop and click the small arrow, if necessary, to to expand all the tray icons
– You should see an icon for Akonadi. Right click on it and select ‘Start Akonadi’
– This should start the Akonadi server. You can verify this by right clicking the icon again and checking to see that there is now a ‘Stop Akonadi’ option
– Right click on the Akonadi icon yet again and select ‘Configure’
– Under the Akonadi Resources configuration, click Add and elect to add a Google Calendar Data Resource
– Enter your login details for your google account
– Next it’s off to Kontact. Go to the Calendar in Kontact
– There should be a small Calendar pane on the bottom right to set up calendar resources. Click the Plus sign to add an “Akonadi (Provides access to calendars stored in Akonadi calendar folders)”
– In the resulting popup, choose the google resource in the list and ensure that Events is ticked to the right of it. (I didn’t try to get Todos or Journals working because I don’t use them)
– Hey presto! All your calendar details should now be pulled into KOrganizers calendar! Hurrah!!!

Just to note, at time of writing I found that I had to search and find the Akonadi Tray Utility on restarting the computer. Once it’s in the System Tray elect to start Akonadi as we did above and you’re back in the game! If you find a solution to this minor inconvenience on restarting your machine then please post below!

Thanks to Christian Mangold for this article which served as a great reference.

Here’s quite a tasty diagram too for easy reference.

module Swingable

    def self.included(base)
        base.extend(ClassMethods)
    end

    def instance_swing
        puts 'Did an instance swing!'
    end

    module ClassMethods
        def static_swing
            puts 'Did a static swing!'
        end
    end
end

class BaseballBat
   include Swingable
end

BaseballBat.static_swing
BaseballBat.new.instance_swing

Many group mailing lists already exist in Ireland for individual technologies, development languages and frameworks. However, each community is sandboxed into its own world. As a result there is less chance for cross-pollination of ideas between FOSS technologies, communities and individuals. The ossdev-ireland mailing list is to augment the existing mailing lists as a place to share ideas across the entire Open Source development community in Ireland.

In particular, it would be great to see the outcomes of code jams, bug triage sessions, or even links to slides that were presented at a group meetup, posted here. You never know who may be interested!

So if you want to browse or join ossdev-ireland, please visit us at http://groups.google.com/group/ossdev-ireland

* Qt has the concept of models baked in. Usually you will only want to use them if you have a list of records involved. So let’s say you have a list of contacts like in an address book then this could be encapsulated in a QAbstractTableModel. If you just want to display a record in one-off fashion you can just populate a bunch of form fields (such as QLineEdits).

A couple of folks had been playing around with RubyGame for visualising data as it changes on the fly – showing that this framework is for more than just gaming. The XML/HTML parser Nokogiri was also mentioned a few of times in passing, with the particularly eye-catching quote “XML is like violence – if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it” adorning the home page of its website. And the cracking little tool tig was also brought up, which has a dinky little ncurses interface into git repositories. Pretty cool; not least because it makes it easier for newbies to avoid being bitten when they start git’tin.

The downstairs lobby in the hotel worked out great for people to meet up and relax, with most people turning up at the scheduled 7 o clock for kick off. From there we took over the, what has to be said, pretty classy meeting room complete with old style couches and some Joan Miró paintings. Just in tune with the creative buzz we had going on. There wasn’t too much talk of Ruby for a while as most people were in stunned admiration of the room. Then the food platter arrived. Impressively, this is when everyone showed off their good manners by looking shyly at the platter for a few minutes, with that kind of “You first, sir” glint in their eye, before taking the plunge and sinking into the pakoras and wedges! Pretty much undoing any good work in the gym from earlier in the day!

One of the funnier moments of the night was when someone went to check the tweets against the (now settled upon) #rubyireland hashtag. Only to find lost rubyists tweeting from the hotel lobby as to where the meetup was on. After a quick runaround the lobby to herd anyone wielding a Macbook into the meeting room, the evening was back on track. We split up into a few smaller groups, with the main walk-through being on the qtonrails – a Rails plugin to simply developing applications on Linux and other platforms using Nokia’s Qt framework atop Rails.

To finish off we had a bit of improv comedy from everyone at different closing stages of the evening; in particular Paul O’Malley with his faithful rendition of an emotion beekeeper. And yes now we’re straying off topic so it’s probably time to go. We’ll leave you with Paul’s write up of last night’s shenanigans

Thanks to everyone who showed. Have a great Christmas and catch ye all in Jan 2010 – surely destined to be the decade of Ruby domination!

Ciao,
Dec

2) In your config/database.yml file, point at the database you wish to dump to a migrations file

3) Run the command ‘rake db:schema:dump’. This should create a db/schema.rb file. Amazingly this effectively is your migrations file!

4) To tidy up create a file called file db/migrate/20091125205635_create_initial_schema.rb

5) Then copy the create_table statements from the schema.rb file into the new file 20091125205635_create_initial_schema.rb. Here’s a template

class CreateInitialSchema < ActiveRecord::Migration

  def self.up
    # Put all create_table statements from schema.rb file here
    # Note: You don't need the 'ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version' line or it's enclosing end statement
    # ...
    # ...
  end

  def self.down
    # Don't really need this
  end

end

6) Once you’ve all this done you can just run ‘rake db:migrate’ and you should have a new sqlite db up and running under db/development.sqlite3

Thanks to Justin Ball on this Nobody Listens Anyway blog at Dump an Existing Database Schema Into a Ruby On Rails Migration Ready Format for the basis of this tip. Sometimes somebody does…

This tells you useful stuff like what remotes you’re bound to, etc.

2.) You can blow away files listed as ‘untracked’ (by the git status command) using git clean (be careful!).

If you want any of those files to hang around (but not appear as ‘untracked’) then add them to your  .gitignore file.

3.) You can re-enter your last commit using git commit --amend. What’s nifty is that you can change files (including file addition and deletion) as well as the commit message. Just do what you gotta do before running the amend command and enter a replacement commit message.

4.) You can undo your last commit completely using git reset HEAD^

*** This does not change the working tree ***

Alternatively, you can use the syntax git HEAD~2 instead of HEAD^^

5.) Refer to the last revision by HEAD, the second last as HEAD^ and the third last as HEAD^^

You can keep adding carrets forever! Sounding like Bugs Bunny there.

6.) You can see the contents of a file from a revision using

git show rev:path/to/file

7.) Ok, this tip is a bit of a longer one. Use git merge some_other_branch to merge another branch into the one your working on. (Note that git pull does a merge automatically once it’s completely – if you don’t want this to happen use git fetch). There are a few possible outcomes:

Fast-forward merge : If changes were made on only one of the branches since the last merge, then the merge should happen without any need for you to act.

Three-way merge: If changes were made on both branches, then git decides how to merge them using an algorithm. If any changes conflict with each other, then git will report them and let you resolve them. Once you’ve fixed any conflicts then you can git commit.

If there were no conflicts, git automatically does a commit with a stock commit message for the log. If you don’t like the idea of this then use git merge --no-commit some_other_branch. You need to manually do the commit afterwards. (This is more like how other distributed VCS’s such as Mercurial. This was the tip that inspired this post!).

8.) Finally, one tip that I found useful is that you don’t want to git pull into your repository when you have uncommitted changes. Especially if you treasure your sanity. Instead git stash is your friend. Here’s how
* Do a git stash to move your uncommitted changes to a magical place in git temporarily
* Then do the git pull
* And finally do a git stash apply. This will now move your ’stashed’ uncommitted changes back (from the magical temporary place in git) into your working directory and take into account what what was changed by the pull. Neat!

Tips 1-7 taken from:  Git – SVN Crash Course. Tip 8 taken from painful experience

If you want a good detailed yet friendly reference on a particular command search the Git User Manual on kernel.org.

On uploading the wordpress site from a development machine (which had the cforms plugin installed locally) to a server online, we could not get a contact form created with CForms to send out an email. Instead, it would say “One moment please” but alas that moment would never end. We tried TLS settings and permission changes but nothing worked. Fortunately there was a solution which we came across at the plugin’s somewhat squashed forum.

When we had developed the site locally, the plugin had hardcoded a variable ’sajax_uri’ into the /wp-content/plugins/cforms/js/cforms.js. This is what was causing the pesky problemo and a quick edit of that file to point the variable at a correct URL for our server fixed the issue.

Hmm… I’m sure there’s a good reason is not a variable in a config somewhere. There’s a few hours of my evening I’ll never get back…

We kicked off by following the instructions on the rails wiki. It’s worth paying careful attention to anywhere it says to set path variables. If you find that you are getting an error that says that you version of rubygems is not recent enough (and you can’t get rubygems to update itself) then you can install an older version of Rails, for example 2.3.2, using the following from the command line

gem install rails -v 2.3.2

(Note: If you have already installed a different version of rails you can uninstall it first by using ‘gem uninstall rails’).

The big problem however was getting sqlite3 working. We did install the SQLite Command Line Tool and the SQLite DLL as the Rails Wiki instructions said to – but to no avail. We kept getting a popup error saying that the sqlite3 dll was not found and to please consider reinstalling. Fortunately, we gambled on one of the answers on StackOverflow. Basically the solution was from the command line

gem uninstall sqlite3-ruby

gem install sqlite3-ruby --source http://gems.rubyinstaller.org

And with that we were away! The final thing was to get a nice friendly IDE installed so we plumbed for Netbeans on the Netbeans Downloads page. Look out for the special Ruby version of Netbeans which is one of the links around the middle of the downloads page.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Happy Ruby hacking!

* Install your gems as per normal (ie. don’t use –no-ri or –no-rdoc)
* Run the command ‘gem server’ from the command line
* Browse to http://localhost:8808
* And voila! You should have all the docs you need available by clicking on the rdoc link for any given gem
* But if you really want to get fancy check out the searchable Rails documentation at http://railsapi.com – there’s an online version as well as the downloadable (the links are at the top of the page and can easily be mistaken for an advert!)