Thunderbird & Lightning - just discovered a new feature

I'm very happy to use my Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client for mail. I also use the calendar plug-in called Lightning. Lightning is connected directly to my Google Calendar account, so I can view my calendar live. I use several calendars on Google for different purposes. I just need a Todo thing on Google, but I solved that by creating a local account for that purpose.

Allright then. What is the new ?

I just discovered that it's possible to drag-and-drop an e-mail from my inbox to one of the panes on the right hand side. If I drag it to the calendar part of the pane, the mail is copied into a new calendar event. If I drag it into the task pane, the e-mail becomes a task.

I love open source !

Open source for entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs often don't require comprehensive compatibility from their computer systems. They need a few applications that can solve the every day needs. In most cases a cheep computer and open source software in conjunction with free Internet services can solve the tasks. As a consequense of that, more capital can be invested in developing the company.

A couple of days ago, I gave an interview to a journalist who asked me why open source software is god for entrepreneurs. When an entrepreneur is starting a new company, like a constructions worker or so, the person needs to spend as much time working as possible. Day-to-day administration like time registration, invoicing and budgets should be as simple and easy as possible. The most important IT task is often accounting and that should be handed to a professional. The same solution should be used when the talk comes to marketing and website. Ask the professionals for help and pay the bill. The final result will be much better, and the entrepreneur can spend his or her time developing the company. Outsourcing is the solution, unless the entrepreneur has the required accounting skills. When the company is established, these tasks might be insourced.

At the same time, as much capital as possible should be invested in developing the production and find customers. So every penny you can avoid spending on expensive software, can instead be invested in the key activities in the company. Business development. If you buy computers and software for all possible tasks, you will need thousands of dollars. If you try to look at the requirements with pragmatic eyes, you will find that most tasks can be solved with open source software or Internet services free of charge (e.g. Google Docs and Google Calendar). Even complicated tasks like time planning and financial calculations can be solved quite easily if ou find the right solutions and combinations.

When the company matures and grow, the entrepreneur has the choise between buying commercial software or stay with free, open and independant software.

So, when you start a new company your success is not depending on buying computers and expensive software. On the contrary, you should spend as little time and money on the computer as possible.

Todos for this week

Tomorrow i'll start working after my vacation. This is my todo list for the first week or so:

Work:

• Research on Lotus Notes/Domino 8 Beta 3 - Make a review for my colleges
• Create a new VMWare environment with Domino/Lotus 8 and Symfoni product e-Office (for demonstration and test)
• Create new OpenOffice.org templates for Symfoni Software
• Implement OpenOffice.org templates (with field-to-field data exchange) in Symfoni e-office
• Prepare a demo (new movie) with Symfoni e-Office and OpenOffice.org integration (make a draft story board)
• Try to get an overview of my calendar appointments. Here is probably at least 20 new invitations waiting for me to consider.
  

Private

• Get a new rain water tank (The old one couldn't take the pressure yesterday). We got 80 mm rain in one hour and a new official record: 10.9 mm in one minute.
• Do physiotherapy exercises with my son every day. He needs to exercise for about half an hour every day
  

Community

• Translation of 2.3. We still need to translate about 200 strings
• Try to get more Danish signatures on the petition on www.noooxml.org
  
• Register and analyze 98 answers from the Danish municipals. We asked them about 15 questions about OpenOffice.org and open standards
  

Arrgh... problems with my calendar sync again

I'm using the Mozilla Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird for calendaring. This, together with Google calendar has been a very fine solution for me for a long time. Specially after I found a small sync application called GCALDaemon to sync my local calendar with Google.

Yesterday, I upgraded my Lightning plug-in to version 0.5 and at the same time I installed another plug-in called 'Provider for Google Calendar'. This plug-in should be the native Google sync application in the future. So far so good. Upgrade and install and restarted Thunderbird. I also removed the GCALDaemon from my computer.

This is where Arrgh comes in to the picture. It didn't work. I could see my calendar entries for about five seconds, and then the calendar view was empty. I tried to remove both the provider-plug-in and my calendar accounts from Lightning and then installed it again. The funny thing was, that I couldn't remove the Provider thing . I gave up after about an hour and started to plan how to reinstall GCALDaemon.

Then today, when I started my computer, I got some weird warnings from Thunderbird. I found that my calendar accounts had reappeared and I could actually see my appointments ....for about five seconds.

I tried to remove that Provider thing again. No luck. After restarting Thunderbird, Provider was still there. Double arrgh.

Then I came to remember, that Thunderbird has an irritating problem, that when you close the program, it actually continues to run as a hidden service. Yes, Thunderbird was still running, even after I closed it. Kill Thunderbird. Start Thunderbird again. The provider thing was removed. Yes !

I installed Provider again and now I could see all my accounts and appointments. I can create appointments in Lightning and they are synchronized to Google. Fantastic.

Morale: Remember to close the application and kill the process in the process window. Closing and starting is not always a complete restart. Maybe some of the Mozilla guys could look into this problem one day ? Okay, I know that I'm a part of the problem, because I'm running Microsoft Windows. Bare with me.

Anyway, I must say that the Mozilla guys has done a great job this time. Bidirectional sync works fine and the layout has got a huge improvement. And now i can print my weekly and monthly calendar and put it on the refrigerator door together with the rest of my family plans.

I have been working with calendaring in Lotus applications for about ten years now. And I know how difficult it can be to visualize a calendar on a computer screen. Do you remember Organizer ? One of the first applications, that tried to visualize a calendar by copying the design from a manual calendar. I still think that concept could win awards today.

But still, the hard thing is to keep the environment running. I remember one of my customers, who wanted to keep half the staff on Lotus Notes and the other half on Microsoft Exchange. Imagine the question: Can we get an overview of all employee calendars ? Will it be possible to invite to a meeting across the applications ?

Converters and integration ended up being a nightmare. When we solved one problem, another fire new problems occurred. That was about four years ago.

Open standards could solve the problem today. With iCal and WebDAW it would be quite easy to establish a common platform for both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange calendars.

I'll put a mark in my diary today

Today I can put a mark in my calendar. It has been a good day.

Why today in particular ?

Because: now I can sync that mark with Google Calendar. Thats why !

Thanks to Dmitri Popov and his article on Linux.com, Syncing magic with GCALDaemon

This has for a long time been a problem to lots of people around the world. And I have tried to find a solution to this problem for more than a year now. And who else than Dmitri could do this ? I have seen a lot of good and inspiring articles from Dmitri over the years. Always very accurate but at the same time not too technical. Keep it up, Dmitri.

Today it took about 30 minutes from I first found the article untill I was able to sync my Lightning calendar with Google Calendar. Tomorrow I will use another 30 minutes or so and sync my local address book too.



I'm looking forward to the next article from Dmitri Popov.