sidetracked

08 Apr 2007 Getting sidetracked so easily is one of the things I'd like to change about myself. I've been so busy looking at a decent notification system to use in all my scripts, that I've lost track of what is really important: getting my laptop installed.

So I'll just stop looking at notification systems and use notify-send in all of them. The advantage is that notify-send already comes in a neat package and it does what I want it to do: send notification popups to my desktop.

So, what else is there to look at ? Phase 2 is the versioned backup I'm working on. It should be finished shortly because I'm tired of looking at it. While I finish up the loose ends, I'm looking ahead at the next phases.

Phase 3 would be the VPN part and phase 4 the VOIP part. Both of these require that I setup a server. For the VPN part, I've been looking at systems that provide access to as many different clients and platforms as possible. I found a site that discusses how to set up a free Microsoft Windows VPN client with a linux VPN server. It also handles MacOS and pocket PC. It also brings up OpenSwan as the VPN server software, which is probably what I will use too. OpenSwan seems to be well supported in the opensource community.

On the VOIP front, I would have to setup an Asterisk server on my desktop at work and buy an ISDN-BRI interface card for my phone at work. Since this is even more work than just installing something on my desktop machine, I'll probably push this back to the very last phases...

So what's next ? Since I've started looking out for new laptop-installation ideas, I've grown out of the first 4 phases I planned on initially. Phase 5 is a local calendar system for example, where I can schedule meetings, birthdays, teatime and whatnot. It should work together with whatever system people will decide to use at work (most likely MS Exchange at this point) and it should allow me to store my daily activities in it (timesheet).

My eye fell on the Evolution groupware software. Although Evolution is wellknown and supported, and has a lot of interesting features and plugins (working together with MS Exchange being the most interesting one), I must admit I have my doubts because of it's large bloat-factor. I don't see myself substituting my favorite E-mail client mutt for Evolution yet. But things can change...

[Update]

I've been looking more at the evolution package and I'm starting to like it. It comes with Ubuntu by default and apparently can be integrated into the clock applet. It can also overlay different calendars, so I don't have to merge my personal/birthday/work calendars together.

Plus, there seems to be an evolution backend server that I can on my desktop at work, on which I can store my timesheet information and birthday stuff. That takes care of a remote backup then.

What I need to find out now, is whether evolution calendar items can be created from commandline. I would like to insert a calendar item for every project I work on. For example "worked on project X from 11.10 till 11.25". It would also be nice if I can retrieve those entries from commandline. And synchronising should happen automatically...