Mathieu Allard's blog

I recently received an Acer TravelMate 2420 Laptop in exchange for the Averatec 3715-ed1 that I had previously purchased at FutureShop.
This laptop works very well in Linux, accelerated video, sound, power management all work very nicely. Moreover, I find the keyboard much more comfortable to use than I did with the previous laptop. I wrote a Linux for Laptops entry which I hope will be approved by Linux on laptops shortly.
I have to pick a paper topic. Last time it was a paper on the use of the OpenDocument format in Canada, the OpenDocument Format which is now a recognized ISO standard, this time I have to write a paper that fits in with the State in the Economy Class at the University of Winnipeg. I would like to pick a current issue that I could link to the course.
I'm off to sleep for the day !
Mathieu

I recently stopped using my palm pilot because I consider it insecure and that means that I don't need to use my palm pilot application anymore.
Unfortunately, I still need a calendar and one of the most complete calendar apps for linux at the moment is evolution.
Luckily, jpilot had an ical export for it's calendar, but unfortunately, evolution did not recognise events that had no time. Given the fact that the ical format is completely open and tranparent, all I had to do was hack the ical file with a script that I put together in a few minutes: -- #!/usr/bin/ruby
#i need to hack this ical file if i'm to use evolution
duplicates = open("ical.ics")
newical = ""
duplicates.each do|file|
#this first statement finds the lines that we want to replace
#i want to add everyline to the new icalfile unless it is a line that we want to replace
file.gsub(/DTSTART;/,"")
replace = $&
if replace

#when we have a this situation, we need to replace
#rip the date out of the line
file.gsub(/DATE:.*$/,"")
date = $&
newdate = ""
if date
date.gsub!(/DATE:/,"")
#i now have the date ripped out
#now i need to add a default time for these events, perhaps 7 am everyday ?
newdate = date + "T070000"

end
#formulate what i want to replace
newical= newical + "DTSTART:#{newdate}\n"
newical= newical + "DTEND:#{newdate}\n"
else
newical=newical + file



end

=begin
change this form:
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20061028
END:VEVENT
to
this form
DTSTART:20050214T235500
DTEND:20050214T235500
END:VEVENT


this time is 1155 pm to 1155pm

=end

#need to add the new line or lines to newical
#puts newical

end

puts newical