I have used Novell Evolution for a few years now and it is an excellent PIM (Personal Information Manager). Other than a bone head move a few weeks ago, which killed all my email and contacts, I have not had any problems.
It had nothing to do with Evolution and I was able to restore from a backup. It was just frustrating more than anything. I guess that is a good argument for backing data up… ;)
Today however I loaded Ubuntu on a spare drive and when restoring .evolution one address book was gone. I thought that was very strange since /$HOME/.evolution/addressbook/local/ contained a folder other than system and it had addressbook.db and addressbook.db.summary. I tried creating the address book in Evolution and then manually copying the .db and .db.summary files into it, but no luck.
I did a little googling and came across a few posts that commented about shutting down the Evolution database server and restarting. This seemed like a logical thing to do, however I would have thought a reboot would have done the same but none the less I was game.
Find the PID of the server. Kill it and restart Evolution.
$ ps -ef | grep Evolution_DataServer
nobody 9657 1 0 20:02 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/evolution
/evolution-data-server-1.2
--oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_DataServer_InterfaceCheck
--oaf-ior-fd=50
$ kill -9 9657
Initially that did not do the trick so I decided to create the address book empty and then move addressbook.db and addressbook.db.summary into the new folder. After adding the address book I had to kill the DataServer again to get new folder to appear in .evolution/addressbook/local. Once I moved the new files to the new folder and restarted Evolution, both address books were there.
Well today I finally had the appointment I’d been dreading for years, literally. I am finally in the position to make right what I should have done 10 years ago. But at the moment I can’t see why. Good things do come to those who wait and in about 24 months it will be good but now …. it sucks !!!
Yes I visited the orthadontist to get some hardware added, what has been a little “out of place” is on it’s way to respecability. At least that is until they start to wander around or fall out, which ever comes first. It started the first week of the month with an extraction from the dentist. Extraction, that is a good word to use. I’ve never had a tooth taken out before, of course the wisdom teeth were pulled but I was not awake for those. So seeing a large pointed chissel type object in the hands of my dentist was a first I’ll say. And in the end when it finally came out it was a first for the dentist, according to them.
They had never seen a tooth with roots so long, I’m not sure if that was good or bad but at an inch long I did ponder how it fit in my lid. Not to mention if all the others in there the same.
Next came the spacers last week. At the time I didn’t really know what they were for just thought they were trying to put some space between my teeth so they’d have some room to move.
Yes I should have asked questions but it was not something that seemed out of the ordinary.
So the spacers were two on each side top and bottom all at the back.
Oh and the extraction was on the top to make room for the movement that would be needed at the front. See that’s where things are a little smooshed.
They were in for a week and today was the “install”.
As for the spacers I’ve learned they were for bands that go around the back teeth and hold the anchors for the wire. Two hours later I was done and on my way with a packet full of info on foods you can’t/shouldn’t eat, wax, perscription toothpaste and a tiny brush for access between the “hardware”. Now I have a mouth full of “extra things” and needless to say it is an expierence. The first day is not even up yet.
I will probably be buying some stock in pain relievers at this rate. It wasn’t that bad when four were moving with the spacers but now there are a lot more. But the bigger challenge will be keeping from getting banged up while playing hockey. Knock on wood after four years of adult league and no cage I’ve been lucky but now I’ll have to pay extra attention.
But that’s ok in 24 months it should all be worth it … at least that is what I keep telling myself…. ;)
Open source came the the rescue again this weekend when I needed to reformat a hard drive. I use to keep handy a Windows boot floppy to get the job done but I have not used a diskett in years. Not to metion of the three machines I currently have none of them have a floppy. Now of course I could have burned a CD or used a Windows rescue CD but none of those was available.
Enter Knoppix.
A few months back I burned a copy of Knoppix 3.6 just in case I ran into a scenario of needing a quick format. This weekend it did the trick. There are certainly other tools available to format a hard drive but QParted was the quickest access.
A spare 20GB laptop drive that was Fedora Core 2 needed to load XP Home. The reason for using Knoppix is the XP install CD was not getting anywhere with no NTSF partition. A quick boot to Knoppix and a couple clicks later, where done.
Being a jack of all trades and a master of none I’m always looking for some help here or there when it comes to getting the job done. Now if I was a web developer I could write about web pages from a completely different angle, but I’m not. Recently I found a product called Bluefish that is very cool.
For what I’ve needed to do over the last few years didn’t need much imagination. I’d use the stock templates that came with the product and because of the implementation I didn’t really need to alter the html… and if I did I’m not a web developer so even if I wanted to there was only so much I could do. But of course the more you know the more you want to know so digging into html is something I’ve been toying with.
For the most part I’ve been using gedit or the vi editor but it always seems like I’d get lost matching up a table or column. That’s when I came across Bluefish. I have not had a chance to work with it very much lately but I can say I like what I see so far. The reviews from the site are from a few years back but the Sourceforge Project site is active. Looks like it could be the ticket for now.
I’ll post more after I get a chance to dig in.
Update April 29, 2005
Well I’m not sure how deep I’ll get into Bluefish I’m just not at that knowledge level yet. It has been a great asset though. See the Bluefish Features List for more details.
