I recently decided it was about time to replace my old phone with some new and shiny gizmo. The choice fell on the HTC Desire. It is a very slick device with capabilities and a level of freedom that far exceeds other similar devices I have considered.
I set out to have the contacts from my old phone transferred to the new one and placed in my Google Contacts account so I would have access to them from other devices and on my desktop computers.
In the new phone I had configured my Google account and things seemed to work. Calendar synced along with a few test-contacts I had created online. I then started the work on getting the old contacts imported.
That part was also fairly easy. Activated Bluetooth on both devices and hit the send button. Contacts appeared in the Desire and all seemed well. At least until I discovered that the new contacts were not synchronized to Google.
After some poking around in the menus I discovered that you get to choose where to store a contact when creating one manually. The options were “Phone”, “SIM” and “Google Applications”. When choosing the latter, contacts appeared in the online contacts application.
I checked the imported contacts and found that all the ones I looked at were marked with “Phone”. So, how do you get them moved into the Google account? The interface provided no apparent simple way of doing what I wanted. Going through each and every one and changing where it was stored was simply out of the question.
My solution? Go into the contacts view and choose the “Import / Export” option. There I chose to export to the memorycard. I then deleted all contacts. Again into the “Import / Export” menu, but that time around I chose to import from memorycard. The program asked me where I wanted to save the contacts and I picked “Google Applications”.
When it was done importing the contacts were magically synchronized to my online Google account. Mission accomplished.
Also, this post was written on my new Desire. It does actually work very well. Though a nice old keyboard with solid tactile feedback beats a touchscreen hands down any day. That being said, HTC have done a great job with this phone.
Have you ever been annoyed at the fact that there has been no straightforward and easy way of having a two-way synchronization between Kontact and the perhaps biggest online calendaring-service Google Calendar? I certainly have. The good news is that the wait is now over. Kontact now talks to Google Calendar.
Historically you would have to go through the tedious steps of setting up GCalDaemon to read / write to a local iCal-file and have Kontact read / write to that again. I am not going to go into detail on the issues with the above approach. What I feel that I must say is even though it was cumbersome, error prone and generally not how I like things; it did work. Most of the time.
What we have now is a brand new KDE ( 4.3.2 here on my desktop ) which sport some pretty decent advances. One of these is Akonadi. Akonadi seeks to facilitate easy administration and utilization of various data sources for personal information, such as mail, contacts, calendaring, etc.
To get Google Calendar working in KDE you now need to install the “googledata” Akonadi resource. In Debian this is done by issuing the following command:
sudo aptitude install akonadi-kde-resource-googledata
After that you open Kontact and do the following:
- Click [Calendar] in the sidebar (usually in the left hand side of the window)
- In the resources view (field in bottom left corner) right-click and select “Add new resource”
- Choose ‘Akonadi resource’ in the dialog that pops up
- A new dialog will pop up. Here you should click “Edit calendar resources” (translations may vary)
- Click ‘Add’ in the new dialog. Choose ‘Akonadi Google Calendar Resource’
- Enter username and password when prompted
- Press the ‘Close’-button
- A new resource with a name similar to ‘akonadi_gcal_resource_X’ should now be visible
- Select it and press ‘Synchronize folder’ to do an initial sync
- Press the ‘Ok’-button to return to your calendar view
The items you have in your Google Calendar should now be present in Kontact.
I hope someone will find this helpful.
At this point my twitter-account and my blog should be nicely tied together using a couple of very nifty plugins. I chose to use separate plugins for displaying latest tweets in the WordPress sidebar and posting on Twitter when I post something new here on the blog. I guess this will be a test of wether or not it is really working.
Check out the WordPress plugin directory for a lot of pretty decent Twitter-plugins. The two I landed on (after some trial and error) was the following:
Anyone else have something interesting to share about Twitter-plugins for WordPress?
So for a while I’ve been meaning to write a little something about people or things I have taken a liking to or been satisfied with from a consumer perspective. Up today is Petter Haukeland a naprapat and personal trainer at SATS Nesttun.
I contacted Petter because I wanted to gain weight. It may seem silly to a lot of you, but I do fit the stereotypical geek when it comes to being a bit on the scrawny side. So my goal was to increase mass, but do that in such a way that I do not get any injuries in muscles or joints and also do it in a manner where we focus on keeping the workout healthy.
Petter has a high level of attention to detail when it comes to how exercises are performed and perceives and corrects where it is needed. His knowledge about dietary things have also been very valuable. He has helped me to find the things to eat that will benefit me and my health the most when working out.
So, if you need to loose weight, gain weight, get rid of injuries or just need some advice on health; do contact him. It is well worth the expense. Thumbs up Petter!
The last couple of years I’ve been using Mantis for issue-tracking and have been really pleased with it. It’s simple, does what it’s supposed to do and is simple enough that my customers can be given access and gain some feeling with what’s happening in the projects I’m running for them.
I have also been using Subversion for version control. I’m happy with that as well (was a nice step up from CVS). A very non-steep learning curve makes it a very nice tool even for people who have never user VC systems before. And yes, some of you will probably comment about how I should be using Git instead. To you I have this to say; git have it’s uses and is well suited for some things. For me and the way my business is structured though, Subversion is a better tool. But, that was not what this post was supposed to be about.
Ever since I started using Mantis I wanted to integrate it with Subversion so that when I write “Fixed issue #1234. A good description of whatever bug I fixed / feature I implemented.” then the corresponding issue in Mantis will be marked as ‘fixed’ automatically. I did that first in the 1.1.x-series of Mantis-releases and it worked well. By that I mean that once you had hacked on Mantis enough it would actually do what you wanted and all was good.
With the release of 1.2 the team behind Mantis gave us a plugin-system and we saw the emergence of a multitude of plugins for email-handling, extending various forms in Mantis, providing links to wiki-engines and integration with VC systems. In the latter category you find the Mantis Source Integration Plugin by John Reese. It’s a nice piece of work that makes it a LOT easier to get a link between Mantis and various VC systems.
If you want to get this set up then you should have a look at this post by Chris Dornfeld in addition to this post by John Reese. Just be mindful that the screenshots there are somewhat outdate. The plugin-page and configration looks a little different today, but it’s nothing you won’t figure out if you just use your head a little.
So, thanks to Chris and John for this.
To those of you who keep visiting and commenting on my posts; thank you. I really appreciate the feedback. I figure it’s about time I do my part now, and that is responding to what you’ve told me.
I have gotten a lot of feedback on my post about getting the MySQL-driver built for Qt on Windows (using MinGW). For some reason people are having difficulties getting the procedure I used to work, even though it has worked for me on several occasions.
This post is just to say that I’m about to start reworking the original article and see what it is I do (and have neglected to write down) that makes it work for me and not some people.
On a similar note; There will probably be a great deal more technical posts here now that things have calmed down a bit in my private life and I have time to actually sit down and write here.
Stay tuned.
This is meant to be a quick howto / tutorial on how to setup a build-enviroment for C++ / Qt with Qt Creator ( Trolltech / Nokias new Qt IDE) where you use Mingw to compile your applications and have a MySQL-plugin available.
Continue reading Qt 4.5 and MySQL-plugin with Mingw on Windows XP
This is just a tip for all of you who, like myself, are tired of waiting through a full Qt build (sources, examples, demos, +all the bells and whistles).
After having run ./configure (Linux / *NIX) or configure.exe (Windows) if you just want to build the qt-libraries, plugins etc then do a make with ’sub-src’ as an argument to the mak-command.
Examples:
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| mingw32-make sub-src
nmake sub-src
make sub-src |
This is not explained in the qt-docs as far as I’ve seen, but that does not mean it’s not there. If any of you guys / gals find it; let me know, so I can link to it.
Hope this is useful for someone.
Can programming be compared to religion? Do we have a situation where you can say “I’m a believer in Haskell”? Apparently Rodrigo Braz Monteiro (one of two main programmers on Aegisub) thinks so. After reading his “If programming languages were religions”-post I have to say I agree. It’s a laugh, so if you are a programmer in need of some entertainment his post is a great place to start.
I’ll finish with a small snippet:
APL would be Scientology – There are many people who claim to follow it, but you’ve always suspected that it’s a huge and elaborate prank that got out of control.
Today I made another interesting discovery in Fedora 10. My (somewhat) vanilla install did not present me with any other screensavers than the one called ‘Blank screen’ or whatever. A case of packages for screensavers not being installed? I thought so and went and made sure that the following packages got registered in the system:
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| xscreensaver
xscreensaver-base
xscreensaver-extras
xscreensaver-gl-base
xscreensaver-gl-extras
rss-glx
rss-glx-kde
rss-glx-xscreensaver |
Still no luck. Perhaps you have to log out and in again? Tried that, no luck. Some digging around the net revealed that you have to do a simple
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| yum install kdeartwork-extras |
to get the screensavers. Go figure.
I hope this will help other people in need of something to enjoy while code is compiling (or the spouse is having another fit).
