I'm exploring the use of RT at WB. Here are some quick notes on installation:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/rt3 \
                  --with-apachectl=/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl

make testdep

sudo make install

Set up etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm...

See the RT wiki for more details.

Categories: sysadmin
Tags: bug tracking, rt
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I just discovered the open-source SVG editor, Inkscape.

And it's not a moment too soon. I've been using Illustrator to edit some extremely complicated SVG graphs. Except that when ever I "save-as" from Illustrator, it can no longer open the resulting file! I'm still using Illustrator 10 which undoubtedly is part of the problem. Forced obsolescence.

Categories: software
Tags: open-source, software, SVG
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In my continuing migration to Google-everything, I wanted to migrate my Mac OS X address book to Google Mail. Importing contacts into Google Mail requires that the entries be in CSV; the OS X.4 Address Book only exports in vCard (.vcf) format.

I didn't want to spend a bunch of time learning the vCard format or writing a little one-off parser. Fortunately, I came across the very handy Text::vCard and Text::vCard::Addressbook modules.

Here's a simple Perl script for handling this conversion. Currently, it imports the following information (if present in your vCard entries):

Last Name
First Name
Middle Name
Birthday
Email
Home address
Work address
Work phone
Home phone
Cell phone

Usage:

1. Select all your contacts from Mac OS Address Book and export them.
   
2. Run the perl script fetched from above (you will need Text::vCard::Addressbook installed): parse_vcard.pl /path/to/vCard_file.vcf > addresses_for_google.csv
   
3. Import the addresses_for_google.csv into your GMail account
   

Categories: Mac OS
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