da.mned

From a conversation on #staffslug

We start of with a recipe for fantastic cake :

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/12983/catherine-marshalls-parsnip-and-maple-syrup-cake

We then see how given this recipe or source different distros would approach cooking it based on past experiences. Please note this is humour and don’t start getting pedantic

Ubuntu

Cooking is reasonably successful, not very fast but was reasonably friendly, used brand name ingredients, the icing sugar came out a bit odd but tasted alright so you can’t be arsed to fix it.

Debian

Getting the ingredients together took a tad longer, couln’t use the recipe as provided as the BBC trademark did not fit with the rules, consequently cake is now called IcedParsnip Cake but apart from that the recipe went well, shame some of the ingredients were a little stale. Also mixed spice cannot be used as it is a closed ingredient provided by a third party company that refuses to reveal the exact recipe.

RedHat/CentOS

Cake was baked with tried and tested ingredients some however were a couple of years old. Cake, although of professional quality was rock hard and stable. Better for construction use than eating. RedHat cake comes with support tag, CentOS version identical but now called CommunityEnterpriseCake.

Fedora

Uses the freshest ingredients but halfway through the baking stabs you in the face with a circular dependency on pecans.rpm.

Gentoo

All ingredients have to be grown from scratch (yes you could use packages but then you could not do compiler fu), recipe is eventually very quick but by the time you have grown everything and baked the cake everyone else has eaten theirs (also then you find out it has raisins in it as you messed up a USE flag when you were fiddling with stuff waiting for your pecan tree).

On ubuntu :

sudo apt-get install libk3b2-extracodecs

Many thanks to http://linuxappfinder.com/blog/howto_enable_mp3_support_for_k3b

I love the reports we get out of SugarCRM now but ZuckerReports sometimes does things that throw me off for a while and then make me kick myself when I understand them later. Today’s case in point I needed to add someone to an existing scheduled report. Zucker (at the moment) does not have any facility for this, you just delete the old one and set up a new one, but I was not having any of this and dived into the database.

Now in the interface and the database the scheduled reports settings are “encoded” and it would appear that adding an e-mail address should have been straight forward. An example :

a:7:{s:10:”FooCoUsers”;s:8:”j.smiths”;s:6:”format”;s:3:”PDF”;s:15:”parent_category”;s:0:”";s:13:”parent_module”;s:0:”";s:9:”parent_id”;s:0:”";s:10:”send_email”;s:38:”d.badgers@fooco.com,j.smiths@fooco.com”;s:6:”record”;s:36:”44989f47-f46e-f334-c287-4c45cb79ff98″;}

Pretty obvious where the email addresses are and they simply appear to be comma separated. So all you do is add the email address in after the last one prefaced with a comma? Not quite…

If you do this then the report will fail silently and will not run and you will be digging around trying to find out what happened!

The Reason aka why you are here

Breaking down the report setting encoding is simple (not sure what the a7 bit is) but then you have inside the curly braces a number of data values each separated by a semi colon ( ; ) the values are in “quote marks” and then they are prefaced by an s:$: value. This value is the a number of characters inside the data quotes for that entry eg s:6:”record” because the word record is 6 letters long. In the case of the e-mail address list it is everything (including the commas) between the quote marks. If you don’t change the s:$: value for a record and change the value (unless the new data is exactly the same length) it will fail silently!

Anyway I hope this helps someone as I was fiddling with this for ages

I have put all the Scottish canoe trip up over on http://crocodil.es blog / site Photos and GPS stuff still to be uploaded as well as a write up of the trip!

Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have two defaults for reminders on meeting requests, one is for appointments and one for all day events. The option in Tools -> Options is for appointments/meetings only and the defaults for all day events is hardcoded to 18 hours and can’t be changed. Now depending on how you create the appointment and which view you are in will depend on which default you get.

If you are in month view and click on a date it will use the all day default (hardcoded to 18 hours) even if it is not an all day event! If you click the new button or are in week or day view it will use the meeting/appointment default (whatever you set in the options).

Madness!