Geoffrey Meredith

Google Labs has opened up a beta of their transit trip planning tool at http://google.com/transit. It generates very detailed directions about how to get from one point to another using public transit. It provides transit travel time, walking times and distances as well as a comparing with the cost and travel time of driving. A tool like this could really help people to make a well informed decision about whether to drive or take public transit.

Too bad it currently only works for Portland, Oregon.

I am starting to warm up to Python after my initial issue with indention controlling the blocking of code. My general sense is that it is an elegant, modern mixture of Basic and Perl. I'm sure that experienced Python programmers would cringe at that comparison but that is what initially came to mind.

My next "shock" was in comparison expressions. For instance the expression a < b == c tests whether a is less than b and also that b equals c. I would have coded that a < b and b == c. Another cool comparison is 'ABC' < 'C' < 'Pascal' < 'Python' where each side of each less-than symbol must be true for the whole expression to be true.

I've taken the plunge and started to learn Python. My target is web-based applications so I needed to have this working under Apache 2.0/SuSE 9.3 on my development computer.

I originally had been developing using the XAMPP platform. That was extremely easy to setup on my SuSE 9.3 OS and worked well. Unfortunately XAMPP does not support Python out of the box. I'm sure that I could add it but I just wanted to get going on it. So I removed XAMPP and started install Apache 2.0, MySQL 4.1, PHP 4.3, phpMyAdmin 2.6, etc.

I've done this many times on Debian, Fedora and RedHat systems but this was the first time with SuSE. I very quickly found that the default setup seemed to be locked down pretty well. Unfortunately it took me quite some time searching though the various unfamiliar Apache configuration files to find out where best to adjust the security so that I could run the already installed PHP application on my system.

I finally created my first bit of Python code and was left scratching my head about the syntax error that I was getting. At this point I've done almost no looking at Python syntax so it never dawned on me that indenting of text was important. In my cut & paste from a web page I had not properly indented the code and that was a syntax error. I haven't ran into this kind of problem since I was writing code in Fortran IV that depended on punch card spacing.

I've now gotten Python Server Pages (PSP) working running with my first PSP application and I'm off to the races!

Now it's time to start actually learning Python. I love learning a new language!

In my quest to do all of my tasks under SUSE Linux, getting all of my 15 years of email history moved to Thunderbird from Outlook turned out to be one of the trickiest. At first I tried to install Thunderbird and Outlook 2002 on the same XP machine and then just having Thunderbird import my email. No luck. Thunderbird (or something) would crash about half way through. I tried this many times without luck. I did some internet searches on the problem but did not find a lot to help. Eventually my wife found this story that addressed my issues very well. What seems to work for most people is to import the email into Outlook Express first and then into Thunderbird. This worked well without a crash. This seems to have preserved both my attachments as well as the formatting in any HTML emails.

So I imported my emails in two passes. Once for my recent email and once more for my old archive.pst file. I had to have outlook switch to that old file as it's main .pst file for this part to work.

I also used Dawn to convert my Outlook Contacts folder into an Outlook Express address book. I also then imported this into Thunderbird.

Once I had all my data in Thunderbird under XP I then had to transfer parts of the directory structure from XP to SUSE. This was accomplished by moving the following file from the XP machine to the SUSE machine:

For the address book:
FROM: C:/Documents and Settings/xpuser/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/RANDOM1.default/abook.mab
TO: /home/suseuser/.thunderbird/RANDOM2.default/

For email message:
FROM: C:/Documents and Settings/xpuser/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/RANDOM1.default/Mail/Local Folders/
The files "Outlook Express Mail.msf", "Outlook Express Mail" and the directory "Outlook Express Mail.sbd" are moved to
TO: /home/suseuser/.thunderbird/RANDOM2.default/Mail/Local Folders

I used xpuser to represent the login in account under Windows XP and suseuser as the login account under SUSE. RANDOM1 and RANDOM2 are random strings that Thunderbird associates with the profile directory and is unique for each installation.

Once all of the new email messages are accessible in Thunderbird under SUSE, it is just a matter of cleaning up any directory structure.

When I finished installing SUSE on my computer I found it strange that the Windows Key did not seem to do anything. Ideally I thought that it should pop up the K menu (the main application menu) much in the way that Windows does. Failing that, I would have expected it to do something useful. It turns out that you have to dig into the configuration and explicitly enable this key so that it can be used throughout KDE. I found this out from this article about enabling the Windows Key.

I guess that this is part of the anti-Microsoft sentiment that is behind most of Linux and GNU software but it just seem silly to leave a valid and well placed key unused. For me it just seem practical to enable this key. I guess this is what you get when you look at an operating system in a fanatical way.