Month: August 2009

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TaskFreak hacking: changing first day of week to Monday

I have two personal TaskFreak installations now: one at work and a personal one for everything else.

Usually I run all my applications in English but the personal TaskFreak is in Swedish so the first thing I changed was a couple of things I didn’t agree with in the Swedish translation.

Then there was the issue with the calendar having Sunday as the first day of the week. For me, and probably 99.99% of all Swedes, it’s like wearing your trousers the wrong way round. Our weeks start on Mondays.

Assuming all users of the TaskFreak installation agree on this, it is very easy to fix:

  1. Open taskfreak/jscalendar/calendar-setup.php in your favorite text editor
  2. Find the line 
    param_default("firstDay",0);
  3. Change 0 to 1
  4. Reload your TaskFreak web page

I hope to write a separate blog post about my coolest TaskFreak hack: a script that receives e-mails and creates a corresponding task in TaskFreak.

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Convert mailman translation to UTF-8

Why is the Swedish translation in ISO8859-1? Sooooo 20th century! 🙂

Templates

cd /usr/share/mailman/sv
for f in *; do
  mv $f $f.old; iconv -f iso8859-1 -t utf-8 $f.old > $f
done
rm *.old

Translations

cd /var/lib/mailman/messages/sv/LC_MESSAGES
mv mailman.po mailman.po.original
iconv -f iso8859-1 -t utf-8 mailman.po.original > mailman.po
msgfmt mailman.po -o mailman.mo

/etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py

DEFAULT_CHARSET = 'utf-8'

def _(s):
  return s
add_language('sv',    _('Swedish'),       'utf-8')
del _

Update On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS it is also a good idea to apply the patch for Logrotate is noisy with: Re-opening all log files. (It’s a issue with the mailman 2.1.9-9 package, which is the latest one released for Hardy.)

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Hire me for my mind!

Ward Cunningham tweeted a link to an ad for an Agile Ruby Developer at AboutUs, Inc. Out of curiosity I took a look and it sounds like a fantastic opportunity for someone!

What I liked most about the job ad was the last part:

We’re hiring you for your mind. Please showcase it by answering some of the following questions in your cover letter:

  • What is a recent programming insight you discovered and what was intriguing about it?
  • Why do you want to work with us? (be specific!)
  • What Open Source communities/projects are you a part of and why do you like them?
  • Tell us about a time you brought initiative to your team and made a positive change.
  • What modern programmer do you admire and why?
  • How do you learn and keep up with the field of computing?

These questions really appeal to me!