Todo-list management hack

I’m warming milk, so this will be a short one…

I get most of my “todo” stuff from clients via email. So I created a special email account todo@… and just forward all such mals to that account.

This has few advantages:

1. Email is still the main way I communicate with my clients. So this hack make sense here.
2. All emails in todo@ account are stored in chronological order, so the ones on the top should be done first
3. When I open one todo@ email, it’s marked as read, so I better get it done

It works for me.

Oops, the milk’s hot…

Importing Outlook.nk2 files into Zimbra

I’ve just spent 7 hours  trying to import Outlook .nk2 files into Zimbra contacts. It took me great deal of nerves and some unix hackery to get it done. Looking back, it’s seems so simple…

Here’s how I did it:

I used free program called NK2 to get .csv from .nk2.

• I’ve made two Zimbra accounts and send one test email from one account to another. This way I had one person in my contact list
• Next I exported this Zimbra contact list (of just one person) into a .csv file (this got me proper .csv structure I knew Zimbra would eat back up)
• I used NK2 proggy to convert all my Outlook.NK2 files into .csv

Now I had one .csv file from Zimbra and few from Outlook.NK2 files.

All I did was match structure of Outlook’s .csv files with Zimbra one. I wrote small ruby script to do this for me, but you can easily use shell or maybe even Windows batch scripting to do this mundane task for you.

The proper Zimbra .csv file format for importing contacts is this:

“email”,”firstName”,”fullName”,”lastName”,”middleName”

This must be on the first line of your new .csv file (the one you will feed Zimbra with). Below this line is data, structured to match first line description.

I’ve imported 4.500 contacts from 10 different Outlook.nk2 files in about 3 minutes using Zimbra Desktop client.

While I was thinking about how to solve this problem (good 7 hours) my friend was importing .pst files into one Zimbra (open source version) server from 14 different Windows computers – simultaniously.

From what I just saw tonight, I must say kudos to Zimbra! In the last 10 hours it has proved itself as a rock solid platform to host emails on.

And the best part – it just works! Keep pushing, Zimbra team!

I hope I saved you some time with this post. It’s 4.30 am here, I’m off.

Floppy hack: RAID5 with 1.44″ floppies

Image via Wikipedia

Years ago, out of sheer boredom, we attached 6 1.44 inch floppy drives on 3 floppy controllers (ISA) which we installed into old pentium box. It took us few reboots to configure all three floppy controllers properly (mainly setting the jumpers right to avoid interrupt clashing) and we were ready to go.

With 6 floppies in the floppy drives we configured software RAID5 (maybe we did RAID1, I don’t remember) and put CVS on it. Sure, floppy lights were flashing as we issued commits. I can’t describe the sounds and sights of drooling and cheering we did as beer cans were being opened.

I don’t remember all technical details (beer might be to blame) but the lights were blinking and we actually used that CVS for few days. Also I don’t know what happened with that box, but I’ll always remember that moment when lights began to flash. It was one of those moments I’ll always remember – few guys hacked the floppy RAID.