Arthur's Mutterings

Deciding on anything that involves a large group of people is always fraught with the dangers of disagreement, and this is one of those particular problems, no matter what solution is suggested there will always be someone that has a problem with it, so the best we can hope for is to minimise the effects.

One suggested issue with the current rota system is that the dates of the meeting are hard to predict for anyone that doesnt have a calendar and/or cant check the list on the site. This being an actual problem for our group is i feel, pure conjecture, but its a laudable aim so lets run with it.

The initial, and obvious answer to making dates easy to remeber is to pick a fixed day of the week, eg First Thursday of the Month. Alas, although this is easy to remeber, it has the very obvious problem of excluding those that already have commitments on that day of the week, and seeing as we have already tried this method with the carmarthen meetings, we have first hand evidence that any day chosen, that may start out as good, will in time inevitably become a problem for people. Since our main goal is to increase the number of regular attendies then this is obviously an undesirable effect.

Now, seeing as this is not the only possible solution to 'easy to remember date', it is just the most obvious one, we can simply move on and try a different suggestion. Unfortunately certain individuals seem unable to let go of this.

But i digress, lets move on to other solutions.

One suggestion was to pick a fixed week and alternate days within it, say 'Second week of the month, alternating Tue and Thu', however this requires prior knowledge of which day was used last time and thus breaks another stated aim, that of being able to determine the day by looking at just that month on a calendar.

My solution to this is to use a predictable rotation, eg '2nd Tuesday or Thursday of the month, whichever comes first' this satisfies the goals of no prior knowledge, and of shifting days, but has been decried as too complicated [shrug].

a third suggestion, which seems to be liked by many is a fixed Date of the Month, such as '23rd of the Month' but there needs to be an auxiliary rule to this to avoid weekends e.g. 'but if it falls on Fri/Sat/Sun move forward to the following Monday' so whilst the basic rule is quite simple, it does appear to come with a lot of added complexity to remember.

Further suggested solutions welcome

I have been looking at the idea of shared calendars, and seeing that many programs (like evolution) support iCal format, i figured it would be pretty easy to find a solution.

So i thought i should be able to keep my calendars on a central server, edit them on the server via some scripts, and also via a local copy of evolution, firefox-calendar, outlook, whatever.

Now just storing the data on a central server and retrieving it seems fairly easy, its just webdav, so thats a quick apache config hack.

There are seemingly boundless quantities of web based calendar applications, sure, many with some kind of import-export ical utility.

But when you look really hard, it seems that you cant combine all of those things. The root cause seems to be that the ical format perhaps just isnt really upto it, that you have to transfer whole calendars around, so that if theres a chance of two people editing the same one then a hideous merging problem is created, so none of the tools seem to allow you to both download AND upload the same calendar automatically.

I think i shall just have to admit defeat on the subject, and go for one of the compromises, of view and edit calendar via the web interface, and have a download only view of it via ical to evolution. shame.

Used the winter solstice as an excuse to practice the fine art of the roast dinner and produced a table groaning under the weight of a Yule dinner. As usual i cooked far too much, so i really must find some additional friends to invite along to such things.

Went to finish that last minute crimble shopping for family, shops are hectic as usual, but it all feels kind of wrong somehow, having had the blow-out dinner and present exchanges, and the number of sales that have started already, it seems like this should be the lull between xmas and new year.

Ah well, means theres more time for me to knuckle down to shifting all the mail and services off my old server to the nice new one, before the old one gets turned off in the new year.

An interesting lesson learnt, by observation rather than direct experience, dont write anything in a public blog which you would be embarassed to see repeated infront of people you know.

Link: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00021.html

I feel vindicated in my belief that Gnome has been dumbed down for far too long now, as Linus has just come out with the same sentiment.

I have always liked the gnome desktop more than the kde one, but increasingly it has been harder to find and enable the options that make it behave the way i like, with many of them being removed totally if not just hidden in gconf.

I can understand a need to make the desktop defaults nice and easy for the first time user, but that doesnt justify taking away the options and freedom of choice to have other styles of behaviour, without them you may as well be using Windows.