The Bonnie Babes Foundation website, email and shared calendaring has recently been developed using free and open source software. That is, each of the software tools is completely and absolutely FREE! My time on the project (around 100 hours all up) was also donated, so the only costs incurred by the Foundation were for web hosting ($15 per month at Servers Australia).  So, how did it all come together?

Email

Bonnie Babes were previously using a POP-based solution using the organisation’s primary email contact address. This meant that if five separate people on five separate computers each sent mail, no one else could see what had been sent. This was migrated to an IMAP-based solution using Thunderbird.

The old POP email was moved to the IMAP folders. The biggest hassle here was that there was around 80 times more email to migrate to IMAP than I had budgeted for during the analysis phase. Luckily, Servers Australia came to the party and gave us some breathing space with an extra half a gig (NOTE: Big thanks Jared!). There was one machine that would crash every time I tried to import the mail from Outlook into Thunderbird, so as a workaround we first imported the mail from Outlook into Outlook Express, and from Outlook Express into Thunderbird. This finally worked (just be careful if you have to do this, as it imports ALL accounts from Outlook Express).

The staff at the organisation were used to using Outlook rather than Thunderbird, however they seemed to adapt fairly quickly. The only glitches we found were that the formatting in Thunderbird is a little different to Outlook – so ‘Paste without formatting’ was used as a workaround.

Filters have been set up on one computer rather than different computers having different filters applied.

Shared calendar

One of the requirements of the organisation was to have a shared calendar so that appointments, events and to do lists could be shared among multiple staff. An Exchange server was out of budget, so I settled for Sunbird. With Sunbird, it can be set up so that a remote calendar can be used. An .ics file was set up for this purpose on the web server, however it was made available under the FTP root rather than the web server root for security reasons.

The calendar is then accessed via a standard FTP URL such as:

ftp://username:password@ftp.mydomain.org.au/path/to.ics

Website

The website has been created using WordPress, with a number of plugins. Chief among them are cForms, for building user editable contact forms and the eShop plugin for online commerce. I had originally planned to use the WP e-Commerce plugin for the Online Shop component, however this plugin seems to be full of bugs and I had no end of trouble installing it.

One very useful plugin that deserves a mention is pageMash - used for ordering pages within WordPress. I’m surprised that this functionality hasn’t been made better yet – as the developers state, it’s still a little ‘janky’. Hopefully this will get a look in for the 2.8 release of WordPress.

One of the very nifty things I learned about WordPress during this exercise is that there is an .ics calendar available of upcoming releases – very handy (and very quickly put into Sunbird!)

Of course, the website validates as XHMTL transitional and CSS 3 valid (a very big thanks to Jason King for picking up that the theme version 1.0 wasn’t compliant).

Google tools

The web presence also makes use of a number of freely-available tools by Google, including;

• Google Adwords (facilitated by Google Grants)
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster tools

I have 9000 days left to live.

Well, thereabouts anyway. How did I calculate this? By averaging the ages of death back a couple of generations on either side, factoring in underlying medical conditions, risky behaviour etc etc. It’s not a perfect model. In short, I’m 29 turning 30 in two months, and there’s good money on me kicking up my heels between 60 and 65.

Sure, there’s some things I can do that might change that outcome. But they might not either. Or I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

So the big question is what am I going to do for the next 9000 days? Thinking about this in terms of days rather than years or decades helps to put this sense of purpose into perspective. I reflected on how my hours are currently spent. There are 168 hours in a week. Of these;

• 45 hours (27%) are spent at work
• 56 hours (33%) are spent sleeping (based on 7.5 hours per night)
• 2.5 hours (1.5%)  are spent travelling to and from work
• 12 hours (7.1%) are spent doing housework or gardening
• 5 hours (3%) are spent in the gym, walking or in the pool
• 8 hours (4.8%) are spent cooking, eating or preparing food
• 5 hours (3%) are spent socialising – talking on the phone, going out etc
• 4 hours (2.4%) are spent showering, washing hair, getting dressed etc
• 2 hours (1.2%) are spent grocery shopping, clothes shopping or other shopping

The remaining time – around 28 hours (17%) is my free time – to write on my blog, do things like play with HDTV, knitting, run my web development business, do volunteer work, watch television and generally chill out. This seems like a lot, but when you average it out, it’s around 4 hours a day. Is this enough time to do what I really want to do?

No.

This means that the other time percentages need to be changed.

First of all, can I get away with a few minutes less sleep each day? Probably – although nothing too severe otherwise there’s a risk of getting run down, sick and therefore being unable to use that free time. There’s say 3 and a half hours a week back if I sleep seven and a half hours a day rather than eight. What about house work? What a useless waste of time! Get a cleaner in and I get back two hours a week. Awesome. Do I want to cut back on exercise time? Not really. It’s something I need to be doing more of rather than less.

Now, for work. I’m pretty lucky in that it only takes me about fifteen minutes each way to and from work. However the time that would otherwise be spent commuting seems to be going into some reasonably long hours. Is this something I can control. Well, frankly, yes. I reckon if I started to say ‘No’ a bit more often to taking on work that would save me at least 3, maybe 5 hours a week.

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. Already there’s at least 8 and a half hours back for me to do what I want. Average this over 30 years and whammo! 552 days back. I can live with that.

So what other changes will I be making to get the most out of the next 9000 days?

Well…

• Spend more time doing things I enjoy doing, and less time doing things I have to do (like housework)
• Spend more time with the people I like and respect, and less time with those I don’t
• Understanding that you never know what is around the corner – and that to get the most out of the time we have left.

Being a geek, it is no surprise that my monitor (an Acer X223W) is bigger than my (Teac analogue) television. It therefore made sense that rather than upgrading my TV with a set top box, to investigate what’s on the market to receive HDTV on the computer.

The weapon of choice was a Gadget Geek USB HDTV tuner, purchased from Dick Smith for under $AUD 100. Not bad. Under Windows XP, it installed quickly and easily. The unit came with a mobile antenna and Blaze HD TV software, and on the first scan for channels, it found absolutely, yep you guessed it, nothing. So, out came the coax cable, and I plugged the USB HDTV tuner into the outlet in the wall (straight from the antenna – it was previously hooked into my stereo to receive FM radio). The coax cable only fared slightly better – receiving only the digital SBS channels. Just to be absolutely sure, I repeated the process on the other two coax outlets (yep, small unit and three phone lines and three coax outlets. I <3 my house. It will be even better when it’s CAT 6 wired). At most, I could receive 10% signal strength for one other digital channel.

Not to be deterred, I booted into my other operating system (Fedora Core 9) to see whether MythTV would fare any better. MythTV was a nightmare to install – it is not for Linux newbies. After spending four hours resolving dependencies in yum, I finally got the software to install… only to find that there are no Linux drivers for the USB HDTV tuner. Bummer.

Conclusion: I need a new antenna that can pick up HDTV signals. Well, it beats socks as an Xmas pressie