[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: Micro$oft is killing small town budgets- no mention of an alternative?

[herrold]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, <elided> wrote:

> You gave me quite a number of ideas to use with my local government...Thanks!

grin .. I am an natural born troublemaker

> BTW- you mentioned the 'calendar' program...I'd be interested in your
> 'hints'.  :-)

Hmmm, a couple people have asked.  I will respond generally.  I do
not think any of the Linux distributions still carry it.  The man
page notes: "A calendar command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX" so
that it is an ancient and honorable tool ... .

It is a macro processor, which understands weekdays and a bit of
calendar math, and sends 'soon' events - one time or recurring, to
std out, based on a collection of 'event' files.  Sources, and a RPM
prebuilt at:

  ftp://ftp.owlriver.com:/pub/ORC/calendar/

The MAN page is visible off the link at:

  http://www.owlriver.com/projects/calendar/index.html

My ~/calendar (which is the master file, which includes sub-event
type calendars) includes:

*
======================================================
*               Family
#include "/home/herrold/calendar.fam"
*
======================================================
*               Friends
#include "/home/herrold/calendar.birthdays"

which includes, eg, ...

#
#       calendar.fam
#
#       RPH personal events
#
01/04   JCH bday 01/11/1983 - 1 week
01/11   JCH bday 01/11/1983

along with 'stuff' I wish to be reminded of

#	monthly meeting
*/21            COLUG.org
# 	make sure my Bugzilla are being handled
*/31            RFE Bugzilla 23998 - perl/Tk

-----------------

and a cron process:

30 7 * * *   (cd /home/herrold ; /usr/bin/calendar ) | /bin/mail -s \
	 " <pokey> `uname -n` calendar" herrold

-----------------

At 7:30 daily, it sends me an email of items to 'remember' -- I
don't forget anniversaries and birthdays -- and even send myself a
week's advance notice, so I get a card|present|sack of coal as
appropiate ...

Plain old flat Unix style text files -- trivial to edit;  exceeding
lightweight

>From the SPEC file description:

Summary     : appointment calendar
Description :
This is the calendar reminder utility from the NetBSD distribution.  It
can be used in two different ways. When a non-root user runs  calendar
without any arguments, it examines the user's calendar file, (the
location is specified by the CALENDAR_DIR environment variable), and
displays the user's appointments for that particular day. <snip>

-- Russ