Messing up your machine

Lesson 1: ccal on the Nokia N810 and under Mac OS X

The Nokia N810 Internet Talblet running Maemo, a Debian based Linux, is a wonderful small computer and would be a perfect companion for nearly everything which does not need phone capability. Lacking any sort of telephone functionality except Jabber, IRC and Skype is something I pesonally like aboute the N810. It has Wifi, Bluetooth and a GPS receiver. One thing that really sucks on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is the lack of a decent Personal Information Management software. Some efforts have been made and some are just great especially GPE ported to MAEMO by Graham Cobb and Florian Boor.

But eventually (after emulating my beloved old Palm Pilot and afterwards messing around with lots of crappy stuff that would not sync to anything but M$-Somewhat) I ended up with a good old PDF-file generated from my Apple addressbook and the finest command-line based calendar I ever came about: ccal.

It was originally written for the Amiga and ported to DOS by Alex Matulich. There is an OS/2-Version and it was ported to Unix by Chris Bagwell. Many Linux repositories also feature their version of ccal. Later on there are some screenshots under Ubuntu 10.10. Finally it was ported to the Nokia N810 and it works fine using not much space on the screen and being always at hand since I never ever go without an open xterm. Actually I am writing this in vim on my tablet. The syntax for yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily entries is quite simple. I have chosen to go with an extra file for recurring events an one for current calendar dates which I keep on my external SD-Card to easily exchange them with my mac via Bluetooth. The calendar files a represented by softlinks in my home-directory and off course I added an alias
ccal='ccal -m=17 -e -f -d=cur.cal -d=rec.cal'
to my profile. So displaying, editing and synching the calendar to my home computer comes in quite handy.

I understand that there is a DOS-Variant of ccal. It also compiles quite good under Mac OS X with gcc. I had to mess up the original source around line 555 a bit but now it works just fine. This is not an actual Mac OS X port of ccal. But it is a working binary with source. I did not document much, I did not much testing and I do not intend to do much support or guarantee for anything. There are ccal packets for most major Linux distributions. So if something smart and simple is what you are looking for and you are a friend of the command line, ccal might be just what you are looking for.

Here is the modified source with the original that will compile under OS X.4.
Here is the binary.
Here is an example calendar file.

And there is another small program named ccal. I quite like it but it is not a colour calendar but a Chinese one. It compiles fine unter OS X but it is all Chinese to me.