luminousmonkey.org

GVim on OpenSolaris 200805

Tuesday 24 June 2008, 07:41 WST —

If, like me, you like the development environment of a unix machine, and, like me, decided on playing with OpenSolaris.  Then, maybe, like me, you found it annoying that Sun decided on having the SUNWvim package, but, for some reason that only the clever engineers at Sun know, they haven’t compiled in gui support.

Solaris uses Gnome by default, so, why?! Even if they could offer a SUNWgvim package, that would be cool.  Anyway, I digress.  If you’re a fan of using gvim for development, you may have tried compiling it on your machine and run into difficulty.  As in the configure script doesn’t seem to detect gnome, or the gtk libraries.

Hopefully, this may help you out.  You need to make sure you’ve got the development headers, etc installed.  Now I haven’t actually figured out what headers I needed, because I kept adding them until it worked.

Anyway, you can always try the following:

• SUNWgnome-libs (Should be in by default I believe)
• SUNWgnome-common-devel
• SUNWxwinc
• SUNWxorg-headers

Then it’s just a matter of:

./configure --enable-gnome-check

When doing the configure, it should mention that it found GTK, and you should be good to go. If it doesn’t work, then you may have to install more packages that I forgot to mention.  Sorry!

1113 Comments »http://luminousmonkey.org/?p=111GVim+on+OpenSolaris+2008052008-06-23+23%3A41%3A37Mike

MYOB ODBC

Thursday 19 June 2008, 14:00 WST —

I have a problem at work. Basically, I have to do the accounts, this means I have to type out the sales orders from our web-based/PHP/MySQL application (that I wrote) into MYOB. This chews up my time, what would be cool was if this could happen automatically, or at least as easy as possible for me.

Enter the MYOB ODBC driver. This basically lets you automate importing and exporting into MYOB, you can get MYOB read access for your company file for about $249AUD. However, write access requires that you sign up for the MYOB Developer Program, this costs about $700AUD per year.

Once you’ve signed up, you get a developer pack sent out, which is basically most of the MYOB software, and access to the MYOB developer forums. Now I’ve been using Ruby/Rails for my webapp development recently, so I went googling for some information for getting MYOB working with Ruby/Rails and came across Pat Allan’s site, Freelancing Gods.

Many thanks to Pat for his post, as it’s pretty much the only decent information you can find on the net about getting Ruby/Rails going with MYOB. Since this sort of information is a bit thin on the ground, and I’ve got such a shocking memory, I thought I should blog some of this stuff.

First off, my situation. I work at a two-way radio company Direct Communications, we sell and repair all types of commercial two-way radios. For our sales, repairs and purchase orders, we used to use an Access database, we have since migrated to a webpage based system. At least, we have for the sales and purchase orders, the jobcard still runs under Access, and are accounts are handled in MYOB. The upshot is, like I said, that I have to manually enter in each and every purchase order, sale, and jobcard into MYOB.

Okay, so to get around this, I have to get the sales, etc, into MYOB without me typing the damn things in. For write access, the MYOB ODBC driver depends on the MYOB program, so you need your ruby/rails app running on Windows. So to start with I got the one-click Ruby installer for Windows. Once you’ve installed Ruby, you’ll need a few RubyGems.

More to come…

11017 Comments »http://luminousmonkey.org/?p=110MYOB+ODBC2008-06-19+06%3A00%3A19Mike