Creeva’s World 2.0

Gnome Con­duit is both one of the great­est util­i­ties Ubuntu and the most incom­plete pain in the butt util­i­ties.  To give a quick run down to what it does here is what the project infor­ma­tion says:

Con­duit is a syn­chro­niza­tion solu­tion for GNOME which allows the user to take their emails, files, book­marks, and any other type of per­sonal infor­ma­tion and syn­chro­nize that data with another com­puter, an online ser­vice, or even another elec­tronic device.

Con­duit man­ages the syn­chro­niza­tion and con­ver­sion of data into other for­mats. For exam­ple, con­duit allows you to;

• Syn­chro­nize your tomboy notes to a file on a remote computer
• Syn­chro­nize your emails to your mobile phone
• Syn­chro­nize your book­marks to deli­cious, gmail, or even your own webserver
• and many more…

Any com­bi­na­tion you can imag­ine, Con­duit will take care of the con­ver­sion and synchronization.

Now  we’ll start off with the fact that this isn’t even a 1.0 release so there are bound to be some issues.   Issues is what I’ve had all down long with this thing, even when it’s work­ing prop­erly.   In some ways this should be essen­tially rsync on crack — and some­times it is.

Let’s go over the things I’m attempt­ing to do with this utility:

• Sync Evo­lu­tion Cal­en­der to  Google Cal­en­der and vice versa.
• Synce RSS feed items into my Calender
• Sync pic­tures from a spe­cific local folder to Flickr
• Sync pic­tures from Flickr to Face­book

While I did attempt to do this all I did man­age to partly get things work­ing.  Let’s go down the list.

I did man­age to some­what get my cal­en­ders to sync.   The prob­lem is that it never com­pletes.  It picks a strange per­cent­age point and just stays there grind­ing away say­ing it’s sync­ing.   I do see new items from one side to another so I don’t need to try to work with Evolution’s borked gcal sync (promised to be fixed next ver­sion).   I can say sync­ing from out­look to Gcal was one of the things I missed most migrat­ing to Ubuntu from win­dows.   Since it never com­pletely fin­ishes I can’t say that this is work­ing as designed.  If it ever does fin­ish I’ll give this func­tion a glow­ing review.

Sync­ing RSS items into my cal­en­der.   While I can do an over­lay in Evo­lu­tion attach­ing to a Gcal­dae­mon server on my net­work fro this func­tion I want it natively synced by an all inclu­sive prod­uct.   The Gcal­dae­mon takes an RSS feed, trans­forms it to an ical for­mat and I can then over­lay it on my cal­en­der.   This allows me to life cache my rss items in an easy to use inter­face.   Going through the options it would seem that con­duit can do this but it isn’t working.

Sync­ing pic­tures from a local folder to flickr, the sync part works but not as spec­i­fied.   When I con­fig­ure the local folder it starts to sync with flickr.  I then real­ize that it’s not sync­ing with the local folder at all, but the one on that is the par­ent folder for the one i am tar­get­ting.   Essen­tially I made a “flickr sync” folder in my pic­tures direc­tory under my home folder.   The flickr sync is work­ing on the pic­tures folder and not the sub folder I spec­i­fied.    Iron­i­cally sync­ing from the same folder to Face­book causes the exact same issue.

Sync­ing directly from flickr to Face­book seems to work at first.   The prob­lem I noticed that it states it’s refresh­ing and starts to go — but noth­ing is trans­ferred.   So essen­tially it’s not allow­ing third party to third party with my machine play­ing the man in the mid­dle.   Since the pro­gram should work exactly the same I don’t see what the issue is where this couldn’t work, but this func­tion­al­ity doesn’t seem to be com­pletely flushed out.

Now a lot of these prob­lem could stop caus­ing me to pull out my hair if I just read the doc­u­men­ta­tion.   The rub behind this is that the doc­u­men­ta­tion is next to non-existent.   The devel­op­ers in their infi­nite wis­don have failed to fully doc­u­ment you the func­tions and how they work either on the site or in the help file included with the software.

This swiss army knife of a pro­gram is more impor­tant then I’m sure most peo­ple real­ize since it could be on the next steps to meld­ing the web to the local com­put­ers.   All of your mobile devices could be synced auto­mat­i­cally all the time by this lit­tle pro­gram.  Home file back-ups to a remote server?  Synced auto­mat­i­cally.  The gen­eral pop­u­lace hasn’t seemed to yet grasp the magic that this pro­gram promises.    This could of course be the lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion that I’m com­plain­ing about.

This pro­gram seems to auto load on start in Hardy Heron which I recently upgraded to.  I think though for it to be truly inte­grated with the final build when they get to it, that the doc­u­men­ta­tion def­i­nitely  needs to be flushed out.  Now I could stay here and com­plain and be just another joe schmo on the street that gripes about the soft­ware.   The great­est thing about open source soft­ware though is get­ting involved.   After I fin­ish this arti­cle I’m going to be con­tact­ing the project lead via e-mail and see if I can start work­ing on the doc­u­men­ta­tion and help out where I can.

I stand behind this project and think it is fab­u­lous.   It pains me that the bugs I am deal­ing with cause me undue heart­burn.   This is why I hate to love this product.