Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I keep a monthly budget and have for years. This keeps me from bouncing checks and scrambling when the yearly automobile insurance is due, but I don't have a clear picture of whether I'll be playing golf every day after I retire or eating dog food. GnuCash has a retirement planning feature on its to-do list, and nothing else out there (for Linux, at least) provides this yet either. So I'm doing it using the old spreadsheet method with Gnumeric. But it's really complicated.

After reading more about phpGedView and sifting through their online forums, it became clear that the authors expect phpGedView to be the web-based viewer of genealogical data and that GDBI will be used for editing this data. So I canned GRAMPS and pulled down gdbi-7-pgv.jar, the GDBI JAR file for phpGedView. A JAR is a Java Archive file, so of course Java is required to run it: java -jar gdbi-7-pgv.jar.

I won't repeat what's already in the documentation, but these fields required by GDBI could use some explaining: The URL is the location of your phpGedView website with /gdbi.php appended to it. So it should look something like http://www.example.com/phpGedView/gdbi.php. The GEDCOM is the name of the GEDCOM you uploaded to your site, e.g., my-family.ged. Leave the Read-only and Blank Editor boxes unchecked.

Make whatever changes you want, then just exit the program. To update the site, sign in to phpGedView. At the top-right of the page where is says logged in as (username), click on Admin. Choose the third item on the right side of the table Accept / Reject Changes.

At the bottom, under Import Gedcom, select my-family.ged – Import Gedcom. At the bottom of the next screen, select Continue Adding. On the next screen (Import GEDCOM), below Do you want to empty the dataset?, select the Yes button.

Sourceforge periodically sends a list of the top projects. On the most recent list, phpGedView caught my eye. It creates a web site of your genealogy data so you can share it with others in your family tree. My sister maintains my side of our family tree and my wife does hers. Once I started reading, it was apparent that this software, as well as its peers, is more for viewing than editing. So I started looking into open source genealogy software. I'd like to have something that can be run on multiple platforms, or at least exchanges data with other platforms. Currently, our family trees are in Family Tree Maker 6.0. This is a Windows program. Fortunately, it exports to GEDCOM, the most popular file format for geneaology data.

The first contender is GRAMPS. It is available as an RPM that installed with no trouble on my RedHat9 box. It imported my three data files that I exported from FTW in GEDCOM format with no trouble, except for not understanding telephone numbers (the PHON field). You may be wondering why I have three files. One is the original my sister made in FTW 4, the other is the most recent copy of my sister's data and the third is my wife's. As you can imagine there's a fair amount of overlap. Under the Tools/Database Processing section of the menu in GRAMPS is a duplicate person finder. I ran this and it did find the duplicates. At the bottom of the dialog box is a Merge button. I selected a duplicate, hit merge and it popped up another dialog showing the fields of both records. I picked the lower-ID's record's fields and hit Merge and Edit. No joy:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/gramps/MergeData.py", line 354, in on_merge_clicked
self.update(self.p1,self.p2,old_id)
File "/usr/share/gramps/plugins/Merge.py", line 268, in on_update
self.redraw()
File "/usr/share/gramps/plugins/Merge.py", line 243, in redraw
list.append((c,p1,p2.getId()))
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'getId'

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol. It depends upon the clients to distribute the files, so there's no server bottleneck. I've used the original in years past, but for kicks tried Azureus, a Java implementation.

Regardless of client, BitTorrent by default listens on a port in the range 6881 to 6889. These are tried in order and 6881 will be used unless it can't bind to it. Of course, my default firewall setup was blocking it. To fix that, I defined the BitTorrent ports in /etc/services:
bittorrent_min 6881/tcp
bittorrent_max 6889/tcp
and added this rule to the firewall:
$IPTABLES -A INPUT -i $OUTSIDE -d 0/0 -p tcp --dport bittorrent_min:bittorrent_max -j ACCEPT