www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

Mozilla Sunbird, Apple iCal and The Missing Sync

Inbetween moving house I have also been playing with a little 12" iBook, I think I am going to buy it since I do quite fancy it.
One of my big wishes in life has been to get Sunbird Sync'd up with my iPaq as I have mentioned here a few times before. The Apple has that ability, though not natively, but by buying a 3rd party application called The Missing Sync.
After failing to find a demo version I ended up buying this tool only to find that syncing the device with a Sunbird file loaded into iCal totally nukes the iPaq, needed a hard reset.
After much digging around these files and coming up with the types of entries I have, creating matching ones in a new file in iCal I finally got a good idea of the format that iCal likes. Seems there are 2 major problems with Sunbird data:
1) Sunbird puts things on multiple lines, for some reason iCal does not like this, so I just joined the lines together so that you now have SUMMARY:An Event on one line rather than 2.
2) Monthly repeating events should really have a BYMONTHDAY=nn clause at the end of the RRULE, Sunbird does not add them.
Once I had a perl script to do the fixup and loaded it into iCal syncing worked 100% and I now have a iPaq synced up with iCal files, though cant really edit them in Mozilla