Word of Mouth Advertising is coming to Britain, according to the BBC.
I was cynical, but reading on, this seems to be what I do anyway, except that someone will actually buy me the toys I’ll be ranting about.
I can cope with that.
One of the problems I have with Pandora is that it puts a little too much emphasis on technicalities of the music, and not so much the mood… Musicovery is on the other end of the spectrum.
Neato.
I’m currently reading a book called ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen.
There’s a bit of psycho-babble in there, but I think that’s a bit inevitable: when dealing with something that’s essentially new (like our modern, internet-fueled lifestyles) you’ve got to develop the language to deal with it, and it’s often going to sound pretentious. Having said that, there’s a lot in there that strikes me as distinctly pragmatic and down-to-earth.
The book tends to focus on ‘next-actions’ - I like that. You don’t ‘do’ projects, you ‘do’ little steps. And as long as you’re doing them, and that they contribute to the project, you don’t have the ‘open loop’ - what I would call that feeling of something hanging over your head - that you get when you know that there’s something you’ve decided you should be doing.
Some people don’t like the idea of having a rigid framework governing your work. I understand that, because I was one of them. But then again, maybe rigid is the wrong word here. Established, ingrained… whatever. The point is that some of us need something to work within. I’m hoping that this will fulfill that need.
There are a lot of different ways GTD can be implemented: a simple paper system fulfills all of the criteria, for example. Sounds a bit cluttered to me, but my brother would love that. That level of flexibility is good; it means that there’s a lot of freedom to choose something that will fit in well with my career, my hobbies and my lifestyle (yeah, this is a whole-life kind of system). It’s also bad, because it means that before I can hit the ground running, I’m going to need to complete the sort of task I’m hoping for help with.
I want something that I can access anywhere, online or offline. But I also want it to store information from me that I can retrieve. Ideally I want something I can run for myself between work and home. I envisage this as a web-based application that performs some form of synching. That’s about as far as I’ve got, and here are the candidates so far:
43 Folders isn’t technically a candidate, but as a site it looks useful enough that I’ll link to it straight away.
Tracks is a ruby-on-rails implementation. It’s designed specifically for GTD. It’s available as a hosted solution (I think free, so there’s your demo 
), and has RSS capabilities (which is always a bonus for me).
MonkeyGTD is an adaption of a Tiddlywiki. Tiddlywikis are based on single flat files, so the advantage here is that you can carry it with you, work on it offline, and upload to carry on working online. It also looks a lot more sophisticated than you would expect from a wiki.
iCommit is another bespoke GTD solution. I haven’t tried it yet, as you have to register to use it on the author’s site in the first instance to see anything. That put me off, but many people sounding off about how perfect a solution it is made me look some more. 43folders has an article and some screenshots here.
Thinking Rock looks pretty cool, but isn’t an online service. Having said that, it’s java, and based on a single file that I could either USB around with me and/or stick on a webDAV server somewhere… I’m a little concerned by the lack of a ‘tickler file’ or weekly review views, but maybe it’s unnecessary - I’ll find out when I get to that chapter I guess
GTD-PHP is a php based implementation I haven’t had much chance to look at yet - there’s a demo, too.
More to follow? Please feel free to make any suggestions in the comments.
I was looking at Lifehacker today (might have to add it to the ol’ RSS list) and found a great way to add all the old emails from outlook/thunderbird to my gmail.
I’ve been using gmail for almost three years now, and it completely changed how I deal with email within a day of using it. I had given up organising my inbox (a situation I find myself in in work) with gmail that doesn’t happen, and if it did, it wouldn’t matter.
Only problem now is that I’m going to use up half my quota in one fell swoop…
Contrary to popular opinion, there are some things about apple that really grind my gears. This one’s a good example:
I left a macbook backing up over firewire last night. I need to use that image to prepare nine or ten other macbooks for a course next week. So I kind of needed it done this morning when I got in (late, again - what’s wrong with me?).
You’ve probably guessed that it had failed. ‘Disk is Full’.
Well, OK, the mac server I use is old and recycled, and the second disk could be bigger in there. Plus I was surprised to find out that the image would be approximately 14 Gigs, compressed. Fair enough, since the machine is used for a lot of multimedia work, but the disk only had 9GB left.
Emptying the trash left it with 22GB of free space.
I mean, c’mon. The whole point of putting something in the trash is that you don’t think it’s worth as much as the space it’s taking up. Keeping it around whilst you’re not using that space makes sense, but as soon as an application needs that hard disk space, it should get it at the expense of whatever is in the trash. Running out of disk space when there’s 13 Gigabytes of data in there, that’s stupid.
End of Rant.
Home Theater PC.
I’ve had a machine sitting around the flat/bedsit/flat again for years now. I always meant it to be hooked up to the telly. Having it hanging over me has been stressing me out since 2003. So (just as soon as I get my home server up and running again), I’m going to have another go at building one.
I don’t need TV functionality. I don’t want another windows box hanging around (not sure I have the license for one, either). Just a nice interface to videos and music on the fileserver. Perhaps a quick script to rip a DVD for easy access. Maybe, MAYBE a snes emulator for shits and giggles. Simpler the better.
There seem to be three contenders (in the linux space, anyway:)
MythTV - The big one.. this is the one I always figured I’d end up using. It’s so powerful and feature-rich, but it really is set up to do Tivo-like functions and TV recording; apparently its use as a simple video-over-the-network setup is a bit poor.
Freevo, which looks to be more straightforward is based on Python, and their screenshots don’t seem to work properly - maybe I need to try it out a bit. Their plugin range looks pretty impressive, too.
Geexbox looks like the one I’ll most likely start with. Installation looks much easier than either of the other two, and the idea of something small enough to run from a compact flash card… well, one less hard drive in the box will cut down on noise…
Anyone have any experience with these? Opinions welcome as always
I love that the technical requirements for something that looks like WordPerfect on Dos are ‘10.4 or later’.
I’d love to know whether this made a real difference to those creative types who have to do some serious writing, writing you gotta get involved with. I like that idea.
Well, no luck on the apple forums, so I’ve resorted to working around the problem I talked about yesterday.
(more…)
As much as I like it, I’ve had a problem with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) for a while now. I administer a fairly large number of macs using it, and since I’ve started doing so, I’ve changed their DNS records. Before, their DNS names were more or less random. Now, they match the ID number stuck to the front of each machine, and can be used to rename the macs after imaging.
Only I can’t make ARD pick up the new DNS addresses.
The first time I asked for advice about it, someone suggested that it was the DNS cache on the server ARD was running for that was keeping the old information, but flushing that cache didn’t do me any good. I even tried deleting the computers from the list, and re-adding them by IP address, but something somewhere is still remembering the old DNS names. I can edit the DNS name for each computer manually, but that makes it a bit meaningless.
The DNS name information must be cached somewhere. It doesn’t seem to be on the client computers, as this problem has persisted through numerous reformats, reimaging and nv/pr-ram resets. It doesn’t seem to be on the server OS’ DNS cache. I’m reluctant to uninstall/reinstall ARD, as there’s a lot of configuration data and management tasks saved on there that I don’t want to lose: but I suspect the information is cached somehow within ARD itself.
The ARD manual says that the DNS name field is set using reverse-dns lookups when the machine is added. But this seems not to be wholly true. Reverse-dns lookups all seem to work correctly, from the web and elsewhere. Perhaps the reverse-dns happens when a machine is originally added, but after that point, it seems to remember details even if the computer they’re associated with is deleted from ARD’s management list.
I’ve thought of a nasty hacky way of doing it, but I’m going to give the apple discussion forums a bit of a chance before I try tackling it. Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, please be my guest…
OK, ‘Fess up
Who submitted the email in this blog entry to TorrentFreak? C’mon, I won’t be angry…
I posted the thing just because I thought it was an unusual (and probably doomed, but that’s just my opinion) way to approach a problem. I certainly didn’t expect more than a couple of people to read it. So I was surprised earlier when a member of the server team from the Uni’s Information Services dept (INSRV). pointed this article out to me a couple of hours ago…
Embarassed by my own blog
The guy comes over to solve an issue with one of my servers, and mentions all this bru-ha-ha they’re having today over there because someone’s released an email that was sent out only to LCRs (that’s local computing representatives to you and me). He shows me the article and I think “that can’t be me, can it?”
Yes, it can. The number of characters in that X’ed out name at the bottom there is a match to the one I used - and not to the original email. So I think I’m the culprit. ho hum.
So that upset a few members of the network team - not a thing you want to do if you rely on them to work your network for you - and they do look after us. Luckily as it got passed up the chain of command the general sentiment changed from outrage to approval - the high-ups like the idea that cardiff are ‘leading the way’ with this approach (what?) and getting a form of recognition from it.
Missing the point?
Meanwhile, the INSRV team has also found a silver lining: not only are a couple of the comments quite funny (”Finally a good list of torrent sites”), some of them mention the odd site missed by the boys in INSRV - who can fill in those gaps.
One more thing, in the interests of pedantry: the email says that they will be prohibited - these sites are not blocked just yet. But soon, and for the rest of your life (maybe).
Apology
Ok, I lied. One last thing, for real this time.
Any organisation like ours with many satellite, semi-autonomous departments and a single organisation to provide general information services/network/computer support will entail a number of challenges. Sometimes there’s no good way to do something. Sometimes you need to compromise. Because of legacy reasons, the network in Cardiff has outgrown its design, and there are problems; bitTorrent complicates these hugely. It really does impact on our work.
INSRV might not always do things the way I like, but they’re always trying really hard to do the best thing by the university and their users. I posted the original entry because I wanted to talk about the technical limitations, and social education versus technical limitations. Any criticism was supposed to be positive. Sorry if I’ve caused you hassle, boys.