What Vince Did

Turned 40

2010-06-22T22:50:00.000-04:00

Without celebration or fanfare, I attained 40 years today. What's next?

Tried out some Time Management Tools

2009-11-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

The great Peter F. Drucker, master of all things management, commanded "Know Thy Time". It was the title of chapter 2 of The Effective Executive and he emphasizes that it is difficult or impossible to become truly effective without this step.

I decided to go in search of time tracking tools for the Mac to see if I could find anything that would help. The short story is, although there are many choices out there, I found very little that met my personal requirements. Most existing time tracking tools are integrated as part of a larger project management suite and provide lots of great tools that got in my way since I am not a project manager.

Here's a quick review of the tools I looked at:

RescueTime is a program that sits in the background and watches what programs you use and what web sites you visit. I used it for a while, but I didn't find the output to be actionable. It could measure, for example, how much time I spent doing email vs. web browsing. It even allowed me to lump email, IRC, and IM applications together into a "communication" category. However, it did a very poor job allowing me to record off-computer time. There's a basic "add time" interface and that's about it. Worse, it's model didn't really fit my usage patterns. As a web developer, I spend pretty much all my working time either in a terminal or a web browser. RescueTime did not allow me to differentiate between developing code, debugging production issues, performing QC testing, writing documentation, etc, all of which take place in the same two programs. Likewise, sometimes when I'm in my IRC client, it's scheduled work collaborating with coworkers. But if I'm supposed to be doing something else, then it's a distraction. RescueTime can't really make that distinction.

Harvest is a time tracking and invoicing tool for freelancers. It's a web-based tool, and the service costs $12 a month. These two factors eliminated it from my consideration without a test drive. Too much money to pay for features I will never use, and too much inconvenience trying to track offline time.

Nozbe is a GTD-style personal productivity tool that includes a time tracker. This is another web-based for-pay tool, although there is a free version that you can use indefinitely. Again, for this task I find web-based tools inconvenient, and this one had too many features that I simply didn't need.

Fanurio is a commercial cross-platform Java time tracking and invoice application for freelancers. This one had potential, but the proof was missing from the pudding. I found using it to be a hassle. Just getting started was a wicked pain, because it forces you to enter a Client, Project, and "Service" before you can begin tracking time. This makes it entirely unsuitable for tracking small bits of time. The interface is bizarrely counter-intuitive, displaying completed time but not the current timer by default. Finding how to enter notes for the current timer is like an Easter egg hunt, and the tool managed to lose some of the notes I entered in the few hours I was using it. Strongly NOT recommended.

Time Tracker (what a unique name!) is an open-source time tracking application for the Mac. It performs the basics of tracking your time, but it was not at all easy to switch between tasks. I rejected it because it commits the worst sin: closing the window will close the program and stop tracking your time. That's just dumb. A time tracker should, almost by definition, be unobtrusive and should run in the background by default.

Finally, OfficeTime probably came closest to being usable of those I tested. It was reasonably easy to switch between tasks once I had set them up, and the idle timer was both clever and very useful. Unfortunately, OfficeTime also stops tracking time if you close the window (though it does not quit the program). It lasted longest on my desktop, but I seriously doubt I will still be using it when the free trial runs out.

What I want in a Time Tracking Tool

What I'm really looking for is a strange hybrid between OfficeTime, RescueTime, iCal, and Twitter.

I already have a schedule in iCal that knows what I'm supposed to be doing. My time tracker should start with that. Then it just needs to ask if I am on-task at the beginning of each calendar event so I don't have to re-enter anything.

OfficeTime's idle time pop-up did a reasonable job of substituting for what I call "interrupt mode". There's the thing I'm supposed to be working on, and then someone walks up to my desk and asks a question. Ten minutes later when I turn back to my screen, the idle pop-up asks "You went idle, what have you been doing?" It gives me the option to keep the time on the current task, or allocate it somewhere else (or ignore it entirely, but don't do that). I'd like to add a hot-key that would put the tracker into "interrupt mode" manually. This would help prevent accidentally restarting my scheduled work after an interruption without resetting the timer properly.

RescueTime's ability to know what program I'm using would be a fine addition, to enable tracking hidden distractions. It could warn me, "Hey Vince, you claim to be doing web development right now, but you're in your email client. Are you really still developing or have you switched to communicating?" RescueTime already allows categorizing programs, it would be a short leap from there.

Finally, the user interface for all this should be as simple to use as answering Twitter's "what are you doing" question. Allow me to set up projects, categories, and tasks, but don't force me to! Often, I don't know what category a particular block of time should go into at the moment I'm recording it, and trying to think about it then is distracting me from my real work. Let me add all that metadata after the fact, if at all. In fact, just leave me a delicious-style "tags" field, and later I'll tell the time tracker which tags represent clients, projects, categories, or something else.

At the end of the week I'll do my weekly review. At that time I would like to check scheduled vs actual time on task and get an idea of when and where my interruptions are coming from. RescueTime-style graphs of time by category would be extremely useful. So would a temporal graph displaying activities and interruptions linearly by time.

As it stands today, none of the time tracking tools I have seen do what I want. Nearly all of them are focused on tracking projects and/or billable hours, and as such they are biased against the very feature that I want, the tracking of distractions and small amounts of off-task time. Does anyone out there have a tool for me?

Updated Webquills.net with tasty links

2009-08-11T23:16:00.002-04:00

Man, those round tuits are really hard to come by.

Nearly a month ago, I started working on a system to incorporate my Delicious bookmarks into my web site. I spend a lot of effort sifting through web development articles and writing descriptions of them to go into my bookmarks. I've always thought it was a good idea to recycle that content for use on my web sites. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I got the polish on my integration.

Tonight I finally found the extra hour I needed to get the software tested and integrated in the site. So now when you visit the Webquills.net home page, you'll see not only my articles, but also articles from around the web that I think are worth reading.

If I can find any more of those tuits, I'll write up an article about the software for Webquills.

Relaunched Webquills.net

2009-07-15T23:21:00.005-04:00

Last week I launched my new web design for Webquills.net. I accidentally spent a couple of months working on it, and threw away two nearly complete designs and one perfectly good blogging tool in the process. These things are always a learning process. So what did I learn?

First, although Movable Type is a perfectly acceptable blogging tool, it annoys the crap out of me. I couldn't stand the tedium of trying to edit all those templates in so many places through that dinky web-based editor. I finally just pulled my head away from the wall it had been banging against and rebuilt the whole site in HTML::Mason. After all, I'm a web developer, I can do that.

Second, I learned that I have the visual design skills of a wet bar of soap. I couldn't put an inoffensive color scheme together to save a kitten's life, and anyone who lets me near a texture library should have himself analyzed. I finally just adapted one of those free page templates you find on the Interwebs, and even my selection drew sneers from the more color-coordinated people in my life. It's sort of Ubuntu-orange. But IMHO, almost anything is better than the horrible Movable Type default template.

I'm having fun putting together the back-end functionality I want, rather than picking from a menu of somebody else's mediocre ideas. I have basic blog stuff working now (posts and feed). Soon I'll be integrating my delicious feed as well.

Actually, the thing that took the most work (and by work I mean thought) was coming up with a tagline that captured the spirit of Webquills. I must have gone through 100 variations or more, returning to the same concepts over and over, trying to boil down in my mind what it is that Webquills is meant to be about. Finally I settled on Develop effective web sites. The phrase was strongly influenced by my reading of The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker - a fantastic little volume that basically woke me up to the difference between killing time and kicking ass. Read it. Just read it.

Contributed to a CPAN module

2009-07-14T20:49:00.005-04:00

I had a need to use Net::Amazon at $work, and it needed a little help because Amazon is changing their API to require all requests to be signed. So I contacted the maintainer and offered to contribute a patch. The patch was added in version 0.50. But what's cooler is that in version 0.54 some one else submitted a patch to correct some problems caused by my patch. Open source software is so great! Two people who don't even know each other writing software maintained by a third person, to make better software for all of us. What a great concept!!

Embarked on a Historic(al) Publishing Adventure

2008-08-18T21:56:00.002-04:00

Sometimes fun turns out to be a lot of work.

I have always had an interest in History. In school, all my elective classes were history classes. I love that whole karmic one thing leads to another flow of events that brought us from there to here to who knows where next.

Of course, in my life, everything usually comes back to the web, and so it is with history. I recently discovered that the great science fiction writer, H.G. Wells, also wrote a marvelous tome of the history of the world, entitled (creatively) The Outline of History. I also discovered that, although the book is in the public domain, the only text of it available on the web is a sort of unfinished OCR scan. Being a history fan, and an H.G. Wells fan, and a web developer, I obviously could not let that stand.

And so I have begun a long term project to edit together a web version of the book. This mostly entails doing some cutting and pasting, and a whole lot of trips to Wikipedia to verify spellings of archaic terms and the names of obscure kings. At any rate, the publishing of The Outline of History, Online Edition has begun. One article at a time, I will be editing and posting the entire contents of the book. It's going to take months to get it all out, and the project is eating huge amounts of my spare time. But it's so much fun!

Finally created my "me" page!

2008-06-06T06:51:00.003-04:00

Although I have been on the web for more than a decade, I've never really had a page that was just about me. Until NOW! Mwah-ha-ha-ha! (Okay, so I'm not an evil mastermind, I can still practice the laugh. You never know.)

The All About Vince page is a collection of "inputs and outputs", things I read (or hear or watch) and things I write. At the moment, it's almost entirely composed of Javascript or Flash widgets that pull in me-data from various ports of call on the web. So far I've covered my delicious bookmarks, my Amazon wishlist, and most importantly, thanks to Google's Feed API and their swank FeedControl, all of my blogs.

There's plenty more I want to add, but the page is a Work In Progress (just like me :).

Turned off my link splicer

2008-06-04T23:36:00.004-04:00

If you've been subscribing to the What Vince Did Feed (you're probably the only one) to get my tasty link list, you're about to get disappointed. I have removed the link splicer from my FeedBurner feed, so you won't be seeing them here anymore.

Of course if you really want them, you can go directly to the source, my bookmark feed is here. It's just that I'm starting to build a tool that combines my feeds in various ways, and having all my links show up twice is a bit unpretty. More on the mythical feed project later, after it's launched.

Came out of hiding - mumba zuzu!

2008-06-03T21:46:00.003-04:00

After more than three months of doing nothing but $work and (very little) sleep, I have finally emerged and re-engaged with the tiny pieces of my tiny world. (Hello World!)

I made a post over at Webquills on hash slices that I've been itching to write, because I use the things so much and I don't see them around much elsewhere.

I also dropped a note on Media Brothers about my latest muse. Kate Voegele's music has helped keep me pumped for coding through those long nights of sore eyes and tired fingers. Thanks Kate!

Also I received three emails in one day with the subject line "mumba zuzu". I have no idea what it means, but it's so fun to say that it has become my mantra this week! Say it with me now: MUMBA ZUZU!! See, isn't that fun? :)

Discovered REAL ultimate power!

2008-02-03T22:06:00.000-05:00

See, this is why I will never be cool (and by cool, I mean totally sweet). I'm just not plugged in to the Jungian collective subconscious. Somehow, until today I managed never to hear about real ultimate power, an Internet experience apparently so powerful and popular that it has been parodied to apply to programmers and bald Britney.

I'm going to crawl back under my rock now. Wake me at the Apocalypse.

On second thought, don't.

Made PerlBuzz!

2008-01-30T16:41:00.000-05:00

W00t! My Webquills.net article on choosing a perl template system got linked from my favorite Perl site, PerlBuzz. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

It's funny, that article started out as just a quick little "here's what I do" note, and ended up a 1,500 word comparison of various templating systems in Perl. I'm pretty sure this is the first person to link to Webquills.net who isn't me. Maybe I'll get a little traffic now.

Switched Webquills.net to Movable Type

2007-12-19T16:09:00.000-05:00

I recently made a decision to focus my Webquills blog not just on web development, but specifically on Perl web development. It seemed hypocritical to write a blog about Perl web development using a PHP blogging tool (or a Java-based service like Blogger). And when I heard that MT was going open source, it was the perfect opportunity for a switch. So this past weekend, I converted from Wordpress to MTOS. So far, so good. I still need to do a lot of look and feel customizations. But no at least my Perl blog is generated with Perl blogging software.

Declared CVS DTM

2007-12-06T13:39:00.001-05:00

Finally migrated the CVS repository at work to SVN. Now all my revision control is under SVN. CVS is Dead To Me.

Had a good day

2007-09-26T00:19:00.000-04:00

I slept in, got to work late, had a very productive day of coding (with a passing test suite to prove it), and started watching season 2 of The Unit. I'm in a good mood, and it's been a good day. Happens so rarely, I thought I would record it for posterity. Now I'm off to bed. :)

Took some time off

2007-09-05T05:26:00.000-04:00

The last few months have run me ragged at work. The result has been a large gap in posts to all my personal web sites, and a burned-out feeling. So last week I finally hit the breaking point and took some vacation, during which I did pretty much nothing but lie around the house. I'd like to say it felt good, but really it was more like just working out a cramp.

I have resolved to live a more balanced life (whatever that means) so as not to drive myself to an early grave. Let's see how long that lasts!

On a side note, a certain evil person has introduced me to sudoku, which I was trying hard to avoid. Now I'm dreaming about little squares filled with numbers. Argh!

Launched Webquills.net

2007-06-04T08:01:00.000-04:00

Five years ago, I registered the domain name. For all that time, ideas have percolated, but never taken form. Now, finally, I have gotten off my rump and done it. (Well, okay, technically, I did while sitting down, but you get the metaphor.)

Webquills.net is "Brain food for web masters," a collection and constantly flowing stream of important knowledge for web professionals and dedicated amateurs. Because web mastery is not just about HTML, it covers the full gamut of web-related topics, including software development, system administration, design, and even writing.

Laughed out loud

2007-05-30T20:57:00.000-04:00

Director Mike Figgis spent longer at LAX airport than intended. He'd arrived in Los Angeles, along with half the acting and directing world, for what is known as 'pilot season', when the big studios try out new scripts, directors and actors in a two-week frenzy of auditions and career make-or-breaks. When Figgis was being grilled by airport immigration, he was asked the purpose of his visit. Unthinking and tired after a long flight, Mike replied: 'I'm here to shoot a pilot.' After five hours in an interrogation cell (yes, really), he finally made it into town.

Via the Guardian

Paid Money for Music Downloads

2007-05-30T20:46:00.001-04:00

I've been waiting for this one since they announced it, and now it's here. Today you can upgrade your iTunes client to version 7.2, and then you can upgrade (some of) your iTunes purchases to 256kbps, DRM-Free versions!

It's been said before, and those who know me also know my opinion, but for the record: DRM is bad, bad, bad. It's bad for artists, bad for fans, and bad for online music retailers. It's even bad for the media distributors who use it, although you may have a hard time convincing some of them of that.

EMI seems to get it, though, as their music is now up and running. I am not a big purchaser of music in general, but I have been saving up to vote with my dollars. As I write this, I am listening to my newly purchased, non-DRM Rolling Stones tunes. Wow this stuff sounds good!

Admitted defeat

2007-05-12T09:01:00.000-04:00

That's right, I give up. Despite having devoted the last five years exclusively to Perl development, my next project will be written in another language.

I am not happy about this, quite the contrary. I love Perl. I've learned so much of the ins and outs of Perl syntax vagaries that I feel like I've been married to it. But for at least a year I have been looking at the web development tools and frameworks in other languages and drooling. Where are the Perl tools that will double my productivity in web development? No, for two years I have spent most of my time building those tools for myself, because those available do not suit my needs and do not measure up to the tools available in several other languages. But of course, I'm not as smart as those other guys, so my home-grown tools are not as good, and not really useful outside my personal bubble.

Now, the Perl fanatics out there are going to start yelling about things like Catalyst and maybe Jifty. Hey, I know, because I am (was) a Perl fanatic myself. But Catalyst is unnecessarily complicated. In trying to be all things to all programmers, it creates more slow-downs in overhead than it does speed-ups in infrastructure. Jifty is pretty cool, and it even comes with a pony, but it just isn't there yet, and the community behind it is comparatively small. None of the Perl frameworks I've examined make it particularly easy to implement REST-based web services (it's certainly possible, but the frameworks don't make it any easier than doing it "by hand").

Now, if I had my druthers, based purely on language syntax and tools, I probably would go with Python, and a framework like Django. Django is a beautiful piece of work, in my mind the Python alternative to Ruby on Rails, and far superior in productivity to Zope or anything based on it. Also, Python's Universal Feed Parser is by far the best library for manipulating RSS and Atom feeds that I have found in any language.

But there are also disadvantages to choosing Django over PHP. PHP has the simplest deployment path, and is still the most broadly deployed of the open-source technologies on my radar. Django requires mod_python or FastCGI, and Rails similarly relies on FastCGI. These technologies are not widely deployed and not nearly as simple as just dropping a bundle of files into your document root.

But really there are two big reasons for me to run PHP: MediaWiki and phpBB. Both are excellent applications at what they do, and I need to run them both on my new web server for compatibility with previous deployments. And both are built with PHP. Since I have to have PHP installed anyway...

So in addition to Django, I will also give symfony a test-drive. This is a PHP web framework. I have no experience with it yet, but it looks more mature than the Zend Framework, seems fully capable of doing what I want, and happens to be the first hit on Google for "PHP framework", so there must be plenty of people who think it's good.

My relationship with Perl has not ended. I'm still building large-scale applications with it at my day job, and I have no doubt I will turn to it when the going gets tough in my sysadmin role at home. But it's time for me to stretch my legs, to look at some other languages in the hope of finding tools that will increase my productivity the way Perl did when I first started using it. Python and Django will be my first try, followed closely by PHP and symfony. And if neither works out, well, there's always Rails.

Added a Terabyte of Storage

2007-04-21T22:45:00.000-04:00

Yes, there seems to be no end to my storage needs. First there was a 160GB drive. Then a second 160GB drive. Then I had to add a 300GB external drive. And finally even that filled up. So I just picked up a pair of 500GB drives and swapped them in for the 160s. So Gabrielle, my main desktop (Mac G5), now has 1.3 Terabytes of disk space. Hopefully that will last a little while.

Meanwhile, the two 160GB drives had nowhere to live, so I bought a few cheap parts and built myself a new Linux desktop named Joxer. I had a tough time deciding how to configure him, but I finally settled on Kubuntu 7.04 for the OS. I'm really liking the whole Ubuntu family of products. It's like the best of Debian, wrapped up and delivered fresh to your door every six months!

FINALLY published "Film School in a Box for $25"

2007-02-25T19:58:00.000-05:00

After years of threatening and a week of editing and composing (yes, it's sad), I finally published Film School in a Box for $25, a "review" of the DVD box set of the "Mexico" trilogy by Robert Rodriguez. He is my hero when it comes to art and creativity.

Got distracted by my day job

2007-01-28T10:17:00.000-05:00

I've had my head so deep into my day job lately that I haven't done much in the way of personal stuff. Last week I added a quick post to Control-Escape about CSS Layouts with YUI Grids. It's not very detailed, but it doesn't really have to be, the documentation provided by Yahoo is plenty good. This week all I managed to do was tweak a couple of links and fix an environment bug that wasn't detecting Windows clients correctly. Just the same, page views look to be up about 20% over last month, and revenues are following. There's a possibility that the site will actually pay for its own hosting this month, an historical first.

I didn't post anything at Media Brothers this week. Mikey took up my slack with a nice review of Band of Brothers. I've got a few ideas floating around, but I can't seem to organize any of them into a coherent article.

Meanwhile, the post office can't seem to keep my Netflix queue turning over. I've been reduced to actually reading things on paper. If I ever finish one, I'll put a review on Media Brothers.

Had a multi-post week

2007-01-15T21:38:00.000-05:00

Just couldn't stop myself this past week. I've been pouring content onto Media Brothers. I made a post about the AppleTV that The Steve announced at Macworld Expo. That's been getting some traffic from del.icio.us. Then I wrote a review of Ladyhawke, for no particular reason. Then I finally got inspired to drop a post about network neutrality. And according to FeedBurner, Media Brothers actually has some subscribers now too!

And yet, I still have not had time to write about my cataloging project, nor to write those articles for Control-Escape that I keep putting off. I don't get how so many "bloggers" have time to write ten posts a day. I really don't.

Beat the Market - Sort of

2007-01-04T07:55:00.000-05:00

I just did the math on my meager 401k investments to see how I did in 2006. The answer: not bad, and better than 2005 by a lot. My annual return on capital came in at 15.97%, a very respectable return. The Nasdaq 100 gained only 6.93%. The S&P 500 came in at 15.85%, so I just squeaked past it. But the Dow Jones Industrial Average whupped me at 18.91% return.

On the other hand, if you count 401k company matching funds as gains rather than contributions, that would give me a return on investment of 38.75%. Now that's what I call a return! And since contributions are made with pre-tax dollars, only about two-thirds of the investment is mine, the rest is a loan from Uncle Sam. He'll get his in the end, though. He always does.

My play-money portfolio actually dropped a bit this year (Texas Instruments, you big slacker!), but has a 50% return over two years, so I'm not complaining. I figure it picks back up this year.

If only that decimal place were moved to the right a couple of digits, I'd be rolling in money. Oh well. Time compounds all accounts.

Reviewed Superman II - the Richard Donner cut

2006-12-31T19:34:00.000-05:00

Just posted my review of Superman II - the Richard Donner cut, a new DVD release that restores the original vision of the creators. Now if only something could be done about Superman 3. Bleh.