Monthly Archives: January 2008

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January 31, 2008

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Gadgets

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I’ve freed my iPhone

One thing I hated on the iPhone – not having the option to copy music from two different computers onto it without losing everything. But no more!

Some background information: I use a laptop for work and also have about 3 other computers at home. On the home PC’s I have the bulk of my music, and on my laptop my contacts, calendar, podcasts. Once I’ve synced my contacts with the laptop, I can’t put music from the home pc on it.

Apparently this has ended with an update to iTunes 7.6 – a new checkbox appeared on the sync music tab – Manually manage my music. From what I tried it seems that I still need iTunes installed (unless a tool like vPod will appear / works already) but instead of syncing I can drag a file from my desktop over the iPhone icon and it will add it to its library. Which means I can put music from any pother computer that has iTunes (at least in theory). I’ll try it later and update this post with how good it works.

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January 29, 2008

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IT, Web

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An update plugin to update the host

I hate updating wordpress. It takes time and I need to be (slightly) carefull of what I do – I’ve already set up stuff once, I’d really hate to have to do it all over again. So I started for an automatic tool that would do this for me and would run within the confines of a go daddy hosted account.

Fortunatelly someone else had the same problem, and so I’ve found the Instant Upgrade plugin (google search for it). It only took me 5 minutes to set up (partly thanks to FileZilla’s recursive permission changer) and then I’ve simply activated and clicked a large button. In about 5 minutes it was all over and I’m up-to-date with my wordpress. And if it weren’t for that annoying text poping up that I need to upgrade I wouldn’t have done it.

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January 26, 2008

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IT, Productivity, T&T

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Setting up subversion on Windows

svn logoToday I had something to test that required a svn repository. Since my home repository wasn’t answering my calls (well, pings actually) I decided to do a quick install of the svn server on my Windows XP box. From what I remembered it should have been simple enough.

After restarting all the process at one point, because I hadn’t paid attention to the warning about Apache 2.2, I found my Apache 2.0 refused to load the dav_svn module and couldn’t figure out why. A quick search on Google revealed the cause, but it still was annoying. Continue reading →

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January 19, 2008

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IT

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How the mac messed my morning

Weird title, but true. Today I planned to make my life easier when working with files from my home. For this I want to install a Lamp server using Ubuntu’s Server edition. Since I had a mac handy, I burnt the iso downloaded from the ubuntu site with the Disk utility app. And proceeded to install.

Now, I’m not saying that the Disk utility program is a bad app, just that in this case it put a lot of corrupted files onto the disk, and thus the installation failed. Now, the machine I plan on using is pretty old, and its cd drive has a reputable age also, so I tried it for a few times, thinking that the drive was at fault. Since it kept refusing to work, I moved back to my laptops, moved the iso to my windows machine and burnt it using it’s built-in software. Now the install went flawlessly.

That’s the rant for today.

P.S. On how I’ve set up my server, in a different post.

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January 14, 2008

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Announcements, Flex, General

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Speaking at 360 Flex

306_Flex Italy In April I will be speaking at the 360 Flex conference in Italy. I will be talking about webservices and Flex3.
The conference will take place between 7 and 9 april in Milan, Italy, so if you’re in Europe you can attend.

 

Details on the event can be found on the homepage for the conference, and registration can be done through its eventbrite page.

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January 14, 2008

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Productivity

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My GTD

Sometime last year I read the Getting Things Done book by David Allen, of which all productivity blogs / sites / news was all about. And I liked it, and it made sense. Then I tried to apply it, religiously. And I failed. Several times actually:

The first time I failed because I tried looking for a tool that would fir the GTD philosophy completely and would integrate perfectly with what I use to do my work. After trying tons of software (I stay by a PC 90% of my time, so it was the logical choice) I ended up spending more time testing and customizing than actually using the system. And it was bad. Instead of helping me gtd, it was the exact opposite – I lost time, thus things I could have done.

Second time I failed because I tried to adapt my environment to fit the full GTD philosophy – e.g. tuning my Outlook and text files and batch files to match everything in GTD : contexts, processes, etc.

This was last year. As the year was ending and the new one starting, and I had more spare time, I gave good thought on why it sounded so good, but didn’t work for me. I also read some more material on this subject, and the one that touched me most was "How I GTD". And the answer was simple: I must adapt the process and the thinking to my own life style. I am not a manager nor do I have tons of contexts; I don’t have teams to manage nor a physical inbox. And my life is still not so complicated.

So I did it. I gave up trying to fit everything into clear contexts and projects.Well, actually I gave up contexts entirely, since most things went into the @computer category. I started using Chandler to create lists of to-do tasks, add events into the calendar and integrate it with my e-mail system. This way I don’t have to care if my GTD app is with me all the time or not – I can just send me an e-mail and figure out what to do with it later. I only have one inbox : my e-mail inbox. I’ve digitized most of the things in my life, so paper-based material is close to nil.

And so far, it’s working, so I’m a happy, clear-minded worker again.