Techiness
I'll clump web design talk and gadget talk here, I guess.
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GTD: Implementing with Tracks
When I started the new job on Monday, I took a bit of time to consider how I wanted to implement Getting Things Done (GTD) in the workplace. After considering my circumstances — glued to a computer all day, no particular need to access issues from home — I decided to try out Tracks, a Ruby on Rails tool for implementing GTD. Looked hot, so after a few failed attempts to get it installed on XP at work, I set up an account on a hosted server and ran with it. …I love it. Now, I have a PDA, you might say. A nice little Sony Clie 610C that’s served…
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User-focused development
Examine, if you will, the core design, development, and support trio of a company’s flagship product. This trio considers the product’s users dumb and stupid and “fucking retarded”. They’ve been told 30 times that a date looks like 3/19/2008, not 3/19/08, and certainly not “next Thursday”. They’ve been given the manuals and a tour through the product. They must be retarded if they repeatedly break the software. Customer support is, of course, a supremely annoying job. The customers don’t know what they’re talking about, and almost everything is a training issue. But those users keep that company afloat and its employees able to eat. Their needs are simple, and many…
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Java? Anyone ’round here do Java?
And because WO had me rolling twice today, you get twice the number of posts relating conversations between me and him than you’d ordinarily have. Wait. Zero times two is… Oh, snap. Teaching math is going to be hard. Anyway, this is some foul-mouthed stuff, folks. Send the kids to bed. Hopefully listboxes are kinder in the newer versions of Java…
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Task difficulty: cake
TINY Linux was the answer. A twelve-diskette install (by which I mean, 4 diskettes, round-n-round) later, I had a small Slackware 4.0 installation on my little laptop that could get on the internet. A little more work (i.e., manually setting network settings, as I had no DHCP client installed yet), and I had an installation that could grab packages from mhvlug.org with wget. I want to mirror this distribution via ftp on irrsinn.net soon, because that is the only resourece for Slackware 4.0 files I could find. Problem is, it’s a bit expensive under my hosting plan to set up anonymous FTP. At the very least, I can mirror it…
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Task difficulty: medium
Alright, things are better for the little laptop. When I tried to view the hard drive through a USB device (basically, an IDE port stuck onto a USB cable), both XP and Windows 2000 saw the drive as a 1.4 TB drive that was uninitialized. And it couldn’t initialize it. Fiddling with various drivers made no difference. A scanning program like R-Studio could see perfectly well the partitions and old files on the drive (including from the Windows installation that had been there), but it still thought it was a 1.4 TB drive. So that was a no-go. The drive is too tall to fit into the bay of my…