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  • Michael 4:55 pm on February 8, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Todo Later: First Update 

    This is my first update on the project I previously blogged about. It’s called Todo Later, and it’s aimed at solving some problems I’ve had with other task management software.

    I’ve registered the domain already (sadly, .com was being squatted at the time of registration), and have setup an SSL certificate. Everything is rolling right along. The API engine is the first item on the list. I’m not really experienced with API engine programming, so the first implementation might be ugly. I’ll have to get a book or two on API design.

    Once the API engine is out of the way, the web frontend will come into effect. The layout is unknown at this point. I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself and just focus on everything in order that they should be completed.

    I’ll be sure to post more as I progress through.

     

  • Michael 9:58 pm on February 1, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: GTD   

    GTD: A Story About A Personal Struggle 

    When I started my first job, one of the things I had to get used to was making a list of what I had to do, using a pen and a legal pad.

    I quickly started losing track of where I was.  If I had to go to a new page, I didn’t think to transfer my open items over to the new page.  There was little room for context, notes, due dates, and urgency.  I needed an application to handle this.

    I started working on a little website to take care of this, with collaboration, but it meant that I had to build something reasonably professional, if my coworkers wanted to use it.  The project ended up falling by the wayside, so I started hunting for the perfect GTD application.

    The Things application stood out to me.  It was beautifully designed, and had everything I could ask for.  However, the price was a bit steep.  $50 for the Mac application, $20 for the iPad application.  That company would certainly get my money due to the design and features, but it was missing one crucial thing: cloud sync.

    Looking around, I stumbled upon Producteev.  It was an elegant application that emulated some of the things I was looking for in Things, and it was free!  But it lacked an iPad application.  One of the features I needed was the ability to add/edit notes.  You could add and delete, but not update.  Am I the only person on this planet who has to modify what they note about a particular task?  Apparently this issue has been raised a few times before, but there isn’t much feedback as to whether the developers are willing to add such a feature.

    I tried OmniFocus, but it was worse than Things in terms of pricing (Mac: $80, iPad: $40). Although the desktop application was customizable, the design was less than appealing.

    Then there’s a handful of others that charge a monthly fee.  I know what they’re doing, but it’s a little ridiculous.  I just want something that has some features.  $10 for an iPad version, $5 or so for the iPhone/iPod Touch version, and maybe $20-$30 for the Mac version with a decent demo time to let people get accustom to the application.  No monthly fee.  Oh, and syncing.  That is a must.

    That’s why I’m planning on writing my own.  It’ll be an interesting experience, and I plan on documenting my adventure into iOS development.

    The plan so far:

    • Daemon written in Perl to act as an API engine to query databases
    • Website written in either PHP or Ruby on Rails (I have no prior experience with RoR, so this should be interesting)
    • Mac application written in Objective-C
    • iPad application written in Objective-C

    I’ll post more in this blog until I can get a blog setup on domain I’ve yet to decide on for the GTD application.

     

  • Michael 6:11 pm on February 17, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Perl, programming   

    Rounding Currency in Perl with sprintf 

    In hopes of trying to automate some of the daily work that I have to do, I tried implementing a way to calculate the exact amount of postage a job might use, by using the return files that we generate for each job.

    I ran into an interesting problem that I couldn’t seem to find a real solution for (I didn’t do much hunting, just searched for “perl round decimal sprintf”, but didn’t try “perl round currency”).

    The problem was that I had $1,466.485 returned from the postage information, which gets rounded up to $1,466.49 on the forms we print out. However, my script wanted to round it to $1,466.48, and not $1,466.49 .

    Original code:
    sprintf("%0.2f", $money);

    Solution:
    sprintf("%0.2f", ($money + .0001));

    By adding that 1/100th of a cent, it forces Perl to round up to the hundredths place, or nearest whole cent.

     

  • Michael 2:58 am on February 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Linux, , VIM   

    Vim to the Rescue! 

    When I started getting into Linux, it was sometime during the early Mandrake 10′s releases (I’m judging this date by the old CD’s that say “Mandrake 10 – CD 1″ on the cover). I did it mostly because it seemed like a rebellious way to use a computer at the time.

    Along with Mandrake, came KDE. I don’t even remember if GNOME was an option during install. On KDE, I had to use Kate to edit files. Shortly after discovering the terminal window, a few people pointed me to use nano, which was one of the most basic editors that could be easily picked up. I must’ve used nano for at least 3 years, but I felt like venturing out of the nano box and explore other solutions.

    Emacs seemed to be this obfuscated editor that relied on an X server to be running, which isn’t something I particularly liked. I wanted to look cool and use something from the terminal, so I stumbled vi. No matter which button I pressed while in that editor, it seemed like the wrong one. Someone suggested on IRC that I’d probably prefer Vim over vi, which was essentially a more improved version of vi.

    After I got the hang of the different modes, I read about the various plugins or scripts that you can get for it, which is mostly what this article is about.

    Fast forward to today, I’ve got MacVim running on my Mac, with some rather neat plugins and scripts.

    Right now, I’m using:

    • The NERD Tree: which allows you to browse a filesystem from within Vim,
    • netrw: a script that allows you to edit and read files across multiple network protocols,
    • snipMate: a script that can help cut down on programming time by auto-completing various procedures in code,
    • ManPageView: a script that is able to pull up the man page, Perl doc, and PHP doc for any function or application,
    • Vim Addon Manager: a script that takes the task of going out and finding the source to whatever script that you wish to use.

    I hope that this list is useful to everyone who might stumble upon it.

     

  • Michael 6:36 am on January 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Saw this really neat application called F.lux, posted on reddit. It adjusts the display of your monitor to fit the time of day, to avoid eye strain. I’ve been using it for the past two hours, and the sepia tone took a little bit to get used to. Now, switching back to the normal screen is almost painful (in a good way, the sepia tone makes everything soft to look at).

     

    • Chris L Walters 11:37 pm on January 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I tried it…VERY hard to get used to…I can’t use it.

  • Michael 5:32 am on January 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Settling In 

    I think I’ve decided to stick with this theme. It’s elegant, yet minimalistic enough for my tastes.

    I also fixed up some of the lighttpd rewriting rules, so we can now use and include media in our posts.

    Today, I bought season one, part one of Dragonball Z Kai, which is a remastering of the Dragonball Z series, and a two DVD box of the final two Dragonball movies, which I’m watching the second one as I’m typing this.

    I’ve decided to use this blog as a means of talking about my day, and perhaps collecting code that I’ve come across, or used to solve a problem with. Hopefully it will be useful to someone other than myself.

     

  • Michael 2:45 am on January 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    First Post 

    This is the first post, of hopefully many more to come.

    Right now I’m trying to setup a few accounts here for friends.

    Work was alright.  Made a script that pulls information off of the postage handling website, wrestled an automatic invoicer into accepting return files that we generate, and made some more progress on a parser script for a customer that’s coming on board in a few days.  I’m not quite sure what the final word is on this particular customer, as they’ve been asking us to come up with some pretty strange stuff considering they haven’t finalized their data yet.  Why do people in administrative positions at hospitals have to be so stubborn?

    Aside from work stuff, I’m still working on this silly Pokemon website.  I hope to have it finished by mid-March.

     

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