ToDoList

My todo-list is..huge. For WinMerge and Frhed there are hundreds of bugs to look and and (some day) fix. And few times more of new features and improvements (visible ones). And then maybe couple of thousand things for testing, documenting, refactoring code…

Few years ago this almost drive me nuts even trying to somehow keep up all these things. Not alone trying to track these things. Planning is totally out of the question. Most of the time I try to find the most important things. Based on my memory and experience about what are important things. Yes, I simply forget lots of things. Just reading through most bug reports would take days of my free time. I haven’t even tried to read through feature requests in last couple of years.

Sourceforge.net does not really help software developers. Their trackers are plain awful to use. They are slightly better than putting TODO and BUGS -text files to Subversion and just editing those files. But not much. Recently they added Trac to their software offering. I thought we could finally start using decent tracking software. But there is a catch. You can export data from Sourceforge.net trackers. But there is no way to import it to their Trac installation. So no switch for us.

Couple of days ago I updated to the latest version of the ToDoList by dan.g. It is an excellent advanced todo-list application. I’ve been using it for years tracking everything. Its weakness is it is a quite complicated-looking. Luckily it can be configured, but it takes some time to find a configuration that works best for different needs. And even then it takes more time to find out the best way to work with it.

Yes, there are lots of todo-list applications. Everybody wants to do their own. Just because they can? But most of those applications can only sort by few levels of priority. Some allow even setting due dates. How original. I quess people writing those applications never have more than ten items in their lists. And they never want to categorize or sort their items. No much sorting in two items… When you have even 50 items you really appreciate ability to add categories etc to your items.

One nice thing in ToDoList is its code is available under free license. Few years ago I even borrowed some code from it to WinMerge (the options dialog). Unfortunately the current license (The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License) is not GPLv2 compatible and hence does not allow further code sharing. I suspect the licensing change is pure accident due to code published as a part of the article. But still prevents me updating to latest options-dialog code. Of course I could ask if Dan would be willing to double-license the code with GPLv2 compatible license…

Small annoyance with ToDoList is it doesn’t have installer but just files in zips. So the update is not simply downloading installer exe and running it (which I’ve used to doing for lots of programs). Instead I need to unzip the files with WinRar. That gets annoying when there are frequent updates.

If you need a good todo-list but don’t want to install Bugzilla for it, ToDoList is worth looking at.

Sodan Tuulet

Viime päivät (lue: illat) onkin mennyt Sodan Tuulet -sarjaa (Eng: Winds of War) DVD:llä katsellessa. Vaikuttavin sarja mitä on vähään aikaan tullutkaan katsottua. Ko. sarjan boksin ostin jokin aika sitten heräteostoksena Anttilasta. Ja eipä kyllä kaduta tippaakaan.

Itse asiassahan tuo on mini-sarja, ja useimmat jaksot kestävät yli kaksi tuntia (jakso per dvd). Mutta siltikin tuntuu että niin paljon jää kertomatta tarinasta. Ja tietenkin koko tarina jää pahimmoilleen kesken. Olisikin todella hienoa kun saisi jatko-osan Sodan Muisto:nkin (War and Remembrance) katsottavaksi. Valitettavasti tuota ei ole (vielä) julkaistu Suomi-boksina.

Nämä molemmat sarjat perustuvat Herman Wouk:n kirjoihin. Luin tuon Sodan Muisto:n muutamia vuosia sitten. Lukemistahan siinä riittää tuhannen sivun verran. Mutta eipä sen kanssa aika käy myöskään pitkäksi. Vaikka meritaisteluiden kuvaaminen ja strategioiden selittäminen välillä onkin aika hankalaa ymmärtää. Ehkä se tarkkuus sopisikin paremmin jonnekin tieto-kirjaan eikä romaaniin.

Niin, itse tuosta Sodan Tuulista. Vaikka näitä sota-tarinoita onkin viime vuosina tullut “tarpeeksi” (Taistelutoverit, Pelastakaa Sotamies Ryan, Schindlerin lista jne) niin siltikin omasta mielestäni tämä on kuvauksena mielenkiintoisin (ja minä pidän Taistelutovereistakin). Koska sarjassa ei kuvata itse sotaa, vaan ihmisiä jotka vaan joutuu ns. pahaan paikkaan. Ei tarvitse mässäillä verellä tai komeilla räjähdyksillä, kerrottavaa riittää muutenkin.

Tarinasta on huono kertoa ilman että tulisi paljastettua liikaa. Mutta sanotaan nyt vaikka että keskeisimmät toisen maailmansodan tapahtumat itse sodan valmisteluista Pearl Harbouriin käydään läpi. Ja joku päähenkilöistä on aina jotenkin mukana tapahtumissa.

Seuraavaksi pitänee hommata Sodan Tuulet myös kirjana. Jotenkin voisin kuvitella että tarinaan sisältyy paljon enemmän kuin mitä TV-sarja pystyy kertomaan. Sitten pitäisi jostain löytää aikaa lukea se… Noh, junassa istumistahan on tiedossa…

Jos on katsomisesta pulaa, hommatkaa tämä sarja. Jos on lukemisesta pulaa, hommatkaa jompi kumpi kirja.

Facebook and RSS-readers

Some time ago I added RSS application called Simply RSS to my Facebook profile. It worked pretty well with my blog’s feed. But I think after Facebook update it stopped updating. I even tried to install another RSS application but could not get it working either.

I hope this does not mean that RSS applications don’t work with the new Facebook? Not sure about the application model with Facebook, but maybe apps don’t “run” when they are shown (page opened). If I open the Simply RSS’s options and ask it it update, it works. Otherwise it won’t update feeds.

Feeds are very handy way to keep up with lots of different web sites, news and blogs. Especially the blogs are getting more and more important in spreading the information. Currently I’m using FireFox add-on to read feeds. But it would be cool to get feeds appear as one Facebook page. It would mean (once again) less applications to use and less web pages to open to get the information.

But I quess for the Facebook (and big public) it is more important that those endless quizes and games work… I definitely need to know what Disney character I am (based on couple of questions) and how perfect life I have based on few weird questions… Instead of getting latest news and information I really need.

I don’t want to give up (yet) so I’ll try to find a working RSS application or configuration that works with Simply RSS application.

Maemo WordPy testing

Ok, this is for testing the maemo blogger software (Maemo WordPy). If this works it is very cool.

It is easy to see I’m not very active blog writer. That is because I don’t have much time for it. And when I have time I’ away from the computer.

I will be traveling by train Monday and Tuesday. So it will be interesting to see if I really can start using this tool for real blogging…

I’m in Facebook

Yes, I’m also in Facebook. I don’t even remember when I created the account. Must be just one of those sites I’ve sometimes visited and registered to. Then just forgotten it. There are so many sites I sometimes register to see if they offer something useful. And if I don’t see anything useful there I just forget them. At first it looked like Facebook was one of those useless Web 2.0 sites with lots of hype but nothing really useful.

Then I got e-mail that one of my co-worker wants to add me as a friend. I quickly just logged in and accepted the request. And forgot the site again. There isn’t much in default Facebook profile after creating it.

Few weeks later I heard two co-workers talking – first one had done something interesting and second one had seen it from the Facebook profile. So people really use it and share information through it? I decided to look at it more carefully again.

How wrong had I been! When I started actively looking at Facebook I started to understand why people are there. There is a lot of entertainment available. Lots and lots of small applications you can add to your profile, take quizzes, send and receive gifts, hug friends and whatever! There are apps for sharing images and videos too. Just looking at all those fun images and videos people share would be worth of it. But there is so much more. And all this of course is part of this “social networking”. So entertainment value is great. And I’m certainly using many of these fun applications already. And all this working because you are sharing things with your friends. When I created my account and didn’t yet have any friends, I couldn’t see all the possibilities.

But how about something really useful, not just entertainment when you want to spend some time?

That is a lot harder question. I’ve tried many interesting applications, installed, tried and then uninstalled. Quality of many applications just sucks. Its kind of same thing that happened when Visual Basic was published. Everybody could do programs, so everybody did. Now that everybody can make those nice Facebook applications, everybody is doing them. Finding useful and/or quality applications is too hard.

One application saved me really. The Slates application is great! It allows me to write notes, thoughts, opinions and whatever I want to write. I can write public messages for others to read, or private messages for myself (or for later publishing). I can add tags to keep up with my texts. Just what I needed. I’ve already written several non-public text and started couple. I’m sure I’ll be writing many texts. And I can edit them whenever I can access my Facebook profile. Earlier I wrote these kind of texts as mails in gmail.

For people like me who like to write things down, that alone would keep me using Facebook. So we have the entertainment, and one really useful application. I’m still really missing other useful applications. I tried one calendar application but it was using some external calendar service. Too bad. Calendar could have been second really useful application.

I’ve also tried to look at Facebook as WinMerge developer. Can I use Facebook somehow to help my WinMerge efforts. Other than letting people know more about me? I’m not sure. I created WinMerge group, but again as there really aren’t groupware applications (or I haven’t found them) I think the usage is very limited. I can post items about releases, and there can be discussions about WinMerge. But all that is already available in several other places. Maybe it has some value that people can do it in same application (Facebook) and don’t need to login to other sites has some value. Anyway, I’m keeping the WinMerge group and I accept people there. Maybe it is good to just have WinMerge to show in your profile’s group list?

It was also very disappointing to find out there is no good way to make my blog posts to show up in my profile page. I found one working RSS software, but it is far from good. Also, there is no way to just add list of my favorite links?! Some links could be public, but I don’t want to publish links to some non-public servers. Still I’d like to keep those links easily available somewhere… I can create Slate article and add them there, but shouldn’t links application be a very basic Facebook application? Aren’t people sharing links anymore? Yes, there is that Posted Items -application. But as I wrote I want to control visibility.