in gravyland

SubEthaEdit Blogzot promotion

Hmm.  So, via BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com, the price of SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys is being reduced 5c for every ‘qualifying blog post’.  MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software as a result of this promotion. Sounds like a good deal.
SubEthaEdit is a wonderful thing. Collaborative writing across the net.  Haven’t had to do any collaborative writing across the net yet, but heh.  Let’s try it out…

Google Earth for Mac

I see Google Earth has just become available for the Mac. As I write this I’m downloading. Can’t wait.

New Stuff

I’m working on some new AJAX-driven interactive web stuff. AJAX is a hype-driven idea that we can make web pages interactive and asynchronous so visitors don’t have to spend all their time waiting for pages to reload.

It is a cool idea. But there is an “As Usual” here. As Usual, it works great for simple things. To make things fast and snappy and with rounded corners is a lot harder and will involve lots of JavaScript with the usual cross-browser issues.

That said, it is fun and enjoyable to work with. And it is very refreshing to break out of the one-thing-per-page idea.

Want to know more? Start at the Wikipedia entry for Ajax (programming).

For my development, I’m using Python on the server, using the Myghty template framework and the Myghty Ajax Toolkit.

MyTaxTables project generates MYOB tax tables

Ages ago I wrote a post here that whinged about MYOB charging a lot for a new version of the MYOB accounting software every year, just in order to get updates to the tax tables used for calculating PAYG income tax.

There’s been an ongoing chat between a few folk in the comment thread about how to solve this problem. And now there is an open source solution to the problem: MyTaxTables is a project on sourceforge that allow you to easily convert ATO tax tables into MYOB tax tables. The developers are looking for people to test the software, so get on over there and help them out. It looks like it only works on Windows at the moment.

Congrats to the team for putting the software together (whoever you are) and huge kudos to the community that made it happen!

Speed Week 2005

Here’s what I’m up to in Adelaide this week:

SpeedWeek 2005

My Favourite OS X tools

I’ve been meaning to write down the set of software I use with OS X on a daily basis. It has taken me a couple of years to refine this set. OS X is a great operating system to start with. This is the cream.

Desktop Search/Launcher

The latest and greatest thing to make a big difference is Quicksilver. Hard to describe all it can do. At the basic level, you hit a hotkey, in my case Command-space and then start typing what you want. The name of an application, file, bookmark, contact, … and Quicksilver presents you with a list. You choose. It remembers for next time. I hardly ever use the dock anymore. Quicksilver has a plugin architecture that is constantly being added to, meaning that it can often perform functions inside applications. Like select a playlist from iTunes or something. Simply wonderful.

Writing/Editing

BBEdit is my tool of choice for writing and editing text, html and script languages. It is reliable and solid and works well under OS X. I use it for creative writing, blog posts, todo lists and just about everything else. I will use Microsoft Word for final documents, but I do all the source writing in BBEdit. It doesn’t get in the way. I’ve use both vi and emacs a lot in the past and still do on linux and windows. BBEdit is just better on OS X. Worth the money.

Browser

Two favourites. I use both Safari and Firefox. Safari wins for having that OS X sleek simplicity. Firefox wins for compatibility and extensions, like the Web Developer toolbar which I love. I’m in a Safari mood at the moment. Thankfully it is easy to move bookmarks back and forth between these two. Oh, Safari really benefits form the addition of Saft.

Email

I use and enjoy Mail.app. Again, nice and simple. I like the open storage of Mail. Entourage databases scare me.

Calendar/Todo lists

I use iCal. Works for me. It has got a lot better in the last couple of version. Clean lines and simple. I wish it was better at inviting people via email. That side of things is a bit clumsy.

I use PyGTD and BBEdit to manage my To do lists.

IRC

I use IRC a lot when working. So, I was really pleased when Colloquy came along. Very Tidy.

Instant Messaging

Lots of sucky IM clients for OS X. iChat is ok, but it annoyingly loses the server frequently and has to be logged back in manually. Presence lost. However, the Skype implementation of IM is nice and it always manages to stay automatically connected without creating a fuss. Plus, I love the way it works. Read about the protocol (pdf, 300k). It is all peer to peer!

Java Development

I use Eclipse for Java development. Hard not to love it. Free and fully featured and reliable and heavily extensible.

And the rest…

iPodderX Lite for podcast downloading. NetNewsWire as an RSS reader, most of the iApps for various things. Address Book for contacts. Terminal for just about everything else.

That covers most of it.

Experiments in Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done is the title of a book by David Allen that teaches skills and systems for working through the long lists of things we all have to do in an ever-more chaotic world. In this post I’m going to talk through how the book and the ideas behind it are changing the way am organised, and what tools I am using and trying out.

If you are looking for a gentle introduction to Getting Things Done, have a listen to Richard Giles’ Gadget Show Podcast interview with David Allen.

This book is a good one. I haven’t read it all yet. So far I find it is sensible and practical and an easy read. It deals with people like you and me as real fallible people with scattered minds and gives concrete things to do to create stress-free productivity.

(Note: in Australia, the book is called the slightly different How To Get Things Done.)

Even before my copy arrived I discovered the rather wonderful weblog called 43 Folders. 43 Folders is named for the number of manila folders to make a 12 month tickler file system. It talks about tools and techniques for implementing the Getting Things Done (GTD) systems on a Mac under OS X.

In GTD, it is really important to have a place to record the next actions (ToDo items) that you need to take in a reliable system. You don’t want to be relying on your memory, or on some system that you don’t trust. You want a way to record things that makes it very easy to put things in reliably, and makes it easy to get things out reliably. If you can trust that when you put things in they aren’t lost, and it is easy to put things in, you have the beginnings of a solid ToDo or next actions list.

I’ve adopted a pair of tools to handle this for me. My portable tool of choice is a stack of 3″ by 5″ index cards held together with clip and a pen or pencil. This is known as a hipster PDA. It is a very flexible way of quickly writing down things that are easily lost. Once written down, these can be merged later into the master system, or just thrown away when things are done. It works best if you write one item per card. This is so cheap and easy and flexible beyond belief that it is hard to beat.

So that handles the mobile todo system. On the Powerbook I’m using a slight advance from a plain text file. I’m using Keith Martin’s PyGTD, a python script that works on a set of text project files and combines them into a todo.txt file. It uses dates, importance, and urgency among other things to calculate the order of todo items and allows modifications of the todo.txt file to feed back into the project files. Entry is very quick, being simply adding plain text into a project file. Modifications are the same. Very quick. Fast feedback. No mouse clicks.

To enjoy PyGTD you are going to want to be very comfortable in a text editor. I’m using BBEdit to edit the files and activate the PyGTD script via a single key-press, but BBEdit is expensive overkill for this task. Look for another text editor that can easily run scripts.

So that handles the ToDo list side of things. Once you’ve got a system like this running that you can trust, and you can chuck things in easily, you are halfway there. But, my email was getting out of control, so I’ve simplified that as well by adopting some email productivity tips from 43 Folders. The most important thing here is (I find) to turn off automatic email receiving, and only check your mail when you are prepared to process what is coming in. That stops the email mounting up in a discouraging pile automatically all by itself. I feel back in control of my email now.

I’ll report more on how I go here as I get these systems bedded down. So far it feels really good. Also, I’ll report on my list of favourite OS X productivity tools. There are some real gems out there.

synergy magic

If you ever have more than one computer screen lined up next to one another, then you need to get hold of Synergy. You install it on each computer (Mac, Linux or Windows) and then after a little bit of configuration you can move the mouse from screen to screen, computer to computer completely naturally like they were multiple screens on one computer. AND cut and paste is supported across all of the computers.

The big thing synergy does it remove the need for a keyboard and mouse for each computer. And all those extra keyboards and mice take up desk space and then, if you are silly like me, you always end up typing on the wrong one.

Before I found synergy, I used a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch to move between my Mac and my windows box. That works well, except for three things:

• I often needed to see both screens anyway (which the KVM allowed), but then I could never tell or never remember which screen they keyboards and mouse were working on :-)
• There was a 3 second delay when nothing worked just after switching which seemed like forever. That 3 second delay was enough to make me forget why I was going to that screen anyway.
• I really needed cut and paste to work.

Synergy does it all. Free & Open Source. Go mad. Love it.

spam plugin update

I’ve just changed from using wp-blacklist to keep the comment spam in control over to WP Hashcash. wp-blacklist was having hassles with comment spammers leaving (intentionally?) bad urls, which were getting put in the blacklist and then causing wp-blacklist to choke on any comment input.

Wp Hashcash looks great so far. I’ll report after a couple of weeks.

But don’t get me wrong. wp-blacklist did a great job for a long time on my three blogs. I might well end up going back. Who knows? But we have to try out new things….

[Update 16/1/05: I've reverted to wp-blacklist. Something in WP-Hashcash was causing some looping in php, leading to apache processes on the server eating up all the CPU time. More on this when I work out why....]

[Update 29/1/05: I tried a manual installation of WP-Hashcash and it works without running the CPU into the ground. Good. ]

Mail.app indexes all the time

I use Mail.app for email on my Apple Powerbook.

Lately it had got to a point where Mail.app would re-index the Inbox all the time. This turned into big trouble eventually, with the processor working hard all the time to reindex the mailbox again and again and again.

I put up with it for a while, then eventually found this hint at macosxhints.com which helped but didn’t quite have the answer.

What I did to fix my problem is shown below. This worked for me with Mail.app version 1.3.9 under Mac OS X 10.3.6:

1. Back up all you mail folders first. Just in case. This worked for me but may not work for you. Your mileage may vary. I accept no responsibility for these steps doing anything to your computer or email. That’s your responsibility.
2. Empty your Junk Mail and Trash folders from Mail.app and also make sure you’ve read everything in your Inbox. This is important because we are going to re-make the indexes and this will reset the status of messages.
3. Quit Mail.app
4. Open a terminal window and perform the following commands
5. cd ~/Library/Mail/
6. cd to the directory of your mailbox that is causing problems. Mine was called POP-gra@sf.barkingowl.com
7. cd INBOX.mbox
8. Now we are going to delete some files. Be careful! Only proceed if you know what you are doing…
9. rm .index.ready
10. rm content_index
11. rm table_of_contents
12. restart Mail.app. You’ll see that your inbox now shows all items are unread and it will re-index the mailbox. You can select all messages and mark them as read and you are back to normal.

This worked for me. Mail.app now doesn’t index all the time. Much better.

MYOB tax table exploitation

The budget comes and goes each year, and we are used to small tax changes, at least in recent years. For all businesses this means that there will be changes to the tax deducted from employees wages. A lot of businesses use MYOB and other accounting packages to do this.

And then, a close to the 30th of June a fax comes from MYOB, suggesting you need to buy the new version in order to get the tax table changes. And that is over $300 for a whole new version of the software or sign up to quite expensive support that in the past has been quite useless. This feels like exploitation when the tax changes are small — a few numbers changed in the tax tables. And the tax table is in a file in the application folder (on MYOB AccountEdge it is, anyway)

Over $300 to update a table? I think not. That’s exploiting small business. Come on MYOB, just distribute the tax table change for free. That would be fair and reasonable.

Or somebody else will probably update the tax table and make it a free download. Anybody want to do it?