• Multi Platform
  • I need to be able to access my tasks from the web, my iPhone, and if possible a Mac.
  • Many solutions hit 2 out 3 of the platforms. I can accept not having a desktop app if the web app is available but I don’t like it.
• Effortless Syncing
  • I want to be able to enter/close tasks on one device and have those changes propagate within a couple of minutes across clients.
• Due Dates/Times
  • I want to be able to set a due date and time on a task.
• Reminders
  • I want to be able to set a reminder time on a task and preferably be notified on my iPhone.
• Cheap
  • I am willing to pay for task management software as evidenced by the numerous iPhone task managers I have bought in the last few years. However I am not willing to let a company siphon money from me indefinitely and I find the companies trying to charge extra for syncing particularly distasteful.

I have tried OmniFocus, Things, The Hit List and none of them have kept me using it for more than a few days. OmniFocus is to expensive and has no web app. Things has been promising sync forever and aside from a limited beta test hasn’t produced it. Cultured Code the make of Things also doesn’t seem to updated their website since last August. The Hit List was presumed dead for a long time until it’s developer popped up with a new version and added syncing for an extra monthly charge. So I have encountered show stoppers with all the big Mac task managers that preclude me from using them.

I have tried many web applications however most of them aren’t available on any other platform. I have been sporadically using iPhone clients that store their data in the Toodledo web application. This gave me the 2 platforms I needed the most web and mobile. However I haven’t been particularly pleased with any of the iPhone apps and Toodledo’s UI is ok but not great.

I am currently giving Wunderlist another try because it’s available on practically every platform Mac/Windows/Web/iOS I would want to use it on. Wunderlist is very simple however it does support multiple lists, due dates and times, syncing, and reminders on the iPhone. Wunderlist is free which isn’t actually a good sign in my book because they have no revenue to keep them in business.

I am going to try and stick to using Wunderlist for two weeks to really evaluate it. There is one thing that annoys me already and that is the custom backgrounds they use everywhere, I would prefer that the app use the native window background on iOS and Mac/Windows. I also wish Wunderlist would use black text in order to increase the contrast and make the test easier to read.

There are so many things wrong with this that I just had to write about it. I am venting in this way because I had to refrain from saying something I would regret after this decision was made.

First we are software developers not clerks in the 1950’s doing everything by hand. Our job is automate business processes not make them more inefficient.

We want to empower the users to address any issues they have rather than having to contact us. We want users to feel capable and that our product meets their needs.

The only way developers can fix this support issue is to go into the database and delete records since we have no superuser capability in the system. This is exactly what you never want to do unless it’s an emergency and then you better think twice before touching the database.

I believe once this solution is in place and the extra work is factored in we will end up developing a different solution to the problem so we won’t save any time overall and I wish we were doing it right in the first place.

I have two projects where I have the need to pull commits from an upstream github repo and then push to my own github repo. I kept finding myself with a detached head after pulling from the upstream repo. I could resolve any conflicts, commit my changes, and merge them back into HEAD but pulling from upstream would just result in a detached HEAD again. I went around and around with this issue until I was ready to cry uncle. I tried resolving this both through the command line and several Mac Gui git clients.

Fortunately this project contains my files in a couple of isolated directories. This let me copy those directories out of the repo and then delete the repo and start over with a fresh clone of the upstream repo and then add my files back in.

This shows me that I need to spend more time using git or stop trying to do oddball things with it.

My mom bought a version of the Apple II around the time I was starting high school at the time I didn’t get into it that much. Since my mom was teacher she had older model Macs for several years. My first real exposure to a Mac was when I was working for a publishing company and we used Quark Express on really old Macs running System 7 as the operating system. By this time in my life I loved computers of all kinds and was learning everything I could about computers and operating systems of all types.

It wasn’t until years later when I was attending college and that I was able to buy my first Mac. With the release of Mac OS X I had developed a real interest in Apple. I was studying computer science in college and I wanted a laptop computer to use for school so I bought a 12” PowerBook. I loved everything about that computer the portability, the aluminum enclosure, the joy I got from using it. From that day forward I primarily used a Mac at home even as I was a Windows developer at my day job.

A few years after I got my first Mac I bought an iPod Mini. I had a long commute for years and having my own music in the car made it so much more tolerable. When the iPhone 3G came out I bought one and fell in love it. I had a hand held computer straight out of science fiction that just blew my mind. When the iPhone 4 came out I upgraded from my 3G and bought my wife one as well. The products Steve Jobs designed have made our lives better and I think that is what Steve was always trying to do.

I tweaked some of the styles as well. I moved the post date to the right of the post title so it doesn’t take up as much room vertically and flows with the post a little better. I tightened up the spacing between posts and paragraphs as well as shrinking some of the font sizes in order to give the design a tighter feel.

I wish a designer would pitch in a little time and come up with an actually attractive default design for Octopress. I think that would make using it more appealing to those of us who are design challenged.

I decided it would be the least amount of work to move my posts into Octopress rather than migrating to a different platform so that is what I have done. I have been pretty happy so far. My next task will be to start modifying the layout to be something I like better as I have never liked any blog engine’s default theme so things may look a little wonky as I make changes.

One the core features of Google+ that I find interesting is how they have leveraged their search technology to create a kind of dynamic saved search they call Sparks. I think Sparks is really cool. I created a Ruby on Rails spark and when I click on it I get job postings, news articles, videos, and blog posts.

I haven’t had a chance to upload photos yet to try out that feature or the Hangout video conferencing/chat feature.

Google’s implementation of notifications is very slick and I believe web and I like it a lot.

I don’t use an Android phone so I will have to wait awhile until Google releases an iOS application but I am looking forward to being able to use it on my phone.

I also took this opportunity to add google’s +1 button to my posts on this blog.

When I eventually bought a PowerBook laptop one of the first things I bought was NetNewsWire and I have been using it practically every day since 2003. I have been a big fan of NNW for years and years. NNW was created and developed by Brent Simmons first as an indie developer then as part of NewsGator when it bought NNW. However NNW now has a new home, Brent left NewsGator to start a new company and before he left he conviced NewsGator to pass off NNW to a new company Black Pixel. I have used NNW as a client to Google Reader for years and while there have been some issues with syncing between NNW and Google Reader I guess it just never bothered me enough to even complain about it.

With NNW changing hands and the release of the Reeder RSS reader in the Mac store I decided to try something new. I have used the Reeder iOS app on my iPhone for a while but I don’t actually read RSS that much on my phone. I like the iPhone Reeder app better than the NNW iPhone app. The Mac OS version of Reeder is only $10 so I thought I would give it a try. So far I like it as a stripped down RSS reader. The UI is very attractive and it looks like it’s ready to be a part of the next Mac OS X version Lion already.

I do have a few quibbles so far with Reeder. Although it’s UI is very nice it’s pretty opaque the toolbar buttons have give you no textual reference as to what they do stand for. As someone who has so much ingrained muscle memory from having used NNW for so long getting used to a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts is a bit of a pain. Reeder also has a tendency to get a little hung up when I try and quickly select the next unread item when the current item is large or contains pictures or video. I know part of Reeder’s aesthetic is that the reading pane is styled very minimally but I miss NNW custom styles and I hope Reeder adds that capability in the future.

I will probably continue to use Reeder for the short term until I see what Black Pixel has in mind for the next version of NNW. For basic RSS reading I think Reeder is a pretty good application however I am hoping the next version of NNW continues it’s tradition of being one of the best applications on the Mac platform.

I decided I would take a day off work and drive up the day before the conference. I used to live and work right by the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg so I stopped off there and got lunch at Portillos. I stopped in at the bookstore and saw a movie. The unpredictable Midwestern weather caught me though as I had only packed clothes for warm weather and it was fifty-five degrees and blowing rain when I got out of the movie. I ducked into the mall and bought a pair of pants then I went down to the Apple store and played around with the new machines for a while. I really wish downstate Illinois would get an actual Apple store rather than just the display table in the Best Buy. After my afternoon of goofing around I drove up to Mundelein to check into my hotel.

I had a nice evening at the Double Tree I was staying at however I don’t sleep well in strange rooms so I was up early and ready to go early Saturday morning. I drove the rest of the way up to Grayslake Community College for the conference. I was one of the first people there and I ended up standing around for forty-five minutes as the organizers got ready to check people in.

The organizers of the conference had setup a very nice mobile version of the code camp web site and I had preloaded it onto my phone in case there was no wireless internet or 3G service in the college. However the wifi was pretty good and I never had a problem using it. The mobile version of the site let me flag the presentations I wanted to see so I knew which room I wanted to look for for each presentation. I had some time to kill before the first presentation time so I ended up talking to another attendee who was local and lived two minutes from where I had stayed in Mundelein.

When the first session time was approaching I found the room it was being held in and it was getting pretty crowded fast. I got a nice seat in the front row for Michael Eaton’s (@mjeaton) presentation Going Indy 101. I really enjoyed Michael’s presentation it was worth the day off and the trip to Code Camp. Michael’s presentation covered networking, insurance, lawyers, accountants, making contacts and priming your work pipeline. Here are my notes from the session.

• Networking → go to things like code camps, make contacts with vendors (Microsoft), if you work with a headhunter let them know what kind of work you are looking for such as having to work at least partially remote, contact local business groups such as the chamber of commerce
• Insurance → carry Errors and Omissions insurance in order to protect yourself
• Lawyer → having a lawyer will make you money, have a contract designed that allows you to subcontract and allows either side to walk away with 14 days notice
• Accountant → you need to have one do your taxes
• Make contacts → it is very helpful to be able to share your experiences and concerns with others doing the same type of work
• Work Pipeline → you need to have your time booked in October for the end of the year and preferably the beginning of the next year

Although I have only ever done a small amount of contract work if I need to in the future I will be referring back to my notes from this session.

The second session I attended was the Git More Done session which was given by Keith Dahlby (http://solutionizing.net/). This session started off humorously because he bashed the really poor version control systems some people where stuck using at their jobs such as TFS. Unfortunately the rest of the session went by really fast and I didn’t feel like much of it stuck with me. I did learn more about git rebase, git reflog, and git bisect so I got a little extra knowledge out of this session.

After the two sessions it was lunch time and we all went downstairs and got in line. The Code Camp was providing a box lunch that was a decent deli sandwich, chips, applesauce, a cookie, and a drink. I sat with a couple of guys who both worked for small insurance companies doing .Net development and working environments that sounded like they were being forced to use technologies that are more complex than need be to solve the business problems they were trying to address.

After lunch I was off to the Onion Architecture with MVC talk by Matt Hidinger This talk I found very interesting since I have experience developing a site from the ground up using the ASP.NET MVC technology. The speaker was advocating for an architecture that defines interfaces in a lower layer and implementations in a higher layer. I found it an interesting practice but it seems like it would be a bit frustrating to actually work with. I think a little discipline and using some commonsense conventions along with an IoC container could achieve the same things he was advocating.

The fourth session I attended was Micah Martin’s (@slagyr) Clojure; It’s the new Ruby talk. Micah’s talk was the most entertaining one of the day. Micah is “Uncle” Bob Martin’s son and his presentation covered how he created the cleancoders.com website in Clojure with his dad and ran it off of Google’s App Engine platform. Micah wrote a library for Clojure to interact with Google App Engine called gaeshi.

I have had a passing interest in Clojure since it’s a LISP implementation that runs on the JVM. I don’t have much experience with LISP other than a year or two via Emacs customization. However if I needed to run a program on the server to crunch some numbers and I wanted access to some Java code I would definitely consider Clojure. One of the interesting parts of the talk was when someone asked who is using Clojure and Micah mentioned Groupon and one of the senior engineers at Groupon was sitting in the back of the class and he described how they are using Clojure to analyse purchases and look for fraud. The Groupon engineer said they had run tests on several languages to see which would be appropriate for that project and found Clojure to be 13x faster than python.

The last session of my day I had previously decided to go to a DI/IoC talk and then I changed my mind at the last minute and went to JC Grubbs Introduction to mongoDB. This presentation was not great I don’t think he spent enough time introducing mongoDB and going over why you would choose it over a relational database. He ended up spending a lot of time talking about sharding which I would consider an advanced topic.

After all the sessions where done there was one last bit of the Code Camp where they raffled off a bunch of technical books, some .Net tools, and a couple of high end XBox packages. I ended up having my name drawn for an O’Reilly ebook of my choice which aside from one of the XBox’s was my next choice. I drove to the closest Portillos and had dinner and picked up an extra Chicago style hot dog for my wife since she hasn’t had one in a long time.

My dad spent a few days in the hospital and then he was moved to the nursing home in his home town because it has a good physical therapist. My dad is very slowly regaining movement in his legs and we are hoping for the best.

I give you the Jekyll Render Archives Tag Plugin. You can see it in action here on my blog by following the archives link at the top of the page.

It took me a little while to get the hang of what was going on because there aren’t really any how to write a Jekyll plugin resources out there. So the code for this plugin may not be the most elegant anyone has ever seen but it does what I wanted it to and so I thought I would make it available to anyone else looking to do so something similar.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41

module Jekyll
  class RenderArchivesTag < Liquid::Tag
    def initialize(tag_name, text, tokens)
      super
    end

    def render(context)
      posts = context.registers[:site].posts
      posts.sort!
      @collated_posts = {}
      posts.each do |post|
        @collated_posts[post.date.year] ||= []
        @collated_posts[post.date.year][post.date.month] ||= []
        @collated_posts[post.date.year][post.date.month] << post
      end

      output = ""
      @collated_posts.each do |k,v|
        output += "<div class='archive_year'>#{k}</div>"
        months = v.reverse
        months.each_with_index do |m, idx|
          unless m.nil?
            posts = m.reverse
            output += "<div class='archive_month'>#{Date::MONTHNAMES[posts[0].date.month]}</div>"
            posts.each do |p|
              output += "<ul>"
              output += "<li class='archive_title'>"
              output += "<span class='archive_day'>#{p.date.day.to_s}</span>"
              output += " <a href='#{p.url}'>#{p.data["title"]}</a></li>"
              output += "</ul>"
            end
          end
        end
      end
      return output
    end

  end
end

Liquid::Template.register_tag('render_archives', Jekyll::RenderArchivesTag)

I enjoyed the magic and the Asian tumblers who jumped through a burning ring. My wife remarked the lions just looked kind of pitiful and she was right. The elephants seemed to be in much better shape.

It seemed like the circus company was making most of their money on concessions and cheap plastic toys of which purchased. I probably paid half as much as the four tickets cost for popcorn/cotton candy and a toy for each of the kids. It still made for a fun day out with the family.

I had never played a Pokemon game before but I was interested. The chance to pick up one for half price persuaded me to pick one up. After all the parties had wound down I brought the games out and gave the one my son wanted to him and I took the other one. I then ended up spending most of Sunday playing the game. I can see how kids get sucked into those games they are a combination of a strategy game and a collectable card game.

Playing a game at the same time as my son is a lot of fun. We are both pretty into it. I don’t think the game would be nearly as much fun if I was playing by myself. My son who has played several of the previous Pokemon games is farther along than I am and he keeps trying to give me pointers and tell me where I should be going. I keep having to tell him “No spoilers”.

I put authors on two levels those whose books I buy immediately and I will always treasure and those who I enjoy but probably won’t read again. I decided in order to not be buried under books I could use a Kindle for reading books I don’t have to have in print. This has worked very well for me so far. The Kindle version of a book is usually discounted at least a dollar or two and it is very convenient to get a book delivered to the Kindle as soon as I decide to buy it.

A few other nice perks of using the Kindle are sending articles from the web to the Kindle to read. I found a Google Chrome browser plugin Send to Kindle that does just that. You can also setup the website Instapaper to send a digest of web pages you have saved to your Kindle each week. These features make the Kindle a device I have quickly come to love almost as much as an Apple product.

I am stilling buying physical books from my favorite authors and I will continue to do so as long as it is feasible. I also buy physical copies of computer books because I like to use them as reference material. All in all I am enjoying the Kindle even more than I thought I would.