Blog

  • Bad Behavior 2 Beta 1

    June 26, 2006

    Some nice commenters let me know that they were still having trouble posting comments and receiving errors. This was due to the anti-comment spam plugin I was using, Bad Behavior 2. Compounding the issue was the cryptic error messages BB2 generated when its “5-second wait-before-you-can-post” trigger was activated. I eventually modified my copy so it didn’t give the people the impression my entire site was on the verge of collapse; most people just saw ERROR and tons of tiny text, and (naturally) assumed that some kind of severe system error had occured due to errors in my PHP coding or my ISP’s server configuration. That is in fact what I thought until I read the text more carefully.

    Anyway, today I was hapy to see that Beta 1 is available. It gets rid of the 5-second wait that caused the problems I just mentioned.

    • Just installed it. Crossing my fingers.

    • I was about to give WP-Hashcash a try again, but people have been reporting that it’s also letting spam comments through again…figured I would try BB2 first.

    • I also deactivated Spam Karma 2 and enabled Akismet 1.15 to see what happens. I know, it looks like bad debugging methodology…I should just keep BB2 on for a while first to establish any change in behavior, then try swapping Akismet in. However, the input is pretty variable: new spamming techniques arise every day, as do new spammers and spam surges. I wouldn’t be able to tell, without spending a lot of time I don’t have, what the causal relationship is between spam stopped and a particular plugin combination. So I might as well just see how they work from an administrative perspective.

    <

    p>Without these plugins, I would have to shut off comments. It is incredibly irritating that these spammers STEAL OTHER PEOPLES TIME AND PROPERTY to make their money. This starts to make the non-anonymous Internet look attractive, but then you have the problem of TRUSTING THE GATEKEEPERS of the system to maintain the egalitarian policies of a Free Internet in the face of commercial greed. Sigh.

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    DSri Seah

  • The Printable CEO™ in Japan

    June 26, 2006

    I got a lot of incoming hits this weekend from Japan, from some kind of explanation of the Printable CEO. It’s even got diagrams explaining the various areas of the forms, and how-to modify them in Illustrator CS2. Translator-raconteur Matt Alt told me it was a part of a productivity series. I grew up inspired by all the cool stuff that comes out of Japan—I’m thinking mecha design in particular—and it’s interesting how seeing something I’ve worked on reported in Japanese text gives me a little surge of joy; It feels a bit like I’m a kid getting to throw the opening ball at a baseball game, if that makes any sense.

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    DSri Seah

  • A Theory of Blahness

    June 26, 2006

    Right now I am feeling rather tired and sluggish. I just realized that over the weekend, I haven’t been drinking nearly enough water. Could this feeling merely be onset of dehydration, and perhaps lack of breakfast?

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    DSri Seah

  • Emergent Task Tracker Updates

    June 25, 2006

    I had a couple hours free this weekend to hack in some new features to the interactive version of the Emergent Task Tracker Alpha. There’s a few new features:

    • I am now allowing non-US character sets for task entry. The rest of the application has not been localized, but you should be able to now enter and display your native language if it’s not basic LATIN. Japanese should work, for example. This is not a full internationalization pass by any means, and unfortunately users of bidirectional languages (Farsi, Arabic, and Hebrew for example) are likely to have some problems (Flash does not support BIDI text input).

    • You can now customize the alarm sound by uploading an MP3 to a web server. Type set alarmURL http://location/of/file.mp3 in the command line (CTRL-SHIFT-TILDE to get the console). You can use the alarmplay command to see what alarm is currently set, and alarmdefault to reset it back to the default. The location of the alarm URL is saved, so you should only have to do it once.

    • The current time cursor should now be displayed if the default starting time causes it to be out-of-range. This should help alleviate some confusion when the cursor doesn’t show up.

    <

    p>This should help make the application a little more useful in its current alpha development state. For more information, see last Friday’s post.

    Feel free to post feedback :-) The next thing I’ll be doing is probably adding drag-and-drop; I’m using a slightly different Flash programming approach than I usually do, so it’s interesting to work out new (to me) paradigms for old techniques.

    After that, the big question is how to sync all the task data to a server database. I’ve never written a real webservice before on the server side, so I have a lot of questions about “best practices” to create a service that handles multiple transactions from multiple clients seamlessly and securely. I think my data architecture will translate well to a database (it’s designed to be reused by different incarnations of the PCEO tools), but I’m also not that well-versed in SQL and PHP. Should be interesting…looking forward to finally learning how to do this stuff :-)

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    DSri Seah

  • The Printable CEO™ Online Emergent Task Timer

    June 23, 2006

    ETT I was getting pretty fed up with my kitchen timer-based Emergent Task Timer sheet. The sheet itself I like a lot, but I was continuously getting out of sync with my kitchen timer. I sometimes would get lost in my work and forget to mark where I was leaving off between tasks. Very annoying.

    To resolve the kitchen timer issue, I put together a quick Flash 8 prototype. Once I got going, I added more of the functionality of the paper-based form and ended up with something that is usable day-to-day. It’s useful enough to release to the public, I think: Emergent Task Tracker Online Tool. This is an alpha-quality release, but I am finding it already useful in my day-to-day.

    Basic Instructions

    As this is a functional prototype, a lot of the UI hasn’t yet been worked out and may be confusing. The basic operation is this:

    • Choose a start hour. If you’re starting work at 9AM, set the start hour to 9. The timer uses 24 hour time, which I am partial too because it makes it easier to calculate things like time durations.

    • Enter some names of tasks on the left side. I don’t have drag and drop working yet, so you’ll have to make do with just filling text in.

    • Track the current time by looking for the red vertical line. If you don’t see it, it’s possibly not visible on the current range of hours you have displayed. Just adjust the start time (base it on the current time) and you’ll see it.

    • Optionally turn on the 15-minute alarm by checking the box in the lower left corner.

    • Print your sheet when you need a hardcopy with the PRINT button in the lower right.

    • Don’t Worry about Closing the Window…I’m using “Local Shared Objects” that save data persistently between sessions; it’s sort of like a “Flash Cookie”. The upshot is that if you accidently close the browser window, you won’t lose your data…just open it up again and it should all be there.

    Workarounds

    Right now, the ETT tool tracks a single day consisting of 24 hours. There currently isn’t a convenient way to browse the day. To see other parts of the day, just set the start time to something else. I’ll be adding those kinds of UI elements as the feature set starts to finalize. If you want to erase the current day and start a new sheet, you need to go into the debugger:

    1. Click the movie, type CTRL-SHIFT-~ (tilde, usually upper left of your keyboard).

    2. Click in the bottom line of the console (the input line) and type lso clear. This erases the persistent storage (the local shared object, or LSO).

    3. Reload the web page, and the hour tracking information for the CURRENT DAY will be created.

    More Later

    <

    p>I’m pretty tired and I still have to clean up the house for Creative Retreating this weekend, but I’m jazzed to have gotten one of my backburnered projects actually off the ground. Yay! GTD helped me maintain momentum with all that next-action talk. Dang…it actually worked!

    There’s some interesting things about the software design, particularly the data structures for the tasks and hours, that would be fun to talk about. In the meantime, please feel free to give the prototype a browse and let me know what you think. Thanks!

    Updates

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    DSri Seah