Rogue Wolves

Today I have the fortune to attend a private researcher session with Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Dr. Vint Cerf at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Cerf is also known as the "Father of the Internet" as he co-designed the TCP/IP protocol and the basic Internet architecture.

Yesterday I attended an open session talk he gave for the Moore School of Business and was lucky enough to ask him a question during Q&A. I recorded the audio of that session and I will post it on this site soon. I won't be posting the audio for the private researcher session unless I find it is appropriate. However, I'll try and post any interesting discussions that arise during that session.

Dr. Cerf is a great speaker and his talks should not be missed.

After hearing about Getting Things Gone (GTD) on the web for years now I have finally decided to see what all the fuss is about and find out more. If you haven't heard about GTD it's a productivity/organization system to help you "Get things Done". The system was created by productivity guru David Allen who published a book on the subject: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. (Note if you buy the book using that link you will support Merlin Mann of 43 Folders. I figure I've gotten so much from his site that if I can get him a few extra bucks it's the least I could do)

So I bought the book and I'm halfway done it but now I'm considering what tools I'll use to implement my workflow. For physical things like mail, forms, etc I will use metal stackable trays for IN boxes but for the majority of my "stuff" it will be digital. I want some good tools to keep track of everything on my mac and then sync everything to my Palm Tungsten T3 for mobile calendar/todos/notes.

After a bit of research here are choices I'm looking at for Mac tools:

iGTD

Pros:

• Built for GTD
• Developer is very actively developing application (updates almost every day)
• iCal sync
• Tagging
• Lots of praise from the GTD OS X community
• Freeware
• Excellent Quicksilver support

Cons:

• Cluttered UI
• Not very mature
• Closed data formats!
• No export features (yet)

Actiontastic

Pros:

• Built for GTD
• iCal sync
• Opensource
• Simple User Interface
• Not bad Quicksilver support

Cons:

• Not very mature
• No Smart Folders
• No tagging

Journler

Pros:

• Extensible with AppleScript
• Fantastic journaling application
• Allows audio recording, video, text and attaching files to entries
• iLife support
• Mature application
• Tagging
• Amazing Smart Folder support
• Freeware
• Quicksilver support (via services plugin)
• Great export features

Cons:

• Not designed as GTD application (but could be used as one)
• No iCal Sync (some iCal integration can be achieved using AppleScript

I've been using Journler now for research, notes, etc for a month now and it's a fantastic tool. This is why it would be great to also use it as a central point for GTD but it definitely wouldn't be as feature rich or polished a solution as the other two applications. I'll play around with them and see what I think. Anyone else have some good thoughts or experience with GTD?

These days I need to work on my organization. Between working on my PhD (course work, research projects, dissertation), consulting, personal projects and life in general my current systems are in need of tweaking. I'm hoping GTD is as good as all the buzz says it is. So far from what I've learned it does have promise. We'll see how it goes...

I've decided to use CVS to maintain my Drupal sites rather than manually downloading Drupal updates and upgrading by copying the updates into your drupal folder. Manually updating is time consuming. In order to do it correctly you shouldn't just copy the new files overtop of your existing install since this could leave old files in your folder that are no longer used and can cause problems or security holes. To do it right you need to rebuild your Drupal folder and then copy in your settings, themes, etc. Then you may also need to go and download all your modules again for the new version. It turns into a chore quickly. A much better way is to use CVS to handle all the grunt work.

Drupal like many open source projects uses CVS to maintain it's development and release code. CVS is a version control system that helps developers keep track of their code and all the changes that have occured. Also, like many open source projects the CVS repositories that store this code are open for anonymous access (read only). This means anyone can download the latest code directly from the CVS repository that hosts it. By using CVS you get all the nifty features of a version control system such as updates to out of date files/folders and removal of files no longer in the repository. This is exactly the functionality I want in order to eliminate the need to manually perform these actions...

Recently I've had to do some SOA development using Java and Tomcat. I've never dipped my toes into Java web service development so it's a new world to me. Compared to ASP.NET it seems very convoluted with many different frameworks and conflicting/incomplete/outdated tutorials. I ended up using Axis2 as the framework but wanting to develop on OS X I had to install a servlet container to host my web services. I also wanted to integrate this into Apache for various reasons. After some research and searching here is a process I came up with to install Tomcat on OS X using Apache.

These instructions are for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with JDK 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5:

Step 1: Download Tomcat and JK source

You can download Tomcat from this link

In order to integrate Tomcat with Apache you need to use the JK Apache module. I downloaded the source for the module and compiled it. You can download the JK Apache module source from this link

Step 2: Install Apache Tomcat

First unpack apache tomcat (double click the file in the Finder) then move folder to /usr/local (or optionally /Library)


sudo mv apache-tomcat-5.5.20 /usr/local


Next create a symbolic link in /usr/local for tomcat. I do this to make it easier to update tomcat versions later.


sudo ln -s apache-tomcat-5.5.20 tomcat


Step 3: Build and install the JK module for Apache

Unpack JK module (double click the file in the Finder) and then open a Terminal and change to the directory that contains the JK source code native directory. You need to build the module from source code to do this issue these commands: