Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...


Posts Tagged ‘planet’

Some housekeeping

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

I'm going on a big trip in a few months, and figure it's a good time to start planning a bit more actively.

I've used the "Getting Things Done" methodology in my e-mail for a while (basically: your inbox should always be empty, you should have an "Action this" folder and a "Reference" folder, and you should either deal with an incoming e-mail immediately or file it into one of these two folders for later processing).  It seems like it might be fun to try it a bit more with the things I need to arrange before I go - you really do have to break things down into small steps when it's "move half way across the world for fun".  So I'm looking at Tracks, a GTD program written in Ruby on Rails.

Before setting this up though, I needed to play with my web host a little, so have categorized my posts to this site.  This crosses something off my aforementioned list-of-things-to-do, and also means that I will be a bit easier to read on planet.geek.nz, where I am now showing up.  Also, I'll probably do the whole Postcards from Uncle Travelling Matt thing, and I'm sure my Mum will find posts about Exim a bit over her head.

I've also seen a lot of people using Google Calendar, and now there is a way to get Thunderbird to use it directly, and you can publish stuff to the web in a neat fashion, I might see if it can arrange my trip for me.

Any other suggestions are welcome, bearing in mind I will need them to be easily accessible from anywhere.

Planet NZTech

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Planet NZTech has received a facelift recently. As well as a new design, seems that the behind-the-scenes stuff has all been fixed, including the last of the unicode problems (I hope Follower wasn't calling me uncultured. I'll get him back by pointing out that his post was syndicated from his blog to Advogato, and from Advogato to the Planet, so appeared twice in a row!)

Other than the layout, the biggest change is the de-emphasising of who wrote what. It's an interesting concept, probably based around the idea of a magazine that has a single focus, and multiple people writing to that focus. In this case, I think people write for their own purposes (I still don't know what mine is, so I should stop doing it) and it's a bit confusing having everything anonymised. Plus, you don't get to have cool heads. But it's not wrong, it's different.

Web 2.0 vs chmod a=rwx

Monday, June 5th, 2006

Meanwhile, over on Planet NZTech (I'll pony up the cash for for planet.geek.nz btw), Richard McManus (You're a manus, nah, you're a manus!) compares Web 2.0 to chmod 777. I think this is a horrible analogy, because to me, chmod 777 implies "anyone who has any access to this data has full access, including overwriting or deleting it". Not the impression you want to give people about their hosted online data!

I'm not sure what to think of the new Slashdot. You can tell that the owners liked their old design a lot.