Blog Yellek

Digg and Netscape.com are both popular internet news sites that base the content of their front pages primarily on electronic votes cast by users on stories that other users have submitted. Back in June 2006 when the newly designed Netscape.com launched there was a lot of controversy about the new site’s relationship to Digg. Was it a Digg clone? What were the moral implications of Netscape head Jason Calacanis offering to pay the top users on Digg to work for him on Netscape? Would the huge Netscape.com traffic numbers convert to the sort of participation that Digg was enjoying?
Now that the dust has settled nearly a year after the launch of both sites what do they both have to offer to potential users and which one is better? Read on for my perspective on the answers. (more…)

Worse Than Failure has departed from their usual fare of tragic but funny stories from the IT industry to comment on The Great Pyramid of Agile. Agile development has always been one of those oases off in the distance for me: “Real developers do agile and everything else is old fashioned and inefficient”. I have spent more than a little time wishing that a current project was more agile and that we weren’t wasting so much time on obsolete specifications and schedule readjustment.

There are, however, naysayers saying that agile development is just a pipe dream and that we should as developers stick to the methods that we know, even if they are less than perfect. Who is right?

I suspect that a lot of the ideas that the agilists promote like test driven development and continuous integration are valuable contributions to the field of software engineering. I also think that software development is such a complex process that there will never be a definitive answer one way or the other, no matter how the proponents on each side want there to be.

The problem is that humans get involved and what started as a discussion of new ideas becomes a political/religious debate with entrenched views on each side. Developers in the trenches need to be more pragmatic than that. There is software to write and projects to complete and they will use whatever they can to get the job done.

The key thing to remember is never to stop learning.

Overheard from MLK #1 (she’s 9) to MeLo on the weekend. Kids are priceless .

I was just looking on the FreeMind site (earlier coverage of FreeMind here) when I noticed that one of the features of the upcoming 0.9.0 release was the ability to execute Groovy scripts from mind map nodes. This raises the possibility of all sorts of interesting applications. One that sprang to mind was to enhance the GTD FreeMind template from YekSoon with scripting functionality to provide a better GTD tool.

Well done the FreeMind team, I’m sure that this new feature will see a lot of use and Groovy is certainly a good choice for a scripting language.

I wonder how many “boardrooms” ever actually have boards meeting in them?

I’m currently attempting to implement some of the GTD principles in my life and I’m attempting to use a free hosted version of the Tracks software to do it. I have to say that it is rough round the edges so here are the 10 things I hate about tracks (as hosted at http://tracks.tra.in):

1. There is no way to set a user timezone. This means that the UI thinks it is yesterday until the clock ticks over in the timezone where the server is hosted. Perversely the javascript date popups get it correct, probably basing it on my PC. Inconsistent and bad.
2. There is no way to sort next actions by anything other than the data they are due. Sort order within that is always by the order they were entered. This means that there is no way to sort by project within that.
3. There is no priority field. This means that you are ending up with an amorphous collection of actions, especially within large contexts like “Work”
4. The UI often glitches up meaning that completed tasks often end up in the to do list meaning that you have to “complete” them all over again until the data gets saved correctly.
5. There is no way to attach files like mind maps to projects, only text.
6. Projects can’t have due dates so the UI can’t display them or check the next action’s due dates against them.
7. The CSS has only been designed with Firefox in mind, there are significant errors in IE6.
8. There is no support for the agenda functionality mentioned in the GTD book other than through setting up another context. If I need to talk to someone in the work context then I want that listed under work so I can see all of my work items together, not completely separately.
9. There is no sort order on contexts, they appear in the order you enter them.
10. Although there is some AJAX used there are a lot of screens that require a page refresh. The whole UI is poorly laid out and doesn’t look anything other than clunky.

All of these make tracks very difficult to work with but since there are no other alternatives at present I’m using it for now. I only wish that I had the time to write something myself. I have a whole bunch of ideas for features but I can’t see myself getting to any of them any time soon.