Dear BigPond® Music Member,

BigPond Music won’t be supporting the Windows Media Audio (‘WMA’) file format after 1 April 2010. That means you won’t be able to download new DRM (Digital Rights Management) ‘unlock’ keys for the WMA files you’ve bought from us already – so you should back up your music now.

Any MP3 files you’ve bought from us won’t be affected. Read further if you want to know more about WMA files.

Here’s why you should back up your music.

As long as you keep using the same computer and operating system, you shouldn’t have any trouble playing your WMA music files. But if you try to move them onto a new computer or operating system, they won’t work if you don’t transfer their DRM keys as well.

Besides, backing up your collection is a good idea – for your MP3 files too.

So here’s what to do.

You can back up your music collection now, by either:

1. Burning it to audio CD (Click here to find out how.)

2. Backing up your WMA files and licences separately (See how to do it here.)

Additional information on WMA’s & DRM.

All our music was in the secure WMA file format when BigPond Music started. Whenever you downloaded a WMA file you downloaded it’s encrypted Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) code at the same time.

DRM is a kind of lock and key system. The key unlocks the music so that it’ll only play on your software. The downside of this security is that WMA downloads don’t work on popular systems like Apple’s iPod and iTunes software. It’s also hard to move WMA files without downloading a new licence key.

We started selling MP3 files without any DRM or licence key restrictions in August 2008. MP3’s are a much more universal format that works on most digital music players and software. We stopped selling WMA files in March 2009, and only offer MP3 music now.

The BigPond Music Team

1. The website shall be developed in such a way as to allow maintenance by persons other than the successful bidder.
2. The design of the website shall allow future enhancements to take into account changing requirements, technology and standards without requiring a rewrite.
3. The website shall allow the content to be edited and maintained by the client without the need to engage external parties to do so.
4. The website shall be accessible to the widest possible audience and shall not prevent access by people with disabilities or access by persons using commonly used technology.
5. The website shall be designed in such a way as to promote favorable ranking in common search engines.
6. The website shall be designed to prevent modification of its contents by unauthorised users.

I think these form a pretty good basis for good technical website design.

I am definitely looking for help on this project as the scope of the ideas I have is much greater than the time I have available to work on it so if you have the time to help drop me a note in the comments.

A Template is a layout of regions. Each theme will have a number of templates (which may be only one) A region can have an existence apart from a template so a region on a particular template is called a Template region. Each template region has a context and can have 0 or more blocks to display content. The blocks use the context to decide what to display. A page is an instance of a template with a number of region instances. Each region instance can have a mode such as view or edit.

I haven’t yet decided which parts of this object model will not be represented in the database but rather in template files as tag parameters.

http://yellek.org/blog/?p=345 I downloaded NetBeans to work on my open source project in Grails and one of the first things I noticed is that the Grails plugin doesn’t support creating domain classes in packages. This seems a little bit weird to me and it has left me wondering if I should copy the classes manually into package folders and add the import statements or whether I should give up and have them in the default package. The plugin seems to recognise domain classes in packages just fine but it won’t let you crete them through the wizard. Weird.

I foresee Coherence being useful for applications that need to scale significantly and that need to use an in memory cache to speed performance.

The programming model, though, is more problematic. Basic cache access is achieved through a Map interface where objects are associated with keys. Added to this are methods to listen to events, filter the cache and update it. The API for these operations reminded me a lot of Groovy closures and their operations on collection classes. The issue comes with object relationships. The API, as far as I can see, makes no provision for the storing of relationships between objects in the cache. This means that domain objects stored in the cache need to be aware of how to obtain related objects from the cache. Serialization methods need to know what the serialization boundaries between objects are and how to save related objects. No doubt there would be ways to encapsulate this access into a framework to remove the dependencies from the domain objects but be aware that this is a very different kettle of fish from the ease and convenience that we are used to from Hibernate and JPA.

All in all Coherence seems like an interesting addition to the Architect’s toolkit that may just be the right choice for interesting performance and scaling challenges.

Churches doing or considering podcasting would do well to have a listen to this, I think it has some good insights.

1. Predecessors and Successors. Mostly what I want is to reduce my list of outstanding tasks to only those that I can work on at the moment so the whole list doesn’t freak me out so much. By filtering out tasks that have unfulfilled prerequisites I can reduce the list to those tasks that I need to get done so as to allow the successor tasks to be achieved.
2. The ability to split tasks. Often when doing GTD you realise that the task you have set down is not granular enough and that you need to split it into sub tasks in order to make them next actions. I want the ability to easily split a task and for all of the predecessor and successor information with other tasks to adjust accordingly.
3. Resources Rather than Contexts. GTD, because it was envisaged for paper based tracking systems, allows tasks to be placed into a single context, the idea being that you look at all of the tasks that can be done in any context you are in and do those. This is a way of reducing the task list. I find that I have tasks that can be done in multiple contexts. I can make phone calls anywhere I have a phone which is everywhere these days, not just in a specific context. In thinking about this I realised that tasks depend on resources and that contexts have resources available. Resources can be something you will need to do a task, such as a phone or an internet connection; a person; a specific place or something less tangible such as work time or personal time. Contexts have a set of resources associated with them. It is the match between resources required and resources available that determines what tasks you can do in a context. For example on the bus on the way in to work I have a phone, personal time and an iPod but I don’t have a privacy resource. Resources could be modeled using tags but there would need to be a way to filter for tasks containing multiple tags to represent the contexts.
4. Task Urgency Value. GTD abhors the use of task priority to determine which tasks to do next but it also introduces the idea of a tickler file for tasks that need to be done on certain days. This doesn’t allow enough flexibility for me because I have some tasks that have a hard date and some tasks that can be more flexible. For example I have a meeting every Monday that I need to have prepared for by that date but if it has been more than a week since I have vacuumed my floors one more day won’t hurt too much. My idea is this: introduce a task urgency value which gets calculated based on the date when something ought to be done and how hard that date is. Urgency should be calculated using some sort of mathematical function like an exponential function so that the closer the date the higher the urgency gets. Urgency would increase slower for softer target dates and faster for harder target dates. In this way tasks that need doing first would automatically bubble to the top.
5. Task Templates. In life there are situations that occur that will cause the same set of tasks to occur over and over again. For example my checklist for things I need to bring to my life group meeting. I would like the ability to have that list of tasks to be added to my task contexts automatically using a template prepared earlier. This would save me time and make sure that everything is covered.
6. Repeating Tasks. I want the ability to have a task or a group of tasks via a template repeat. For example tasks around the house need to be done periodically so if I have cleaned the bathroom for this week then I want a new task to remind me to it again in a week’s time. Fly Lady has built a business on this very concept. The new task shouldn’t be added until the first task is completed. Ideally this should be combined with task urgency values to allow some flexibility as to when tasks are completed. Update: There is an application called Sciral Consistency that does this. it doesn’t integrate with anything (such as RememberTheMilk) but they are on the right track.
7. Add Tasks From Everywhere. I want to be able to add tasks from everywhere and have them pop up in a holding area ready for me to review and categorise them. I want to be able to tag sites in del.icio.us with special tags to remind me to follow up (RSS?). I want to be able to SMS, email and IM tasks (Imified?). I want to be able to add tasks somehow from my phone and my PDA.
8. Get Task Lists From Everywhere. I want to be able to get my task list from any device I have, my PDA, my phone and any PC I happen to be on.
9. Wait List Tasks. I want to be able to delegate a task to someone and have it disappear from my active task lists but I then want it to pop up again to remind me to follow up that person automatically. A threshold based on task urgency value might be appropriate or, more simply, a number of days before a due date.

Any or all of these ideas could be implemented independently although some of them obviously have synergies between them.

So how about it? Can anyone pick these features up and run with them?

For more information I can be contacted either via the comments or via the temporary email address (20 emails only) taskideas.20.yellek@spamgourmet.com.

HiTask

Category: Tool / service

Topic: productivity

Year created: 2007

Tags: HiTask productivity task web20 gtd

The major flaw is that it doesn’t interoperate with any other chat services. I have ID’s on Yahoo, ICQ, AIM and MSN because of various groups of friends but I don’t see the value in asking someone to join Zoho Chat just so they can talk to me. Zoho chat is just too obscure to generate a relevant critical mass of users to chat with.

Zoho chat does offer the possibility of adding a chat widget to a web site which the aforementioned chat services do not but if you compare that to Meebo and the MeeboMe Widget it doesn’t really stack up. Meebo does interoperate with all of the popular chat services and offers a lot more features than Zoho chat.

The only redeeming feature of Zoho chat is possible future integration with the Zoho online office suite. Users collaborating on a document being able to use instant messaging to communicate from within the document would be an advantage but only a limited one.

All in all just go straight to Meebo rather than using Zoho Chat.