Archive for December, 2008

Deco09

Christian Decker

5

Now Gmail does Tasks too

As if keeping tabs on my tasks wasn’t hard enough, Google just added a Task list to it’s Mail application. It seems to me that Google is using its popular mail client to start off quite some tools lately. First we get the contacts manager, then the iGoogle Gadgets get added to Gmail and now the Task List.

Not everybody is happy about it though. As Marshall Kirkpatrick points out:

Gmail has been limping along for days, with scores of people reporting down time, super slow responsiveness and other troubles. With no communication from Google about the problem – what are users to think? Perhaps that we should put more of our lives in the hands of the Gmail team!
I too hope that the speed and reliability issues get fixed soon, instead of new features getting thrown at us. But I’m excited to see a major player in the Task Tracking business, and maybe it’ll give the much needed push towards a standard way to exchange tasks.

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Deco07

Christian Decker

0

Pitchfork dead?

I’m really proud of my Pitchfork tutorial I wrote quite some time back. I’ve been using Pitchfork release 0.5.5 since writing that article and I recently wondered if there is a new version. Sadly it seems that the website hosting the project http://pitchfork.remiss.org/ is down, or at least I can’t contact it anymore.

Luckily I still had an archive of the 0.5.5 laying around, and I decided I’d mirror it here: pitchfork-0.5.5.tar.bz2.

Hope this helps :D

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Deco06

Christian Decker

0

Unter Null: The end of an era

I’m a huge fan of Unter Null, and so I was sad today to hear that Erica is putting the Project on a hold:

I’ve decided that with this next Unter Null album, it will be my last foray into ebm/industrial/whatever (you may call it) music.

2009 is going to be the year of massive experimentation, and not letting problems like, oh, not having an orchestra at immediate hand, not having a multi-million dollar studio, not having an actual “band” but being a solo musician, hold things back.

I’ve sorely wanted to get away from this genre and scene for a while now. I support my friends’ bands, and there are a few bands I really really like in the industrial (umbrella term) genre, but it’s not the kind of music I listen to anymore or have for a long time. I don’t go to the clubs, not interested in club culture, and while a close-knit community can have its benefits, I am not enthused by the back-stabbing and horrendous “it’s a small world” of it all.

While Unter Null has been my main project for over 10 years, I’m definitely not quitting it, however my desire it to tread new grounds and explore new sounds and ways of creation.

My latest release with Stray has also noted a change in my desire for evolution and change. With the current production of the next Unter Null album, I’ve been finding it increasingly harder to maintain separation between the two projects because I’ve been finding myself drifting more towards “Stray”-like tracks – heavy on the melody and instrumentation, and less interested in the distorted 4/4 kicks and rahrah vocals.

Being my background is originally in classical music, I feel these days I’m somewhat losing touch with that and while music has always been grounds for catharsis for me, where I am at now is just not cutting it for me.

So, this is meant in no offense to any of my friends, to fellow musicians, or to my awesome fans. It’s just time to be moving on… to start the sound that has begun ;-)

<3 Erica

While this might not be the end of the Project yet, it means that we will be seeing a lot less of her :-(
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Deco05

Christian Decker

7

Unified task and time tracking

I recently started another part time job at Comerge AG, because a friend of mine, Till, asked me if I had some spare time, and since I’m having a slow semester to finish my bachelor, i accepted at once.

The problem now is that I’m starting to run into a wall when it comes to getting my tasks organized and keeping track of my time. At the FGCZ we use a Redmine task tracker for both task and time tracking, it’s a great tool and I started to use it for some smaller projects of mine too. Then at Comerge we use Origo for task tracking and WR Time Tracker, again these are all great tools. For other smaller stuff I use Freshbooks, which I think is one of the nicest trackers I’ve ever used. By far my favorite task tracker for personal use is RememberTheMilk, which I’ve been using since it came out in 2005.

By now you probably see my problem: all tools are great, otherwise I wouldn’t use them, but with all the different locations where to report, it’s really getting hard to get an overall view. Wouldn’t it be just so incredibly nice to have just one place where to get all the needed information, tasks and time reports, without having to look around in hundreds of different places? Many companies and projects have tried to be that one place to go, but none have actually succeeded, and I don’t think anyone will ever succeed. It won’t be possible to force all the users and their respective companies into using one tool.

Why not finally move away from that narrow mindedness and just integrate into our tools a simple common API that would allow tools to share information among each others? Maybe allow for a Desktop client that collects my tasks from BaseCamp, Redmine and Trac, throws in my Todos at RememberTheMilk and shows me where I’ve spent my time so far. I’m not even asking for the ability to update all that information, that’s what the different tools are for, but just displaying all in one place would make my life so much easier.

Would that be so hard?

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Deco02

Christian Decker

3

OdioGo

I just found out about a great service called OdioGo.

Now “Odio” in italian means “hate”, but the exact opposite is my case: I absolutely love the service. It takes your Blog RSS Feed and translates it into Spoken audio content, that the users can then listen to.

The quality is amazing for a TTS (Text-to-Speech) Engine, and it is really pleasant to listen to it while doing other stuff :-)

Sadly I’ve not yet seen many blogs using it, so get out and spread the word.

OdioGo

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