Can I Get a 30-hour Day? Searching for Linux Project Management Tools

My life is getting far too complex to handle simply. Fall is coming, and I’m beginning to think I’m overbooking myself. Consider this:

• I’m working on another book project that I can’t talk about yet.
• I’m way behind in working through the SitePoint web development classes I wrote about a few weeks ago.
• I’m speaking to the Madison Linux Users Group (MadLUG) about openSUSE 11.3 on November 6 (Did I mention that before?), and have to create that presentation.
• I’m probably leading at least one session at BarCampMilwaukee 5 (which I did mention last week) October 2-3. The minimum is likely to be a dress rehearsal for the MadLUG event, but still…
• I want to write more magazine articles too.
• I have to get another car (an unexpected and urgent task).
• There may be still another book project after the one at the top of this list that requires a bunch of preparatory tasks.
• I’ve got to mow the lawn weekly and tend to various other homeowner projects.
• Oh, and BTW I still have a day job that fills in 40 hours every week.

Now between the Web-based app ToodleDo and a lovely Windows-based desktop app called MyLifeOrganized (MLO) that runs pretty well in Wine, I’ve got my day-to-day task/to-do-lists in good order. But right now, I need something that can help me figure out how to fit all of these big projects into the amount of time left in the day once I get home at night. And, since it is fall, ideally allow me to catch a few football and postseason baseball games in the bargain.

So here’s what I need:

• A GUI. I tried a command-line tool whose name escapes me awhile back, but it was just too wonky.
• A calendar tool that allows me to schedule evenings and weekends for these projects.
• Something that will import my XML data from MLO (and ToodleDo) to save me from extra typing. The imported data would include time estimates, dependencies, and other related stuff.
• Allows me to flexibly schedule tasks on the calendar for an hour, or some other time increment.
• Preferably not web-based
• Free or very low cost

Gravy:

• A big bonus: If I could import football schedules and other events from Google Calendar (or other CalDAV data) into the tool and include “multi-taskable” items to do while watching.
• Runs on Windows and Linux. An iPhone/Touch app would be nice too.
• Barks at me repeatedly when I try to overbook myself. Also offers snappy excuses so I can tell people “No” with a smile.

Here are my candidates:

• OpenProj: At first glance, this is the frontrunner, since you can create your own calendar. It looks nice, but I don’t know if I can import anything.
• KPlato (part of KOffice): I want to play with this as part of my drive to learn more about KOffice, but the single “40 hour” template was slightly disheartening on loading for the first time.
• Planner : A GNOME application that looks interesting, but hasn’t had a release in a year.

Am I missing some other fabulous application here? Experiences, good and bad, with any of these tools much appreciated too. Of course, if you know some way to stop time altogether while I get some work done, I’m open to that too.

Ada Lovelace Day +1: Honoring Ronda Hauben

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, a day to honor women in technology. When I first heard about the event, I knew instantly who I wanted to honor. Though we never met, this woman helped inspire me to participate in the community that is the Internet. I’d lost track of what she was doing over the years, so I had to do some research, which of course led to more research … so, I’m late.

So let me introduce you to an underappreciated Internet visionary, one of the original Netizens: Ronda Hauben. In her youth, Hauben worked in Detroit at the world’s largest car factory, Ford Rouge. As the story goes, Ford was sponsoring continuing education classes in computer programming. Hauben and others were outraged when the company canceled the program in 1987. After an unsuccessful attempt to revive the company-sponsored program, Hauben launched The Amateur Computerist newsletter to foster technology education among the workers. The first issue (PDF link) came out on February 11, 1988, the 51^st anniversary of the Flint Sit-Down Strike. It declared:

We want to keep interest alive because computers are the future. We want to disperse information to users about computers. Since the computer is still in the early stage of development, the ideas and experiences of the users need to be shared and built on if this technology is to advance. To this end, this newsletter is dedicated to all people interested in learning about computers.

Sometime later, Hauben found Usenet newsgroups, and figured out early that collaboration and participation among users were the key to the future. In September 1992, the alt.amateur-comp newsgroup was founded to circulate the electronic version of the newsletter, which was:

dedicated to support for grassroots efforts and movements like the “computers for the people movement” that gave birth to the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s. Hard efforts of many people over hundreds of years led to the production of a working computer in the 1940s and then a personal computer that people could afford in the 1970s. This history has been serialized in several issues of the newsletter.

A year later, Hauben delivered a speech on the history and promise of Usenet, which may have been my first acquaintance with her work.

Among the early stories The Amateur Computerist published included one of the first histories of Usenet in its Fall 1992 Supplement, “The Linux Movement” and the Free Software Foundation in Spring 1994, and more than a few basic (and BASIC) programs for its readers to try out, much like Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

In 1994, Ronda and her son Michael released Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet for free on the web. It was later published by IEEE Computer Society Press. It offers a terrific glimpse at the early history of the Internet, and an important discussion of its promise that remains largely relevant today; especially with the increasing corporatization of the Net.

Today, Ronda is a citizen journalist living in New York City. She is an award-winning United Nations correspondent for OhMyNewsInternational, and still contributes articles on the democratic promise of the Internet.

So go out and take a look at the complete Amateur Computerist archives, and think about how you can contribute to your online communities—including this one. Comments always appreciated.

Deal in Writers Strike: Woohoo!

The Writers Guild has achieved a settlement with TV and movie producers! Details (including a link to a PDF summary of the agreement) here:

United Hollywood: Letter From The Presidents With Deal Summary

Be sure to read the comments too. It will give you a sense of the WGA membership’s mood. The strike does not end unless the rank-and-file writers say it’s over.

It’s been a long, hard fight for justice for these folks. If the members of the WGA feel this is the best contract they can get (as their leaders believe), I’ll cheer their return to work. If they choose to continue battling for a still better deal, I’ll mourn the passing of the TV season, but continue to stand behind them. As they say, it’s about “Solidarity Forever.”

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1000 pieces of paper a month?

A
Gartner report from August (“How to Manage the Environmental Impact of
Printing”) says the “typical” office worker prints about 1000 pages per
month. If printing on one side only, they say it works out to 40 pounds
of paper per month!

At four 5-day weeks per month (give or take a couple days), this
would be 50 pages every working day. Really? Tragically, there are no
footnotes in this paper, so you can’t tell if this page count is a
misprint, or if you can trust the 40 pounds of paper number.

Does this seem out of whack to you? Well, maybe not. A Google search
today found quite a few sites that offer that statistic. The closest
thing I found to a reference is a 1997 report from the Lawrence
Berkeley Lab,
where they said that the typical office worker used 5 sheets per hour
of work. No footnote here, either.

I don’t know if I’m as skeptical of the original number, but a
decade can be a long time. I’d guess that I print (and copy) less than
I did 10 years ago. Some of the clients I work with run duplex printing
operations now.

Does anyone know if this factoid is still true (or ever was, for
that matter)? It would be nice to think we’ve made progress
(recognizing that our government is the brick wall to progress on
greenhouse gases).

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Got FeedBuddy?

In my continuing quest to make things easier on my readers (yeah, you!), I’ve been trying to add FeedBuddy to the page. This service lets you subscribe to the “Notes from the Metaverse” feed using just about any reader (web-based or disk-based) you can think of. Or at least those were the notes I took from wherever it was I read about it.

Problem is: For the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to connect to the Feedbuddy website to sign up. I’ve tried different browsers, different times of day, different OSs, but the site continually times out. I even re-Googled it to make sure I didn’t have the wrong URL. No luck.

Does anyone know if Feedbuddy has become too popular for its own good, or just died prematurely? Anybody know of a similar service? Or do y’all like a series of buttons down the right side of the page with the blogroll? All thoughts entertained.

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Getting a Little More Social

Taking up some housekeeping details around here. Finally adding some blogroll material to the sidebar over there. Feel free to visit some other folks I read and learn from. This is likely to expand in the coming days and weeks, but I won’t subject you to everything.

The About page hiding in the cityscape above will have some actual content quite shortly now. In the meantime, just know that I’m a writer by trade, and openSUSE Linux Unleashed will be out in October.

For some inexplicable reason, I’ve also signed up at two different social networks this week.

• Gather.com is a hangout mostly for public radio types.
• The Celtic Lounge was set up by Black 47 lead singer Larry Kirwan and music writer Mike Farragher as a hangout for Irish/Celtic musicians and their fans. Black 47 is one of my favorite bands for a lot of reasons, and I’ve got the Celtic moniker to count as an Irish writer, so it may be fun over there.

You’ll find me in both places as “workingwriter.” Stop by if you have the inclination.

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openSUSE Beta and Book News

It’s been a big week or so for new releases: Firefox 2.0, OpenOffice 2.04, KOffice 1.6, KDE 3.5.5, GNOME 2.1.6, Fedora Core 6, and by gosh there was another browser that rev’d recently too … oh, yeah! Internet Explorer 7.

Now certainly you could download and install all of these yummy new bits of software (and I certainly have), but why not get all the best stuff all at once with openSUSE Beta 1, released on Thursday! I haven’t quite got this installed (my ancient test machine doesn’t like the CDs I’ve downloaded to), but I’ve played with a couple of the alphas, and it’s shaping up quite nicely.

Which brings me to my own news: while details are not yet fully worked out, it appears that I’ll be doing a major update of SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed over the next couple months. We’re going to fix the Multimedia chapter, upgrade all the things that people complained about the first edition, add whatever new goodies from the new version that we can, and have it available quite early next year. Not quite in time for the 10.2 release, but close enough that it will be more than relevant. This, of course, means I’ll be cloistered and turning out copy for the remainder of the year, and posting here may actually dip (but one never knows, I suppose).

But even though it’s getting to be old news, I still have a few things to report to y’all from BarCamp, and I fully intend to do so in the next day or so.

Technorati Tags: SUSE Linux, publishing,

Two Aids to Production

I’ve been amazingly productive lately. Not only have I actually blogged a few times, I’ve been making huge strides on my to-do list. As a result, I’ve been really working with my to-do list! You see, I am a big believer in to-do lists — in spurts. Do a whole bunch of stuff, get it off the list, come up with new ideas and tasks, quickly get overwhelmed and bogged down in larger tasks that are harder to check off (and even harder to break down so that I get that oh-so-satisfying feeling of checking something off the list on a more regular basis).  But now I’m on a roll, and I want to keep it going.

But the other day, I ran into a problem. A brief digression: Now USB keychain drives are an amazing thing for keeping to-do lists. I have a to-do text file that I keep on my USB drive so I can quickly update the list (add a new idea, check things off, reorganize, etc.) wherever I happen to be, and whatever OS I happen to be running. As I said, a wonderful thing — except when you leave the drive plugged into the PC at home!

What I needed was a place to store new ideas (and I had come up with a few) that I could write up at work, and still access when I got home (ideally to cut-and-paste into my text file). I’ve used tadalist.com to do this, but the cut-and-paste isn’t easy: You first have to email the whole list to yourself and then do your editing. Then I remembered reading that Writely was again available. This online word-processor, recently purchased by Google, lets you create and store all sorts of written documents, and access it anywhere. So I registered and created a new document, with a 3-column table (actually more complex than my text file, but I wanted to try it out) with the task, a Priority column and a Due Date. While I was doing that, I had completely forgot what it was I wanted to add, but that came to me eventually. I was happy.

That is, until I was blathering on to a co-worker about how ingenious I was in finding this tool. He turned to me and said “Google Notebook.” This is the tool (a Firefox Extension) he uses when inspiration strikes at an inopportune moment. It is designed for tracking information found on the Web, but is just as useful for jotting down quick notes of any size.

So here I go touting Google again, but these are both two useful things for keeping your act together. If you have other ideas, online or off, I’m still interested.

Technorati Tags: Writely, Google notebook, productivity, Web 2.0