Todo Lists for the web

I've been playing around with the Vitalist service. It offers an on-line todo set of pages.

My first impressions were poorer. I wasn't impressed with the garish colours and without really studying it sort of dismissed it out of hand.

However, taking another look at it, they offer:

- Mail / SMS you your reminders
- Integrate with Google calendar / RSS readers
- Simple UI
- i.e. basics for GTD

The only fly in the ointment for me? I can't get the todo list onto my copy of Outlook.

Perhaps it's time to leave the notion of sync everything behind and start down the 3G route with on-line access to my data / integration with SMS etc...

However worth a look if you are into stuff like this.

OpenID

I never realised this, but blogger, or blogspot, support OpenID.

If you also have a Blogspot account, you also have an OpenID. It's the URL of your homepage.

i.e. mine is http://markaitken.blogspot.com

See http://openid.net/get/ for a list of supported services.

Very smart!

Why Is It Hard To Work In Large Companies?

I've noticed that lately my motivation for work has dropped away a little.  We've recently had a new bundle of joy, Emily, who being the 3rd kiddo means home life is very much about keeping on top of the cleaning, playing with the kids, etc.  I'd previously wondered if this is partly the cause.

But Emily is now 8 months old, and I still feel a degree of apathy, so what is the cause?

I've come to suspect the more likely candidate is work.

You see, I used to work in a small(ish) software house with around 130 staff, I think I knew around 80 of these guys at the time I left.  Since leaving this, I've started in a company with 40'000 staff.  That's a lot of people, a lot of voices and opinions.

Now that I have perspective, I see that there was a really good community there.  People talked from time to time, people challenged things, we worked toward a common set of goals, delivery of a package to our customers and potential customers.

I think that now in such a large environment, these voices may be too small to be heard.  That means you don't get to meet others with the same goals as you or the same problems.  I put my apathy down to a lack of community in my workplace.

I think a lot of the best IT staff do their best work when they have a community to participate in because they are engaged with others and challenges at an ability level without fear of recrimination or career damage.  Simply put, you need to swim with the same fish to be part of the school.

What do I mean by a community?

I believe a community is a group of like minded people with common goals who want to help each other achieve their group goals for mutual benefit.  Sometimes it can be knowledge shared, contacts shared.  Sometimes it can be shared problem solving.

Now, work in a big company and that horrible factor of politics starts to play up.  It's hard to be sure if someone is trying to prove themselves to others, trying to shift out of the way of a bullet, and so on.  Too many people are in it for the money.

I think the community is one of the unspoken requirements for the best development to exist.  Without it, people's views are not challenged or questioned and people find it harder to seek to learn.

And that's quite sad I think...

I'm left pondering how you create a community when,

a) you don't have a project or budget or authority to create one

b) creating such a community would assume you all have clear goals, rarely the case in very large groups of people

c) the community needs members to take a small risk and offer help to their detriment (perhaps they need to use some of their own time to do something).

So my challenge is to understand how to create such a community in a larger organisation when the focus is only on projects, delivery and milestones.

I'm inspired by the material out there on agile methods.  It is clear to me that this approach works best for software development.

I feel at the moment that I have to sort out the community I work in before I can really get my learning back on track properly.

Does this strike a chord with you, and if so what do you think the right way is to tackle the problem?

Hardy Heron

Downloaded Ubuntu tonight, the latest build Hardy Heron.

Installation was so very simple you could knock me down with a feather... Wireless connection was up and running first time round. Left me feeling quite amazed to be honest at how straightforward setup could be.

When did Linux get this simple, and so complete?

Gonna make a point of trying to use Linux day to day at home and see if I can swap over to it. The commercial games aspect is the only real reason I can see at the moment to keep on Windows...

Otherwise it's all in there off the bat with no hard work :-)

Try saying that with Vista...

Far and wide

Make sure that if you work in IT you don't focus on just one aspect of your skills.


Strive for a balance of the following:

• Can code in at least 3 languages
• Knows about OO concepts, or other similar design abstracts
• Knows how to write SQL (the main language for data)
• Knows how to write and manage requirements (suggests a good understanding of English and communication)
• Knows something about how networks work (nobody creates islands anymore)
• Can present their material one on one or to a crowd without belittling them

Covering these general bases makes you stand out from the crowd.

Google = Smart, but a little too subtle...

I've started using Google's mail service lately to aggregate all my mail.

I'm past the debate of whether I trust Google with my data or not simply because if something is important to me I'll store it offline and online. A key challenge for Google is earning and keeping your trust, I reckon the millions they spend trying to retain my trust will be more investment than I'm ever likely to make against my personal data. However that's another debate...

The aggregation feature is very useful to me. One site, all my mail, any PC. Very smart.. However I missed some of the useful features within Outlook that I used to quickly manage mail.

In Outlook from the main view you can select a mail item with the mouse, then hold down SHIFT, select a mail somewhere below it and release SHIFT. This selects the two mails you selected and all the mails inbetween. Very useful in clearing out dead mails I know I don't want.

Google employs a tickbox against the mail.
The subtle part I just stumbled upon... Google has implemented a client side script to mock this behaviour. Select a mail with the tickbox, hold down SHIFT and select another mail far below it. All the mails inbetween are selected!

Very smart, very useful, but a shame that it's not more obvious. Well done Google!

Now, the only problem left to solve is that age old chestnut of having passwords. Need to get rid of them, they are a fantastic security hole for the Google strategy.

FriendFeed

Some of you I've noticed are using Twitter with some success. I've noticed a few other sites push toward FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a social aggregation tool, does a very good job of pulling together all of the social feeds from quite a few sources (Picasa, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Facebook, YouTube, BlogSpot and more).

The very nice part about it is you are subscribing to me without actually knowing what services I use. However FriendFeed aggregates the things I do and puts them into an RSS feed / page you can keep up to date with.

I've used it to tag a few services I use and have created a profile for you to also tag and watch if you want. From that, you can separately drill into the social sites I use.

Well worth a look if you want to follow someone or be followed.