Category: Technology

The Search for the Perfect Task Manager

So I’ve been bandying-about an idea for that “first great Macintosh application” that I’ve been wanting to write for about a year. I’ve always known enough Cocoa programming to get through some book examples, but I’ve never had a chance to write a Real Life application. I know the exact app, and I think it would be a killer.

Personal Information Management has been on my mind for years. There’s never a time when I’m not striving to improve the way I organize “bits of daily information” like my calendar, phone numbers, etc. In fact, a number of close friends and I have been experimenting with some of the (life) organizational techniques in the (slightly cultish) book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Being a Mac enthusiast, I’ve embraced the Apple PIM (personal information management) offering, which consists of the Address Book, Mail, and “iCal” calendar application. One other very important addition is Mac’s iSync application which, at the cost of $100 per year for a .Mac account, allows me to effortlessly synchronize my Address Book and Calendar between all my Macs (my desktop and laptop) and my Palm Pilot and my Razr mobile phone. It also allows my Safari (the Mac web browser) bookmarks to be synchronized between the desktop and laptop.

iSync was the must-have application which locked me into Mac’s Address Book and iCal—and by extension, the Mail program which I really like anyway. Keeping contacts between the laptop and desktop was simply impossible and trying to do so drove be bonkers. I also hate hand-programming (and updating) phone numbers in my mobile phone. I revel in not being stuck when my phone dies, I change providers, or just want to upgrade it.

But this total buy-in has locked me into using iCal, whose “todo list” management is it’s weakest link.
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Yeah, it’s a stock photograph.

I’m going to replace that picture up top as soon as I can.

I’m getting to the point where I cringe every time I see that photograph at the top of the blog. It “came with” the template I chose for the blog’s look and feel. Keeping it is kind of like buying a picture frame at Bed Bath & Beyond and leaving the “demo picture” that comes with it.

Actually, come to think of it, that might be a useful practice. I wonder how many people buy those picture frames, leave the photos in them and claim that’s a picture of their new boyfriend.

Getting back to the point: I’m putting a pretty big priority on customizing that photograph as soon as possible. I’ve just got to figure out what sort of personalization is most representational of me. I’m willing to entertain any suggestions.

JBoss thread leaking JMS problem

All these zombie threads had apparently been created by JBoss’s JMS/MQ system to facilitate reading messages from a JMS sender, and these threads were never knowing to terminate themselves, even when we’d been finished consuming the messages on the server-side.

(Non-technical readers of my blog, you’ll want to glaze past this entry. This is a case where I encountered a problem, scoured the net for any clues and, finding none, slogged on forever until finally solving it. I’m writing this entry because I’ve found that the last couple of times I’ve solved an obscure computer problem, if I posted my solution in my blog then the entry would accumulate lots of comments saying “Thanks so much. I was really stuck on this.”)
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A very helpful article

It’s so gratifying to get these comments like “WOAH! I would *never* have thought of that. Thank you thank you thank you thank you 😀 I was just about to take the iSight back to the store.” (a recent comment)

I just was going through my blog-software system, and I noticed just how many comments had been generated by my earlier article (really, just a blog post) “iChat/iSight and Postgres Memory Bug“. When I’d discovered the solution to that problem I had been amazed how there had been no articles in any “Google searches” that addressed that particular problem; so I figured I would jot down a quick blog entry (apologizing to my non-technical audience) so that eventually Google searches would direct people here for the answer.
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