November 2006 – Marcus Vorwaller

I’ve looked at several options for making sure I “use my time wisely” while I’m on the computer including:

Onlife (Mac only)
The Printable CEO
Timers that capture screenshots such as TimeSnapper or block programs such as Temptation Blocker (Windows only)
Project timers such as On The Job and Billings2 and Billable (all Mac Only)
Various non-free online timers… maybe I’m cheap but 5 to 9 dollars a month is 60 to 108 dollars a year and that’s a lot of cash to fork out for a timer (at least for personal use). These include Harvest, 14dayz, Time59 and Tick.
Firefox Extensions that track time such as TimeTracker.

None of them fit my criteria of being easy to use, easy to see where my time went (some type of reporting) and inexpensive. Then I went back to SlimTimer. The concept is simple. You open up a little window that sits on your desk all day (I open mine in Safari so tabs don’t accidentally pop up there from my default browser, Firefox) and click the name of the activity you’re doing at the time. That’s it. Here’s my window right now.

Screenshot 01

When you’re done you close the window, click another task or toggle the task you’re on. Then the cool part is the reports that are available on the main SlimTimer website. You can see where your time went specifically for the day, week month, per task, tag etc. Here’s a screen capture of a report:

Screenshot 02

SlimTimer is simple, powerful, quick and free. Can’t beat that.

Technorati Tags: gtd, lifehacks, timetracking, software, technology, web2.0, webservices

Since I started learning Rails I’ve often been asked “is Rails hard to learn?” A lot of times this is by people who don’t know any other programming language or even HTML. The answer to that question is a little more complicated than a simple yes or no. Rails isn’t necessarily hard to learn, but a lot of other stuff comes along with it. Here’s the list I came up with of the things you’ll have to learn to write web applications in Rails:

The programming language Ruby
Obviously Rails itself which involves learning the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern (or collection of patterns) and the way these are implemented in Rails, the file structure of Rails and the syntax and domain specific functions Rails adds to Ruby including how to write templates using RHTML. Rails is composed of several frameworks, ActiveRecord, ActionPack (which includes Action Controller, Views, Mailer and Web Services), each of which have to be learned.
How to use Rails plugins, components, Engines Ruby gems etc. This includes how to get them installed along with learning enough to know when (or if) and how to use them.
AJAX, Prototype, JavaScript and RJS. You may not have to learn JavaScript (which itself is a full featured programming language) but you’ll definitely have to be comfortable with using it to some degree.
What web services are and how they work.
How to create and use relational databases.
Basic SQL, at least enough to know what is happening behind the scenes with ActiveRecord. There almost certain to be times when some SQL will have to be written out for reports, optimization etc., so knowing at least some SQL is important.
Having enough of a knowledge of FastCGI, Mongrel and WebBrick to make a decision about which (or which combination) to use to deploy the application.
Apache, specifically how to configure it to work with either FastCGI or Mongrel. Alternatively Lighttpd or another web server.
Rake, Generators and Capistrano and remote deployment.
Database migrations.
Testing web applications (which admittedly I haven’t done much yet).
A basic knowledge of web application security.
How to set up and use SVN repositories. If you’re new to source code versioning this can take awhile to get used to.
It may be necessary to learn a new IDE (RadRails) and/or a new text editor (TextMate).
As with any new programming language, you’ll have to learn to get Rails installed. In my case this meant figuring out how to do it on my personal computer (a Mac), my work machine (Windows XP) and the servers (Linux). None were too difficult but they all had their idiosyncrasies that had to be dealt with.
If you don’t already know it, you’ll need to learn XHTML and CSS

Some of the things in that list are quick and easy to learn, others will take time and practice (I’m still working on a lot of them). If you’re thinking about learning Rails, this list isn’t meant to discourage you, just help to make you aware of what you’re up for.

Technorati Tags: programming, rails, ruby on rails

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