graham.reeds/

Did you remember the milk?

Recently (in the past couple of weeks) I’ve started using Remember The Milk as I have been seeing it on and off on LifeHacker. I went at it zealously at first (as I usually do with these things) and imported all my tasks from work and home. However now the rosy blush has ended and the cracks in the services is now appearing.

First is the inability to create sublists. There are things that need to be done on the house (oil squeaky door, etc.) and then there are my personal programming projects. Ideally they are my personal stuff so they would go in the personal folder. They are also separate from each other so they should get their own folder. You can create new folders but the limited real estate in the layout means that more than a couple of additional tabs you wander off into the realm of multi-row tabs which look horrible in any application. This situation would be solved by sublists but RTM doesn’t support this and the development team doesn’t seem to be forthcoming with dates/roadmaps.

The next major problem is the lack of dependencies. Simply you can’t have one task depend on another. The closest I have come to this is order by numbers. But that doesn’t solve the dates. Example: A bunch of features got put back to the release after next for the program I am working on. They all depend on some functionality that won’t be ready in time for the next release. So I need to put them back to after the release date of the next version. That means I have to shift the times individually because of the next problem.

Time-shifting isn’t supported. You can select multiple tasks, and set the same date for all, but you perform simple maths operations on them. You can’t select a bunch of tasks and say “+1 week” and have all the dates jump by a week from their due date. This seems to have partial, but incomplete, support.

Next problem is how priorities are handled but I can see how this is a tricky subject because people would have a different idea of how priorities are handled. In my book a high priority item with a completion date in September is less important than a low priority task with a completion date of tomorrow. However RTM displays high priority tasks before all others, so task priorities aren’t used.

Which brings me to my next gripe. The editing of a task is via a drop down list. Why not buttons? Most Web 2.0 (how I hate that term) apps have buttons that act like their desktop counterparts, so why not RTM?

One under developed feature is the email reminder. You can set a daily reminder of tasks due that day. The next day you get another email, but it doesn’t list any overdue tasks which are probably more important than the tasks due that day. Admittedly it’s open to debate which is more important, but overdue tasks should be listed along with the due tasks.

The final gripe I can think of, and one that a member of the RTM team commented on, is the syncing with Google Calendar. Now the idea of a calendar with your tasks on is sublime, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired with RTM stating that it is a limitation with Google Calendar and out of their control.  The problem is that every day, even days you don’t have due tasks, have a big image of tick on it. Now a tick has the connotation that there were tasks but they are all complete. Also a glyph on everyday, even when you don’t have a tasks looks very cluttered. It would be nice to have only an image when there are tasks due and the image changing with the priority. I suggested an exclamation mark with colour of the priority, and overdue being the same with a clock behind the exclamation mark.

They are the gripes and some can be worked around, but the questions are: Do other task lists have these features and how can I get all my tasks from RTM to that app? Do any other todo lists have these features?

I know I shouldn’t complain because RTM is free, but I am willing to pay a small amount for a subscription to something that I found usable and user-friendly but at the moment if they started charging for usage, I wouldn’t be forthcoming with the green.

2 comments.

F1

Yesterday I wanted to know what time the Forumula One Grand Prix was on. So I fired up the Radio Times website and searched for F1. No results. So I looked for Formula One. Nothing. Formula 1. Again zip.

So I did a manual search, and there it was: F1: European Grand Prix listed at 12pm on ITV.

So I did a search for F1: and it appeared. Why is a colon necessary for finding a TV program? Why doesn’t it search within the title for a match? If I was to search for 00 (zero-zero) I want to see 007 and 2001, not a missed match.

0 comments.

Readability scores

Found a link via LifeHacker to test your website readability scores. I already use BullFighter on my Word Documents (in particular my CV) so I was intrigued by how my website would fare.

Juicy Studios’ Readability Test doesn’t only test your site for the Flesch Reading Ease score it also includes the Flesch-Kincaid grade level and Gunning-Fog Index. However it doesn’t include the Bull Index that BullFighter has.

So how does my blog do? Well, prior to this post the relevant stats (you get loads of additional stats like the average number of syllables, etc.):

So what do these numbers mean?

The Gunning Fog Index is a count of how many years of schooling it would take to understand the content. The score is capped at 17 where it is considered post-graduate level.

Flesch Reading Ease is a level of ease it would be to read the document. On a scale of 100, the higher the score the better it is.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade is similar to the Gunning Fox Index as it attempts to measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content.

What these don’t do is decide whether the content is enjoyable or not.

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Bloody repeats

If I see the program about “Manuel, the worlds fattest person” one more time, I will probably kill someone. I must have seen the program start about 15 times now – it is always on UK Home and Health (or is it Discovery Science) that Mrs Bear watches.

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Open Source Software

Okay this is a rant. Feel free to come back when I have written something slightly more constructive.

One of my many projects I have on the go needs a C++ SVG library. So I do a search for C++ SVG libraries, of which there are several. However most of them either require GTK+ or Qt. Not useful to me as I have an perfectly usable windows tool-kit called MFC. You’ve might of heard of it?!

So finally it comes down to three: AGG, Cairo, and Keystone.

AGG isn’t really a complete SVG library, but more of a basis that can be used to implement one. In fact they give a basic library to demonstrate the promise that AGG gives. However it may be useful depending on how much of the SVG spec I need, but for now it’s out.

Keystone is an SVG library with some good examples, but it hasn’t been updated in a couple of years, and there wasn’t a quick overview of what parts of the spec it does and doesn’t support. Also the author never replied to my email. So that is out.

Leaving Cairo. Now I had high hopes for Cairo as it is used by Mozilla for the rendering in Firefox, et al. It is being worked on and it gives accelerated graphics via Glitz. Since Moz uses it then it should support Windows straight out the box, right?

Wrong. First you have to create a file that the Windows version will need. They have an html page that shows what the content of the file should be…Why not just include it in the distribution in the first place? You then need to download the MSVC 7.1 project from a third party website. This has what is needed to compile it. Except it doesn’t. It needs libpng. So I go looking for the DLL, but it’s not that easy – they don’t have a simple “Get Binaries here”. You are led around in circles. The version says 1.2.8 but the program looks for v1.3. So I get the source, but I can’t compile that because it thinks there is an error in the zlib source (except there isn’t as even my little knowledge of assembler can tell that there isn’t a problem with the source, and you’d think by version 1.2 they’d have fixed a major flaw like that). Maybe it is the source that comes with libpng, so I download the actual zlib, but that has the same problem. None of these programs have a project for MSVC 8, but relies on the project converter to actually transfer all the information correctly.

So after 3 hours I have several directories of uncompilable code. You’d think that the Windows version would compile straight out the box because, well, there are more people using Windows so most effort would go into that version. I’d lay money on the fact that the downloads for the Windows version of Firefox is double what any of the others are put together. But no, the Windows version is treated like the red headed step-son and ignored because it’s not cool to work “for the man”.

Tonight I am trying another 3rd party binary distribution. I’ll see what comes of it, though I would rather be able to compile my own so when the software gets updated I can update as well instead of relying on someone else…

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Ringing the changes

Been merging code bases at work, from several forks to one. I was hoping to get this done after we install TFS but my boss wants it done before we do our final check in to PVCS 5.3, which is his prerogative. It falls to me, however, to perform the merge, and I am doing the merge blind – that is I don’t know what the code does, and there is no one to ask.

So what tools can I use? Well PVCS has a code compare tool, which I guess can be used, but given that even the most basic check in is fraught with dangers I am loathe to use it. Any source control that requires you to manually hack a file isn’t to be trusted.

So I did what I normally do in situations like this where the tools I have around me aren’t up to the task, or are found lacking. I hit SourceForge.

There I found WinMerge, which is simplicity in itself. A very nice interface, and wonderfully intuitive, unfortunately it get’s confused easily, especially if the two files being compared are disjointed (bits swapped or moved). This was my primary tool in performing the changes. Also there doesn’t appear to be anyway of taking both section changes into a single file.

So the next tool I found was KDiff3 which is a lot more robust, but with an awkward cluttered interface. In WinMerge you select the two file you wish to merge and then use Alt-Up/Down to cycle between differences. Then you use Alt-Left/Right to decide which side to keep. Very easy and very quick.

KDiff3 uses Ctrl-Up/Down and puts the merge changes into a third file. The GUI isn’t as nice or as clean as the WinMerge one it is a more powerful tool. However to select the changes you have to use Ctrl-1/2/3 (KDiff3 supports 3-way merges) which while doable with one hand means twisting, and with a lot of changes in a file makes it a good candidate for inducing RSI.

Now my advice would be for WinMerge to use the KDiff3 engine (from browsing the mailing list that would require a rewrite of most of WinMerge) or have KDiff3 use the keyboard layout of WinMerge and steal some of the visual designs from it. Both a good tools in their own right but what is stopping them from becoming great tools they both have.

1 comment.