It’s a beautiful autumn Saturday. A nice breeze. A light rain. The leaves are falling more and more with each passing day. The yard is covered with wonderful oranges and browns. College football is on in the living room.

BAM!

Now, it is time to face the music. My disorganization and procrastination has put me in a very difficult position. I am behind with my work. I am behind with my family. I am behind with my life. I have to tackle this now or something is going to give. What do I need to organize? In a word, everything. I have way too many things going on in both my business and in my personal home life to be able to successfully keep up.

Here is a quick list:

• Projects
• Tasks
• Deadlines
• Team schedules
• My schedules
• Notes
• Ideas
• Code
• News
• Documents
• Syncing all of this between computers

Here are the tools I have at my disposal

• Mantis (Bug tracker that is also overMISused as a project management system)
• File servers everywhere (Yah, just directories full of shit.)
• eTools (Document sharing used by some people.)
• Sharepoint (Document sharing that we are supposed to migrate to at some point.)
• Trac Wiki
• Fisheye / Crucible
• phpbb forums

So far my research has uncovered many different techniques. I am discovering the best course of action is to define what I want. The easiest way to state what I want is: “I want to organize everything listed above (the quick list) in such a way that all of the information I need is at my fingertips when I need it.” That’s not asking too much is it? I should probably just design and build a robot secretary. That’s a separate post.

Bringing a little order to chaos

The first missing piece of the puzzle is something that allows me to organize my projects. My wife created a OneNote notebook for me and it looks like a great way to organize the information I have for my projects. It doesn’t help me with deadlines and planning, though. I may not be utilizing it to its full potential. Here is a link outlining the various project management tools out there. It’s really a desert out there for anything that doesn’t mimic Microsoft Project.

At this point, I do not think adding another piece of software to the mix of tools I have available is going to help anything. I need to figure out how to make the best of what I have. I have to use Outlook, so I should be figuring out the best way to leverage Outlook. You will find no real help with available plug-ins. The vast majority of them are related to spam control or something stupid that doesn’t have any value where organization is concerned.  From the multitudes of available plug-ins I have found the following to be, at a glance, usable:

Don’t get me wrong. I see a lot of plug-ins out there and I am sure they are helping a few people out. For the most part it seems like plug-ins are made for an individual or a small group of individuals and it eventually finds a place on the Internet for the vast anonymous cog to consume it.

My Bottleneck el Supremo

Email is definitely a bottleneck for me. This is a single point of failure in my process because most of my work is born from email. I need to be able to find stuff quickly and right now this is not happening. In order to use Outlook effectively I need to start working with:

The tarotwicks.com project has now graduated from a small Mysticwicks.com project to something a bit more grandiose. The Twickster will be an online application that will assist users in guided readings. At first we will base everything completely on the Tarot. I have recruited 3 of the brightest engineers I know to assist me in this venture.

We are using Trac to manage the project. (http://dev.tarotwicks.com)

I need to post my notes on the Trac install. It was actually quite a nightmare because I didn’t want to run the standalone version. Bleh. Anyway, its up and running now and that’s what matters. We are going through some push and pull right now at work regarding project management software.

Anyway, I don’t know if I have a document that outlines the entire Twickster experience from start to finish. I have been writing documentation on the project wiki, but it is not a complete and total view. It also uses buzzwords, which have to be explained. G asked me to explain the project to him on Friday WITHOUT the terms and I almost couldn’t do it. This is my attempt to outline the project using everyday language, not Twisms.

Where did the Twickster come from?

Ok, so my wife asked me if it would be hard to develop a tarot reading generator for the Tarot forum on Mysticwicks.com. I said, not really. And then a few weeks later (yah, I’m slow) I started thinking of the best way to do it. At first I was just going to write a Vbulletin plug-in that would do the job. Then I started thinking it might be fun to have a separate site which Mysticwicks.com users could log in and get readings, even save them. My first notes even required Vbulletin user integration at phase I.

From there my thought started whirring around about how best to build the application to produce the best readings. I started thinking about the possibilities of running information obtained by the user through various routines that would find correspondences via various numerological and modern Kabbalistic. These correspondences could then be used to weight the chances of drawing a particular card in a reading.

This Suggestive Randomness would give the application an edge when producing the right user experience to strengthen the psychological aspects of a reading. This also changes the way one would have to think about divination. The assisted reading is based on you and ultimately done by you. The Twickster is a genius at math and able to perform complex equations that would take us forever to complete in a blink. The Twickster gives us a medium and an opportunity to get the best reading we could ever have. It is the best reading because it is done by the only person that could ever really tell you what is going to happen to you.

You.

So, from the small reading vbulletin plug-in springs the might Twickster which will be a very unique site in the social genre. Next post I will explain just exactly what the Twickster is.

Life after initscr()…

Strolling through the ncurses howto we learn the basics of initilization. raw() and cbreak() are used to take control of the buffer while echo() and noecho() takes control of the echoing of user typed characters back to the terminal. When I say ‘take control of the buffer’ I mean that user input is immediately made availiable to the program.

If you want to use the function keys, etc then you will need to call keypad() to set that up.

The fucntion halfdelay() is pretty interesting. Like cbreak(), input is made availiable to the program however a delay can be set to allow the input request to break if no inpout is given.

My first problems came up when whipping up the simple example of using the different initialization functions. It seems that keypad() is not behaving as the HOWTO suggests. Here is my version of the simple program that takes user input (1 char) and prints it back in bold and if the input is F1 then say so to prove we have control of the keyboard.

#include <ncurses.h>

int main() {
int ch;

initscr();
raw();
keypad(stdscr, TRUE);
noecho();

printw(“Bold something?”);
ch = getch();

if ( ch == KEY_F(1) ) {
printw(“f1 pressed”);
} else {
printw(“Key is “);
attron(A_BOLD);
printw(“%c”, ch);
attroff(A_BOLD);
}

refresh();
getch();
endwin();

return 0;
}

This is a simple routine and very hard to fuck up. Running the compiled program and pressing F1 does not yield the desired results, however. Instead the program ends and a tilde (~) is displayed. So, the question now is ‘Do I move on with this tutorial?’ or do I figure what the fuck is wrong with the keypad() init?

It’s always something.

*hours later*

Work had me off doing other things, but as I get back to this I have discovered that getch() is not returning the expected value according to the ncurses HOWTO. Either the howto needs to be updated or, well, no…the HOWTO needs to be updated.

After further testing I have found that F1-F4 are not returning the expected integer. The rest of the keys seems to be mapping fine.

I will update with my progress later.

Who knew?! Actually, to tell you the truth, before I moved to Philly I think I thought Ricotta was a type of macaroni shell. Whatever.

Ricotta (pronounced /riˈkɔtːa/ in Italian) is an Italian whey cheese^[1]. Ricotta lit. ‘recooked’ uses the whey, a limpid, low-fat, nutritious liquid that is a by-product of cheese production.

After realizing that whey cannot be safely dumped as it creates an environmental hazard ^[2],^{[dubious – discuss]} Romano makers discovered that when the protein-rich substance is heated, casein particles fuse and create a curd. This curd, after drainage, is ricotta. Because ricotta is made from whey, rather than milk, it is a whey cheese, not technically a “cheese”^[3].

That’s from wikipedia.

It looks like the security token issue has gotten pretty bad at Mysticwicks. I am going to investigate.

Disclaimer: I am still working on this post.

One of the most important things I have learned about journaling is that it can greatly increase your recall on certain topics. You also cannot beat the reflection points earned. In my job I have to write a lot of technical specifications. I also have to write a lot of manuals for the tools I make. I have learned that documentation does not come cheap and good documentation is even more scarce. The engineers I work with have told me I draw up good tutorials, so I am going to try and share that. Call it a good deed, or whatever.

My wife is bringing up a new site for herself called hailthegoat.org. The domain has been dormant for awhile, but she is feeling the need now to do something with it. She has chosen to use Joomla to manage the content for her site. So, the remaining content of this post consists of step-by-step notes I took while talking her through uploading the Joomla files and installing Joomla on the angrygeeks development server.

It should be noted that my wife is a geeky girl. She runs Kubuntu (satanic version) on her laptop and Firefox 3 is her browser of choice. She hates pages that don’t validate and feels css is the only tool a web developer should ever need!

<the joomla install session begins>

First thing you want to do, most likely, is find out where you are on your local system. You can do this by typing cd at the prompt and tabbing a couple of times to trigger the autocomplete feature (bash for president).

Once you verify that you are where you want to be, fire up secure ftp. From the command line type sftp username@angrygeeks.org and hit enter. Type in your password when prompted.

Now you are in your home directory on the angrygeeks development server. Typing ls at the sftp prompt will list the files in your current directory on the server. Typing lls at the sftp prompt (yes, you can do this while I am writing) lists the files in the current directory you are in on your LOCAL machine. The local is the machine in front of you (most of the time). It’s the one you are connecting FROM!

Make sense? Good.

To transfer files to the server via type put file.tgz.

Oh, that filename IS quite long. Well, one way to speed up the process is to doubleclick on the filename of a file you want to upload, then right-click on the terminal screen and select ‘copy’, then right-click on the terminal screen and select paste. Voila. NOTE: On windows, if you are using putty, this can be done by double-clicking and then right clicking.

When all the files are done you can type exit and hit enter. You will now want to get to the server and start working with the files you transferred. You can work directly on the server by typing: ssh username@angrygeeks.org and type in your password when prompted. You are now connected to the server via your shell account. You should be located in your home directory (/home/username). You can type pwd and hit enter at any time to have the shell print out where you are. Type ls and hit enter to make sure your files are there.

Why are they red?

Good question. Type in ls -lha (you might want to create an alias for this) and then hit enter. This lists all of the files and directories along with extended details, such as size and permissions. Upon investigation we see that there is only one explanation for the reason your files are listed in red. They are compressed. So, yes, you were right. Let’s move on. Sorry!

The angrygeeks development team has a main repository for source code. The location of this directory is /home2/geeks. So, if you type in cd /home2/geeks and hit enter you should now be in the main source code directory. Type ls and hit enter to show the directory contents. You will notice we have separate directories for each project. You are basically creating a new project for Joomla. Therefore, you will want to make a new directory! This is easy. Just type in mkdir directoryname (in this case joomla). If linux doesn’t say anything back, then that means it works!

Now we want to move all of the uploaded files in your home directory to the joomla project directory. Type in cp /home (they will almost always begin with a slash), so, /home/username/, hit the tab button twice…

We see from the listing that all of your files are zip files. So, that means we can move all of them at once by using the * as a wildcard in the filename. So, we finish our cp command by typing: cp /home/gebs/*.zip /home2/geeks/joomla and hit enter.

Type ls to view your files.

We need to unzip archives to work with the files. These are zip files so we will just use the unzip command. Type unzip filetouncimpress.zip and hit enter.

This will unzip the contents keeping the directory structure intact. Type ls to view your files. You can see that unzipping the contents right in the directory you were in made a bit of a mess. Oh well. Make a directory for your zips and move them into it.

We didn’t do move, did we. Moving works the same as copying except for the obvious difference. To move files from the command line type mv yourfile.zip. You want to move them all at once? You know that drill.

The forward slash is not a complicated concept when you take it for exactly what it is. The first / tells the shell where to start. If it is left out, then the shell assumes you want to start from your current working directory.

Now, we have some source code to work with. We need a website so that you can run your installer, though. The site you are working on is hailthegoat.org. This site is currently pointed at pretty much nothing.

<session ends>

Everything else is history. Lot’s of stuff happened in-between and it looks like the tutorial is a bit disjointed because I was trying to work fast. I will revise this at a later time, maybe. You should thank my wife for being so patient while I stubbornly recorded notes while she waited for help.