All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Just Do Something

chromatic on 2004-07-14T05:58:34

I've been experimenting lately with task lists, both at work and away. Since I have dozens of little things to keep track of in the next three months (roll on October!), only luck would have kept me on top of things.

Of course, being prone to yak shaving, I wrote a program to keep track of these tasks. Go on and laugh, I'll wait. Ready? It works phenomenally well.

I've mentioned how much I like Maypole. I've also always admired the way Ingy makes the installation and configuration experience easy, as exemplified by Kwiki. I've tried to do the same thing with the new installer for Everything, though that's a work in progress.

Anyhow, since I run Maypole through Jellybean to power my task manager, I've been doing a bit of work on Jellybean lately. In the spirit of my new goal to Just Do SOMETHING, I wrote Jellybean::App to simplify configuring and running a Jellybean application. It still requires you to know a little bit about how Jellybean works, but once you understand that there are servers that listen for incoming requests and named containers that respond to requests, you should find this much easier than writing a little driver script.

For example, the Jellybean::App-enabled launcher for my task manager has around four lines of code and around ten or so lines of configuration data. That beats some twenty-plus lines of code. It also gives much better diagnostics when you do things incorrectly; that by itself is a major improvement.

Sure, it's syntactic sugar, but it's quite a bit easier to explain and it took me under two hours.

You're so Elite

cwest on 2004-07-14T14:35:48

I've resorted to Apple's Stickies. I've always hated them until I tried to use iCal for todo lists. Then I found out just how easy they are in comparison. They're little, and always there.

But then, all I get to do is delete a sticky to see more of my pretty background image. You get to remove rows from a database! :-)

Though I am now a firm believer in your central point: JFDI. Any progress is a move in the right direction. Or, perhaps better, any move is progress in the right direction.

Re:You're so Elite

ask on 2004-07-15T00:42:39

We need synchronized stickies. :-)

  - ask

Funny story about stickies

btilly on 2004-08-09T04:54:44

A few years ago I asked my sister if she wanted some helpful hints on her computer. She said, "Sure!" So I came up with a few that I thought would be helpful, and posted them as stickies on her computer. (One of them had advice for how to get rid of or add to the stickiest that I had up.)

Now she knows that I'm a programmer. But she's far more impressed by the fact that I figured out how to put stickies on her computer than anything I can tell her about what I actually do for a living!