James Rodenkirch

If you have worked with me over the past few years you know I often try to find ways to reduce effort required with tracking time on a task by task basis. In fact, I’ve blogged about this topic before (see original post). I’ve tried many different setups including software packages, multiple spreadsheet setups, web based applications – you name it. All these solutions work, but they never really fit with my work flow or they added too much cruft to make me want to use them. Continue reading

I’ve been playing around with the idea of using debian packages to deploy updates to various servers (virtual machines, dev servers, production servers etc). I was curious to see how this could work for a variety of tasks, but mostly I needed a way to help keep our development virtual machine up to date without physically maintaining a virtual disc that all developers use. Because we each modify the vm to fit in our specific environment, the need to enforce the existence of *packages* and not specific *configuration* is paramount – this turned out to be a godsend for us.
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Holy crap batman!!!

I saw on slashdot today that Nokia is going to be releaseing QT under the LGPL license starting with version 4.5 (site). Back in the day, when I was toying with leaving the web industry and going more into traditional software developement, QT caught my eye. The thing that stopped me from diving into QT at that time, was the $5000 license fee for anything non open source.

Now that it is being released as LGPL only, there are no more entry fees. Guess I will be looking at QT again

At my current job I am constantly dumping mysql databases from a v5 server to import into a v3 server. In order for this to work, I have to dump the database in a mode that is compatible with version 3. Here is a quick reference for the compatibility modes available for mysqldump. Continue reading

As a developer. it is very common to be required to report actual time spent working on a project or task. Sometimes the data is used for project planning, and sometimes your time is actually billed back to the customer. Over the last few years, I have used a variety of means of tracking time, some that made me cringe, and some that are almost a pleasure to use.

*** Read an updated post to learn more about my new project gootimer, a task based time reporting tool for Google Calendar ***

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