Deadly Bloody Serious

Further to my previous post about a way to improve your productivity on the cheap, some anonymous benefactor has used my personal coupon code (CC15-15411) to buy ClearContext, and in the process:

• Saved $15 for themselves, and
• Saved me the [as yet unknown] cost of the upgrade.

I’m delighted with ClearContext for providing me with a way to save money using my blog, and with whichever of my readers it was that gave ClearContext a shot. Thankyou both!

[Attempt 2, thanks to some WordPress mishap]

As I mentioned on my experimental MSN space:

ClearContext assigns priorities to mail based on thread and participant, and colour-codes and sorts your mail by those priorities. That doesn’t sound as amazing as it is. I’ve never put down my credit card faster than when told my trial had expired.

I’m still delighted with the product, despite barely scratching the feature set. Important items float to the top of my inbox as if by magic, and I can assign labels and file them without dragging and dropping. Once I’ve labelled a thread, future mail in the same thread automatically inherits the label. There’s even a whole Getting Things Done workflow system in there.

Not resting on their laurels, they’re nearly ready to release ClearContext IMS 3.0, which has a feature I dearly want: unsubscribing from threads so that they’re automatically filed out of your inbox. That one feature alone is probably worth the cost of the upgrade.

The evil geniuses in ClearContext Marketing have come up with a strategy to generate pre-launch buzz that might save me that upgrade fee, however: a personal coupon code that’ll save you $15 and get me my upgrade for free. Just quote CC15-15411 when you buy ClearContext, and we’ll both come out ahead of the game.

PS: it worked!

After one too many glitches, Cameron has given up on electronic capture. He’s converted to the Moleskine, and now seeks more Moleskine hacks despite Rob Irwin’s dire warnings about the dangers of unconstrained experiments in self-organsation.

I’m somewhat cautious about the Rimmer Effect, also, but (so far) find there’s a subtle balance in GTD that helps: it’s somehow extensible enough to keep me interested and entertained (and, thus, productive!), without becoming so entertaining that I zoom in and dump myself into la-la analysis paralysis land.

(That’s just as well: there’s plenty else in the world that’ll pull me through the looking glass, trust me.)

In answer to Cameron’s question, though:

So far, the only Moleskine hack I’ve needed is to use a removable 3M coloured tag to indicate the page up to which I’ve processed. If it seems a long way back, I spend some idle time at a cafe copying things forward. If I run out of Moleskine, I can buy another one and copy stuff in. I’m on to my third of the big Moleskine reporters, with no sign of stopping.

Processing is a matter of wading through the Moleskine, updating my Mind Manager maps with action items and important notes, and moving the tag forward. I also cross my to-do boxes through horizontally to indicate I’ve moved them to the real system. Genuine completion gets a tick. If it’s no longer interesting or useful, I cross it out.

My other tip can’t be called a hack, because Moleskine did it deliberately: the back pages are perforated. Need to hand someone a diagram? Rip, scrawl, and hand it over. For some reason, that always seems to amuse the IT professionals. Paper can do that?

I know, I know: I haven’t written about Django for a while. Nor am I this time, really, except to note that I’m still a Subversion novice and have screwed up my vendor branch strategy. I’ll get back to it, though, honest. All I need is some Copious Spare Time…

In other news: if you subscribe to this feed, and you noticed some errors, and now you’re seeing this: I must have fixed it, eh? ;)

I’ve got good and bad news for Juice users on Windows.

First, the bad news: iTunes 7 breaks Juice. Apple might have changed the COM interface on which Juice relies to do its work, but they haven’t updated the SDK so I can’t find out. Perhaps it’s something in our code. Regardless: If you upgrade to iTunes 7, Juice can’t add downloaded tracks to the library.

(Reinstalling iTunes might help; see the updates below.)

Now, the good news: I upgraded, too. My podcast listening life is going to be a hassle until I fix the bug. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so it’s safe to say I’ll get this one fixed as soon as I can given three factors:

1. My understanding of win32com not being wonderful;
2. Apple’s changes, if any, being un-documented until the SDK is revised; and
3. Me being an old geezer.

For the time being, there’s a relatively easy work-around (if re-installing iTunes doesn’t work):

• Have Juice download your podcasts as usual;
• Run iTunes;
• Select Add Folder to Library from the File menu;
• Select your My Received Podcasts folder again; and
• Watch iTunes add your new podcasts to the library.

I’m banging my head against the win32com documentation as I write. We tried using static dispatch with a past version of iTunes, but any iTunes upgrade would break us. We switched back to dynamic dispatch, and that’s worked us fine across plenty of upgrades until now.

If there are any Python experts out there who spend a lot of time with COM and can help me nut this out, please let me know.

Updates:

• Here’s an odd one: at least one Juice user has upgraded to iTunes 7 without trouble.
• David Nicolson reports, on the python-win32 mailing list, that he’s seen this occasionally out of iTunes and that uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes usually fixes the problem. I’ve tried it, and it works. I’ll get confirmation from a few others, and publish if it’s not just me succeeding at this.
• Further to that last one: it mostly works. Unfortunately, the gap is adding tracks. IITPlaylist doesn’t have AddFile any more? Gaaah. My “fixes” obviously aren’t. Time to destroy my makepy cache…(Sub-update: my binary install of 2.2.2a1 works fine, so this might be local to my development version.)
• There might be other reasons not to upgrade: engadget report other problems with iTunes, including “scratchy playback”. Personally, I haven’t noticed any of the declared symptoms, and I love the scrolling album view.

Those few (perhaps zero) of you that read my site directly, rather than via a feed reader, might have noticed that

1. everything looks a little different; and
2. all of the old posts are missing.

The first is deliberate. I’m still trying to figure out whether the second is deliberate, too.

Over the years I’ve used a few different blogging platforms. I started with Blogger, which I gave up because I couldn’t make my own improvements to it. I switched to Radio Userland, which I gave up because it was too unpredictable a platform for me to make my own improvements. From there I switched to (and helped develop) PyDS, which I’m giving up because I want a platform on which I can’t make my own improvements.

To cut a long story short: I’m too old to stay up all night fixing bugs — just ask my poor Juice users. The tiniest problem can throw a six month gap into my blog. As I originally put it five months ago when I made the decision: “Uncle.” .

(As my mate Alastair might put it: I’ve had a geezer moment. Hey, Al! You’re #1!)

So, I’m switching to WordPress. I don’t have to develop it. There are billions of plug-ins. My ISP can provide technical support. Sweet.

I’m still trying to figure out whether or not to import all my old posts, for technical and content reasons.

Technically, the problem is mixed formats. My original Blogger and Radio posts have a lot of HTML in them, and most of my PyDS posts are in reStructuredText. So, importing will require some scripting work to pre-render those pages. That’ll involve development and bug fixing. See also: old geezer, above.

With regard to the content, I’m not sure that all of my old posts are worth the effort of recovery. It didn’t hurt too much to never quite import my old Blogger posts into my Radio blog, so maybe it won’t hurt too much to leave my old Radio and PyDS posts behind. I have no massive reader base to disappoint, either. Perhaps I’ll only import those that have active incoming links. Perhaps I’ll import those and some old favourites. Perhaps I’ll never quite get around to either.

At least, for now, I’ve got a working platform upon which I can write without hassle. So far, so good.

I’m rebooting my blog on new software. I’ll explain more later….