TomBoy

Following on from [my previous post](http://www.fuckcuntandbollocks.com/dorkus/index.php/archives/2004/09/21/43-folders/) about the principle of dorks _Getting Things Done_ (and hoping, desperately hoping that this doesn’t turn into yet another self-help website), comes [TomBoy](http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/index.html), a simple note-taking application that combines elements of post-it notes and a Wiki.
Although this description belies the power underneath such an application. Simply highlight [...]

43 Folders

Listening to [Tim O'Reilly's talk on Alpha Geeks](http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail197.html), he mentions something that I found very interesting: he says he got started on his long, strange journey by simply documenting something that was largely an oral tradition - what it meant to be ‘root’ on a Unix system. By simply _writing down_ what had been passed on verbally from one admin to the next, he started the ball rolling on what has become one of the largest, most successful and best-respected tech publishing houses in the world.

It’s hard to read Merlin Mann’s [43 folders](http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/) and not think of the same thing. Here, Merlin is simply _writing down_ what others have taken for granted — their productivity habits — and sharing them with others. In most cases, people don’t really appreciate just how effective their habits can be. Or perhaps they just don’t see them as significant enough to share with others. Whatever the case, I can only voice my support for 43 folders (and Danny O’Brien’s slow-coming [life hacks](http://www.lifehacks.org/)), and hope that my self-discipline allows at least some of these habits they are suggesting to seep into my daily routine.

Back to Debian

A couple of weeks ago, my main workstation went insane. I put this down to the fact that I was running Debian unstable, which made it, well… unstable. I’d always had a lot of trouble with it. Occasionally, files would become corrupt (mostly apt’s _status_ file), or programs would randomly segfault. [...]

Helpdesk Systems: Eventum

For the last two years, our IT helpdesk has been “powerered” by Zope’s ‘Tracker’ Product. I laughingly refer to it as ‘powered’ because it’s anything but. Right now, we’ve managed to create an ad-hoc system based around Tracker but at the same which tries to avoid it at every step, because Tracker [...]

Mini-hops

We’re switching our network provider. Before we did, we decided to do some speed tests, to find out which was faster. We did this by pinging [ireland.com](http://www.ireland.com). Strangely, we found that our old provider was _faster_, in spite of the fact they’re supposed to be a slower link, with antiquated technology.
So, [...]

Wario Ware Inc.

Strip the flashy graphics, DTS surround sound and heavy production costs from most of today’s best-selling video games. Strip them right down to their bare-bones essentials and what are you left with? A truly interesting game will manage to maintain its element of “fun” without these things. Nintendo understand this and [...]

Project Idea no. 5629

Another idea for a project I may or may never get around to completing (or in this case, starting):
* list of configuration files/binaries to ‘check’
* in the case of text-based configuration files, read the file into the database
* nightly, check the files to see if they’ve been modified (MD5sum)
* if the configuration file has [...]

LookOut 1.2

It seems Microsoft has made LookOut available as a free download on their site. LookOut was a pretty fancy plugin for Outlook that made it possible to search a giant mailbox in a couple of seconds. Word on the street says that Microsoft bought LookOut to get at the search algorithm, which [...]

404 Cheat

When our CEO came to me and told me that I had two weeks to design and implement a new website, I knew I was in trouble. In the years since our site first went live, it had grown a lot of ‘cruft’, information that was now completely useless. I started by [...]

Outlook Quotefix

Outlook Quotefix is a standalone module that ‘fixes’ many of the problems people have with Outlook - specifically the way it handles quoting. Goodbye top-quoting! Goodbye shoddy line-breaks!
From their site:
> Outlook-QuoteFix can modify MS Outlook’s message composition windows on-the-fly to allow for correct quoting and to change the appearance of your [...]