As I wrote before I won’t post anymore to my livejournal blog (as I do now), but I still read my friend’s posts regularly and write comments on their posts. Here I will write my daily thoughts and ideas (mostly in English because I don’t think that there is anybody who is interested in reading all these stuff) and here I will post some reports from my trips and events (these posts I’ll write in Russian language and maybe in English). Today was my last working day before vacation and I hope I’ll start write here very soon.
Archive for the ‘idea’ Category
Some thoughts concerning this blog
May 23, 2008Back to time-logging experiments
April 9, 2008A couple of month ago I wrote about time-logging experiment here, here and here. The main reasons why I decided not do it every day were: first, I found that I can be very productive if I have tasks to do and strict time limits, and second, it is very inconvenient to write all these tasks with not having special application. I didn’t find any service to do this and firstly wanted to create my own application or service. I gave it a try but gave up. Why? Here an explanation. This is a my quotation from this blog:
sandlex wrote on April 9, 2008Hi. Some time ago I had a experiment on tracking my daily work-related activity by writing out tasks I do and calculating some results. I wrote here about it. It was very difficult to write all these things in text files and I even decided to write tracking application. I made a prototype and after analysis it was clear that this kind of application is not handy. The best solution came to my mind was to write a bot for Twitter whom I’ll send short messages like: start writing design, stop writing design. And bot will automatically process such messages, build a chains of these tasks taking into account timestamps when it got messages and through the special interface show me some tables, diagrams describing how productive I was. The problem is I have no idea how to write bots for twitter so I gave up this idea. Maybe you can write something like this based on jabber-protocol? Extend the functionality you’ve planned to do by adding some analytic features.
Does anyone know any such twitter/jabber service? It would be perfect to get one.
Thoughts about time-logging
January 20, 2008Tomorrow I’ll finish the first week of the time-logging experiment I mentioned in my previous post. Today I’ve tried to take a look at my notes and to calculate a percentage for a first 4 days. And it’s really not a simple task as I might expect. The problem is during the last week I was making my notes in my google notebook and almost all of my records look like this:
9.15 -’ve finished this task. let’s have a rest
9.23 - I’m here. ready to work
It was funny to make the records this way but it’s not funny at all to manage them. I’m lucky that I have no more than 20 records each day but nevertheless it’s quite difficult to group records to mike them look like:
9.15 - 9.23 - break
So I decided to postpone this difficult calculation task and instead of doing that decided to look for online services providing such functionality. Google gave me some links and I’ve found several suitable tools. Links are below:
http://www.14dayz.com
http://www.toadtime.com
http://www.toggl.com
http://www.myhours.com
The last one I find the most suitable for me but I need something much more simplier. I don’t need all these costs of tasks, I don’t need any project gradation. I just need to divide all my tasks into 3 categories: work (when I’m doing some project-related tasks, it’s a green light), rest (when I’m really have a rest without sitting infront of my computer, it’s a yellow light) and “prohibited” activity (like chatting, web-serfing, etc, it’s a red light). And the program should calculate the percentage of all these groups of tasks and show the results. That’s all I need. Honestly, it’s not all I need and of course I have some ideas how such service can be extended but I won’t write them here
Let’s keep it secret.
9.15 -’ve finished this task. let’s have a rest
9.23 - I’m here. ready to work
It was funny to make the records this way but it’s not funny at all to manage them. I’m lucky that I have no more than 20 records each day but nevertheless it’s quite difficult to group records to mike them look like:
9.15 - 9.23 - break
So I decided to postpone this difficult calculation task and instead of doing that decided to look for online services providing such functionality. Google gave me some links and I’ve found several suitable tools. Links are below:
http://www.14dayz.com
http://www.toadtime.com
http://www.toggl.com
http://www.myhours.com
The last one I find the most suitable for me but I need something much more simplier. I don’t need all these costs of tasks, I don’t need any project gradation. I just need to divide all my tasks into 3 categories: work (when I’m doing some project-related tasks, it’s a green light), rest (when I’m really have a rest without sitting infront of my computer, it’s a yellow light) and “prohibited” activity (like chatting, web-serfing, etc, it’s a red light). And the program should calculate the percentage of all these groups of tasks and show the results. That’s all I need. Honestly, it’s not all I need and of course I have some ideas how such service can be extended but I won’t write them here
Let’s keep it secret.
Tomorrow I’ll calculate my results. Really interesting for me.
Privacy and wasting of time in the Internet
December 14, 2007These days I’m thinking a lot about my presence in the Internet. There is a quite big list of web-sites where I am registered. I mean social networks, blogs, forums and so on. Anyone can find out who am I just typing my name or nickname in google and it will show what I look like, which music I like, which sites I visit often and so on. Do I need to have all this information shared with those people who I’m not familiar with even? I don’t think so. So since this time I’m going to reduce my presence in the Internet. Of course, it’s impossible to delete all the information about me but I won’t post any private information, thoughts anymore. Moreover I’m wasting many hours monthly just sitting in such sites aimlessly when I can use this time for something more useful and interesting (my projects, career, reading or improving my english for example).
What’s going on in the world of VocRecaptor
December 11, 2007Just a minute ago I’ve finished a rearrangement of my big VocRecaptor mindmap. It’s not a secret that I’m using mind maps for different purposes from writing out my thoughts to making a different plans (including plans for this project).
So now VocRecaptor’s map is properly synchronized with current program state (yes, I was implementing without proper documenting and some features were implemented or were written in some papers). Now here is all right.
In a month (or even earlier) I’ll release the next version (1.4) which will allow you (and it now allows me, because I’m the first and the only user of this version) to learn words and perform some other operations with dictionary.
And after that I’ll start working on the next really extended version which will allow to make exercises, edit your dictionary and so on.
And at the same time I’ll start some sub-projects of VocRecaptor but I’m not going to unveil all my secrets right now.
Cheers.
How are things
September 22, 2007Hey-ya. Haven’t written here quite a long ’cause I had to run concerning our flat repairing. But since this week we are almost in the end of this process. And it’s good.
This week I’ve switched off from my web-site design and now I’m thinking about one small java-project which I want to start for myself (and probably it will be useful for some other people when it will be finished). The project is connected with one of my favourite hobby - learning English. So. What’s else happened to me this week… Nothing except I’ve started listening to bbclearningenglish podcasts again and I really enjoy it. And one the last thing I wanna mention - I was using Pidgin all this week and I like it.
