Padded thoughts

This started as a comment on Martin’s post about problems with Vista but grew a bit too long so I have put it here.

I have too many machines (can you have too many :-)) the one I use most is the MacBook (especially now I have discovered it is Unix really), then the little Linux Asus which is an amazing blend of very easy to use and versatility, last my Vaio with XP (in a cupboard at work for the last month). There are a few applications that are handy for the PC but otherwise somehow it isn’t the best to use. The best free stuff is in the Unix world - Mac and Linux give you access. The advantage of the the PC used to be that you didn’t need to think about how it works - but with online updates and validations then it looks like you do. I am also looking at alternatives for Word at the moment so MS is becoming less important for me - because things do not interoperate fully rather than down on the applications themselves. If Word had an uncluttered export of HTML or XML then I would be happy sticking stuff in it, but it doesn’t so that generates a whole new job of reformatting, cutting and pasting, and general fiddling with documents that should not be there. This really hits me in my role as a journal editor.

So at the moment I feel my world may be in transition and I have been trying out some alternatives - XML editors, LaTeX, Google Docs, etc. I will try to write more later but i am feeling a pull away from the institutional preferences towards alternative application mixes - and just if you are like Martin and your Vista machine refuses to let you do anything!

For a couple of reasons I decided to install Drupal on my Macbook: it seems to have become the prototyping tool of choice in the OU; I am thinking about using the ejournal module for the journal I edit JIME; and, I had too much real work to do so a distraction was in order. I did succeed in installing it after a couple of days but with some strange problems on the way. As usual Google searches supplied the answer but it took a few places so I thought it worth gathering the information here. To be precise what I did on 1st May 2008 was:

• On an Intel Macbook (2GHz/1Gb/120Gb) running OS X 10.4.11 Tiger.
• Using Mac supplied Apache 1.3.33 and PHP 4.4.7
• Install Drupal 6.2
• Which needed mysql 5.0.51b
• And also I need phpMyAdmin 2.11.6

I followed the instructions at MacZealots on Installing Drupal on Tiger which starts by enabling Apache then getting the software, I installed the latest version of Drupal (6.2) and mysql (5.0.51b) rather than the older versions in the tutorial. It went fine upto this line:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p drupal </Library/WebServer/Documents/drupal/database/database.mysql

The skeleton database.mysql does not exist - so ignore the error message and carry on with the next part to enable PHP on the Mac.

But the php does not talk properly to the mysql - this is explained in an Apple support message. But a variant is needed of the steps described there - I did

1. In Terminal: sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini
2. Open /etc/php.ini in your preferred text editor.
3. Find the [MySQL] section, and change the mysql.default_socket directive:

        mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

When it came to configuring Drupal though things also went a bit wrong. The manual configuration in the macZealots page seems to have been replaced with configuration via the browser so can be skipped. But accessing drupal as http://localhost/drupal gave some error messages. Most of these refer to permissions which can be fixed by changing permissions on files - page at drupal.org suggested chmod to give access, I preferred chown -R www - but in each case be wary of security issues (minimal on my laptop). I then hit failure with an error message referring to:

ORDER BY fit DESC LIMIT 0, 1′ at line 1 query: SELECT * FROM menu_router

Googling for this phrase took me to this forum discussion at drupal.org which has some good suggestions but did not spell out the solution which for me was to:

1. stop using Safari and use Firefox instead for the setup (may not be vital but it is what I did)
2. install phpMyAdmin (note instructions there are a bit vague as well but I managed)
3. use phpMyAdmin to inspect the drupal database created earlier following the MacZealots instructions
4. select all tables in this database and drop them
5. open http://localhost/drupal/install.php to restart the configuration

After that things got better - a few more directories needed permission changed and I haven’t worked out how to enable the GD graphics library but I am now away and happy. Just need to work out what to do with Drupal.

I hope listing this might help someone (or me when I come to do it again). Some bits are from memory so I hope they are right.

I have spent a couple of days in the OU internal conference Making Connections blogging the sessions that I am in over on my OCHRE blog. My colleague Doug Clow also blogged the same conference and there were several of us also twittering away during the conference. Liam Green-Hughes created an OU aggregator twitter to see what we were all doing, This was all quite good fun and I felt that I got more out of the conference by making the notes, though I did feel a bit like one of the rebels sitting at the back seat - even though I didn’t get told off like Doug.

There are various advice sites about what makes a good conference blog, and I have been a fan since the OpenLearn2007 conference - but I am unsure what the reader gets out of it, and whether the best route it the raw, quick as possible set of notes. Or a shorter summary which has gaps in it. My own posts are probably somewhere imbetween. Tony Hirst (read through Liam’s PlanetOU blog aggreator) has also just pointed out the advantage of using consistent tags to help aggregate the articles - so I had better go off to fix that!

This year we again have a pair of blue tits in a nest box by our house. The nest box has a camera in it hooked up to our TV via a DVD recorder. Blue Tit TV is definitely the best channel we have and the female has just settled down to brood her 10 eggs - laid one a day over the last 10 days, though she wouldn’t start laying unit he proved that he could bring her caterpillars!

Last year we uploaded quite a few videos on my son’s youtube channel. Not sure if we will do so many this year but it is fascinating and definitely educational. Things that I found out: how blue tits sleep, that he finds the nest then gives it up, what an angry blue tit looks like, and more.

Follow TonyH’s advice received through the wonders of twitter I installed RescueTime as part of my move towards managing time. The result over the first couple of days is shown below.

I think the plot is interesting but I am not sure how useful. Over these two days my main work tasks were involved in meetings that don’t show up (at least not automatically) so the graphs show how I filled in time imbetween. Looking at the detail it shows my top three as e-mail, word and ThinkingRock, which made me wonder at first that I am spending too long thinking about what to do and not enough time doing it! However on reflection I have decided that it shows the value of having a place to organise thoughts and, for the moment at least, I intend to carry on with ThinkingRock and see it as a good thing rather than a distraction.

For RescueTime itself so far it is “interesting” but not necessarily useful. From the descriptions on the website usefulness will come if I can either turn this into measures of behaviour I want, or if we adopt this across a group. The group model is where RescueTime hope to make money - but not sure I want to know what other people are up to or compare myself to group norms (though if others at the OU want to join in I might consider trying the group mode).

For now I will try setting a few goals to go on with and see how it goes.

Martin Weller across on his blog has written about how we have just been reviewed where we work at IET. The review has plenty of reasonable anlaysis but ends with a suggestion that IET splits in two and bifurcates - which if it is not handled carefully might lead to chaos, or at least some effort spent in the wrong place.

Martin’s post considers what happens when reorgs strike. I agree with his view that we ought perhaps not be so tied up with how we actually are organised, as Martin puts it 

Actually, I think that with new ways of connecting, it’s not that the reorg should be more prevalent, but rather that organisational structures, which are often physical organisational structures, are increasingly irrelevant.

However I have another reference point for thinking about organisational change and that is the book the Dilbert Principle. I picked this up at the airport a few years back and found it shaped by view of how management works (even though there are several warnings to ignore such books and reminders that you are reading the management advice of someone who draws cartoons for a living). In the book Scott Adams makes some good points against “one off” activities with restructuring as the prime example of such activity. So  I feel very cautious about setting off down that route. However if we can do something more about changes in ways of working, picking up on knowing what we are doing and why, building on the latest tools so that structure and boundaries matter rather less then I think the review and the push for change could do us some good. 

I think that life needs a decent swap algorithm but first we need a way to know what we are doing. In Unix terms I want to do “ps x” to find the processes that are

The GTD approach is to dump a whole list of everything that you need to do and that makes a great place to start. But where to make the dump? A couple of years ago I got on fairly well with a simple little note book; but then it got messy and I stopped. Then I tried the todo list on on an iPaq; but then I switched computers and it wouldn’t sync and I stopped. So this time around I started with the application that seems to be in favour for time management: Remember the milk .

In RTM there are some good features: it embeds in iGoogle desktop, it is easy to use, there are ways to set the different contexts. But I think I might be too much the optimist when filling in the things to do with the result that each day’s todo list becomes dominated by the things I didn’t do on the previous days. I felt that I needed something to hold those items that I need to do after i have done something. So I looked around for something a little bit more sophisticated. What i have found is ThinkingRock.

ThinkingRock seems to take the GTD approach more seriously than other pieces of software and act as a thought organiser rather than time organiser. I have been impressed by the way in which the software goes beyond the actions to include projects - i.e. things that take more than one action. After a few days I remain quite enthusiastic about ThinkingRock as a process gatherer: but it seems less good as a time schedular. I feel that someone out there has probably mashed this into Remember the milk but I can’t see it in a quick scan. It also sits as a main application rather than embedding into other things. But for the moment I think I will use it as my process gatherer.

I now need to find a way to work my process scheduler: this should pick out what needs doing, give it a time slice, up the priority of things I ignore too long, and not be annoying. Mini-spec only as again this time-slice is used up.

By the way following Tony’s advice now running RescueTime so at least I should start to know the applications I spend time using - though not sure if it will help me know why.

Following up on my previous post about Life Thrash I have carried on thinking about the parallels between operating systems and life. The two suggestions so far “switch off and on again” and “upgrade to a newer model” are a bit tricky to implement - however a software upgrade does not seem out of the question! Sticking with process control in particular I feel that I am currently running a poor algorithm that loses processes, can fail to complete, and works best when simply just doing one thing (but not necessarily the right thing). In OS terms this is like an old version of DOS and things would be a whole lot better if I was running Unix.

So what is a decent process management system. A quick Google for Unix process management shows that there are likely to be some good guides out there, and I may even see if I still have my lecture notes (in troff) on a CD somewhere, but for the moment I want to just describe it from memory so apologies if there are some mismatches here.

Useful concepts are: processes, priorities, nice, running, sleeping, zombie, time slice. Each thing that can be run is a process, the priority is how much you would like it to run, nice is a way to lower (or raise) that priority. Processes can be running, sleeping waiting their turn to run, or a zombie which is something left around that can’t do anything anymore. Just had a check - I left out stopped, which I think is something that needs to be started again.

The key then is to apply a decent algorithm that gives each process a turn, but while a process is having its turn the priority reduces so that no process will miss out for long. Swapping processes in and out switches the context and the OS will try to do this fast enough so multi-tasking appears to work even though the reality may well be that the machine only has one processor. 

OK well my time slice on this task is now up and I will switch to something else (sleeping). I hope that there is enough here to help me think about how actions in life can also be viewed as processes. I want to explore what can be done to help control these: process lists, contexts, priorities and time slices. I think the answer will look a lot like David Allen’s Getting Things Done and that will be good as that opens up some tools that can be used to help.

I feel that just as computers suffer from disk thrash when asked to do too much and spend all the time just swapping things in from disk and back again, I am suffering from Life Thrash - switching attention from one thing to another and not completing tasks.

Having recognised this I want to do something about it! I have a Computer Science background and in the past lectured on operating systems and how computers behave and algorithms and tools that made things work better, matched things to memory and resources and gave everything appropriate priority.  I used to like teaching about the Unix (BSD) way to do things and how it assigned what should happen next. 

So this short post (not least as it is past 1am) is a marker that I am going to work on Life Thrash a bit more, play with the tools that help (again!) and see where I go. I said to Will today I needed to post a declaration to get past this and stop “post about Life Thrash” adding to the  multi-tasking load. So I have.

I am at a conference making some blog entries across at my OCHRE OpenLearn blog. I was taking pictures to illustrate by blog about Marsha Lovett’s presentation and it was not working. Strange error messages resulted asking me to “checktickets”. Looking at the Flickr blog they know about it as their “farm1″ is down. I am sure they will fix it soon but it does seem strange to have one of the major Web2.0 sites not working. I could of course find other solutions but for the moment I will wait it out and add the pictures a bit later.