July 2008 Archives

Very few people like going to the doctor, myself included. So you can imagine my frustration when I found myself needing to making a doctor's appointment this week. I expected to have an appointment at an inconvenient time, sit in a stuffy waiting room with old magazines for an hour, only to be followed by sitting in a stuffy exam room for another hour. We've all been there.

While at cabooseconf last month, I found out about one of the coolest time tracking tools ever: punch. (Thanks to cardiod from OG)

According to its own description, it's a

k.i.s.s. tool for tracking the hours spent on various projects. it supports logging hours under a project name, adding notes about work done during that period, and several very simple reporting tools that operate over a window of time.

I find this to be a much easier method of tracking time than many alternatives, including the zillions of time tracking/billing web 2.0 sites. In fact, an hour or two of hacking could leave someone with a pretty decent time tracking AND invoicing tool.

And wouldn't ya know it, it's as simple as gem install punch.

For those of you who use OmniFocus and won't be getting an iphone, this one could really come in handy. It's a ruby script that talks to OmniFocus via OSA, grabs all the items in a given context, then writes them as poorly-formed html over ssh to a predefined destination. Cheap and dirty, but it's the quickest way I've found to get stuff like this available anywhere, especially in a mobile phone browser.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'

require 'rbosa'

require 'net/ssh'

of = OSA.app 'OmniFocus'

shopping_list = of.default_document.contexts.collect { |x| x if x.name == 'Errands' }.compact.first.contexts.collect { |x| x if x.name == 'Shopping' }.compact.first

items = shopping_list.tasks.collect { |x| x.name unless x.completed? }.compact

def post_file( shell, file, datum )

shell.touch(file)

shell.send_command("echo \"#{datum}\" > #{file}")

end

def build_html(items)

"<ul>#{items.collect{|item| '<li>' + item + '</li>' }}</ul>"

end

Net::SSH.start( 'myserver.dreamhost.com' ) do |session|

shell = session.shell.sync

post_file shell, "~/shoppinglist.mydomain.com/index.html", build_html(items)

shell.exit

# session.loop

end