Getting started with GTD

The first thing I did was grab myself a copy of OmniFocus.  From what I’ve read, this is basically the best application around for GTD.  I like it so far, I watched the intro screencast and it seems like it has some really awesome features and workflows for getting organized and getting things done.  I started with the basic brain dump and will quite likely be adding lots and lots of tasks in to it over the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, with the app, I’ve already run into my problem of over-engineering every little thing, to the point where I don’t even finish because I’ve designed the task to be far far far to

Laptop Organization

One of the tasks I added to OmniFocus was to organize my laptop.  Right now, I basically have 3 folders: Applications, Documents, and Downloads.  I really don’t have any organization in those whatsoever.  I also have Time Machine nagging me like crazy saying it hasn’t backed up my machine in 8 months or something crazy.

Documents, Applications, and Downloads

The first part of organizing my laptop was to create a “Expires on 2009-08-31″ folder inside my Applications folder.  I then went through and moved any apps I hadn’t been using into there, and if I don’t use them by 2009-08-31, they’re getting deleted.  That helped clean up my Applications folder quite a bit.

EMail

I also switched back to Mail.app from Thunderbird.  I’ve never really liked either, but OmniFocus has some nice integration with Mail.app, iCal, and such, so I kinda want to get back to some more integration.  Due to the massive amount of email I have for work and for my personal account, organizing my email is going to be a major task, so that will come later.  Hopefully I can put aside my personal preference issues with Mail.app and grow to like it more.  Anything’s better than Thunderbird, right? :\  Personally, KMail is my favorite mail client, but running on OSX I lose out on that.  I might look into mutt again, and just set up an account specifically for OmniFocus stuff, but we’ll see.  Mutt is a pretty steep learning curve if you’re picky, and also I’ve had issues with it in the past with very very large mail directories (of which I have many), but for now, Mail.app is my master.

Browser

Along with Thunderbird, I’ve been a long time Firefox user.  When I started at DreamHost I started making very extensive use of the keyword search functionality built into Firefox’s bookmark system.  I simply cannot live without this functionality.  There are some ‘hacks’ for Safari which provide similar functionality, but they are severely lacking, both in features, multiple-machine synchronization, ease of use, and, in the case of Keywurl, lack of support for Safari 4 (which is really really trying hard to get me back to using Safari).  In order to replicate that functionality, I’m thinking of looking into some sort of plugin for QuickSilver (something of which I really don’t take enough advantage) to emulate that functionality.  I’ve looked in the past, but what I thought would be stupid simple wasn’t, I got discouraged, gave up, and went back to Firefox.  Another option I’ll likely pursue is just a simple web page with a form which does it all for me.  I’ll quite likely use this approach, as then I don’t have to worry about synchronization, and I can also make it available to other folks at DreamHost to help them get around our back-end management application more easily.  This is still not quite optimal, as it’s a copule of extra steps instead of just hitting cmd-l and typing in the quick search, but it’s way way way better than what one currently has to do if they don’t have keyword searches set up!

Goals

One of my goals is to start blogging more.  I’m not a great writer, and most people probably couldn’t care less about the things I’m likely to write about, but it’s good practice, and if nothing else it’s documentation of my life, something of which I have depressingly little.

Another of my goals is to be more productive at work.  I’ve kinda been in a rut for a while as far as actually getting things accomplished around the office.  I take care of my normal everyday duties such as server maintenance, helping tech support, etc, but I don’t feel like I’m getting much done in the way of actual progress.  I always feel like I’ve checked my email 10000 times, checked on random things 10000 times, and am constantly task-switching, which, unlike a computer, humans do very poorly.

Additionally, I want to get healthier, exercise more (I have a pretty decent road bike now!), eat better (I’ve been watching lots of Good Eats!), and manage my money better (saving up for a down payment on a house by forcefully stealing money from your checking account helps get rid of that obnoxious toy-buying habit).  And of course, QUIT SMOKING.  Ugh.  It’ll happen.  I just have to Get It Done

And finally, I want to be happier!  As part of the non-productivity at work, I’ve started to get a little on the depressed side which, knowing from past experience, ends up making me less productive, which ends up making me more depressed, and on and on in an uncontrollable downward spiral.  Getting my head back in the game, kicking ass at work, taking control of my life, and getting out of the house more often should certainly help with that.

Unfortunately, the deeper I investigate the issue, the more I realize it will require a lot of sweeping changes to our web panel codebase and practices in order to handle properly.  Or, I could just make things happen at a lower level and things will be happy.

The main problem I’m coming across is the inconsistency of how Unicode characters and HTML special characters are encoded when being sent along as form data.  Take the ampersand character (&) for example.  When sent in a form, by itself, it always is sent across literally as the ampersand character.  Less than and greater than characters are the same, they come across literally.  The problem arises when you start sending non-ascii characters.  The following text, which has been copy/pasted from here is sent across as the HTML entities which represent the Unicode codes:

היישוב היהודי בחברון הוכרז שטח צבאי סגור

(היישוב, etc)

This is all fine and dandy.  The way we normally have been doing things is taking whatever comes in and taking it verbatim.  We sanitize on the display end of things in most cases, with HTML::Entities and converting &, <, and > characters to their HTML entity counterparts.  However, you’ll notice that there are & characters in the text being sent to us, so now the browser is encoding it, and we’re encoding it again!  So it displays improperly for users (displaying the literal &#1234; instead of the character they expected) as well as being stored in our database incorrectly (for non-HTML usage, like when sending automated emails and such).  However, if we simply decode the *entire* string, then we accidentally decode literal &amp; and &lt; etc. that people put in as form input, and when we encode it later, it doesn’t come back properly.  In either situation, all or nothing, we munge information.  At least when we do *no* decoding, we don’t *lose* information, but it’s not correct, either.

The solution I’ve come up with here is to simply only HTML entities decode Unicode entities (&#1234;, etc) and leave all of the other entities alone.  This is something I can easily wedge into our lower level POST/GET processing and make transparent to the developer, but I’m unsure if it’s the correct approach, or if it will even work.  I’m definitely going to need to play around with it some more before I make anything live, but I’ll be talking about my experiences with it all right here, on this very blog, for the world to see.  Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any pre-made perl libraries to do this for me.  HTML::Entities looks promising, but its decode method doesn’t seem to be able to take exceptions.  I’ll probably end up stealing a bunch of code from it and piecing it together.

As a quick side note: WordPress (at least as of the version I’m running, which is 2.7-rc1) handles this all excellently.  Not entirely sure if it’s just because of the ‘visual’ editor, or if it handles it properly on the server side, or what, but I’ll definitely be looking more into this as well.