That's funny

I had to chuckle today, I was searching for a link someone told me existed for TaskClerk and stumbled across a whole lot of sites stating they had cracked TaskClerk. What! I exclaimed - its free you wallies what are you trying to crack?

My guidance to would be users is -> Download it from an official site, its quicker and very free!

TaskClerk Version 107

Version 107 of TaskClerk has shipped. This version contains some bug fixes and was compiled under Visual studio 2008 - The framework has not been upgraded but work has started on the WPF version and some enterprise features, thanks to the efforts of my friends.

Download at http://www.taskclerk.com/downloads.ashx

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Enjoy!

Version 106 of TaskClerk

A new version of TaskClerk has been shipped. This version contains an updated printing dialog and some improved UI usability features.

Enjoy!

Looks like success.

Over the last few months TaskClerk has been downloaded well over 300 times from software sites all over the world. I thought I would note down its progress to help me when I reminisce one day. Some facts about the TaskClerk web site.

• 46 web pages on the site: Target for next year this time 150
• 2287 visits: Target for next year this time 10000
• 8,425 page views: Target for next year this time 50000
• 411 cities: Target for next year this time 1000
• 315 downloads: Target for next year this time 2000
• 10 comments by community: Target for next year this time 500

The only one that I think will be a stretch is the “comments by community”, the product does not provoke a reaction that warrants contacting the developers, most of us just don’t behave that way – so thanks to those who do comment, you fundamentally change the shape of the applications you comment on for the better.

Strategy as a process

My next course is Strategy and this diagram best portrays "strategy as a process" and the fundamental building blocks I will have to understand for the exam in October!




This is going to be hard work! One aspect that I wrestled with during the tutorial today was operational and strategic thinking. Sometimes I have mistaken my operational thinking as a type of stategy.
"Operational thinking relates to those activities or sets of activities that characterise the internal functioning of an organisation on a day-to-day basis. Examples of such activities include procedures to control quality of input and output, systems for handling customer complaints, techniques for minimising costs or cycle time, systems for managing recruitment or performance-related rewards and so on"
"Strategic thinking, by contrast, considers the performance of such systems and activities in their entirety." - OU Business School, What is Strategy, pg18

The effects of multitasking someones time.

Here is the basic effect of multitasking someones time, all but the last work stream is late. This concept does not take into account the increased marshaling between task types so this means the last work stream is also invariably late.



The top row shows 3 plans following a sequential pattern, the second row shows an interleaved pattern and P1b (the end of P1) completes the same time as the original P2 plan etc.

New Version of TaskClerk

A new version of TaskClerk has been shipped. Version 1.0.1.104 contains a new iCal exporter that can be used to add calendar information to both Outlook and Google calendar.

Formal Public Identifiers (FPIs)

I came across this identifier whilst creating an iCal exporter for TaskClerk.

An FPI has the following syntax.

"+-//Owner//Keywords Description//Language"

The + denotes a registered owner and the - denotes unregistered owner.

The Owner is the company name like Google or BritishMicro; it can also be ISO or ISBN.

The Keywords indicate the type of information the FPI refers to. Some common keywords are DTD, ELEMENT, ENTITIES, and TEXT.

The Description provides an area in the FPI where you can provide extra detail like a version or format.

The Language is a two character ISO language code. EN is used for English.

Examples
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
PRODID:-//BritishMicro//TaskClerk 1.0.1//EN

Can its be worse than this.

Looking at your potential competitors.

So as a budding timesheet developer in my spare time I decided I needed to understand my competitors. This is a disheartening process for a start-up, it takes hours. I suggest using one of Porters models as a structured strategy.

So let’s go through the model in the context of an ISV.

• Your current competitors; doing a little research using the internet and looking for services and products that compare with yours. Looking at the cost, look and feel, features and support to name but a few aspects.
• Buyers; you need to understand who is going to buy from you. What need does your product for fill and what is the perceived value can they see in your product that will make them part with their hard earned cash.
• Suppliers; I struggled with this one and settled on the effect of their service or integrated product could have on your delivery.
• New entrants; how hard is it for others to join your market. What is the barrier to entry; we invariably combat this by adding features or dropping the price or both.
• Substitutes; something comes along and makes you software superfluous. E.g. floppy disks or CRT’s. Here you just need to keep at the R&D and be the next best thing!

After this start at understanding the competitive market, I think what I will do is contact each of the competitors I have identified and propose an xml timesheet standard – this could be quite fun if it’s not already been done, imagine you name on a RFC standard, mint!

TaskClerk 1.0.1.103 release

This release addresses some bugs and adds the new TaskDescription Add dialog.



You can download the lastest version at http://www.taskclerk.com/downloads.ashx.

Self hosting a web site

I found this an interesting exercise and promote the idea for those wanting to understand how the mechanics and technology works. The process was fairly trivial for me because my ISP had given me a fixed IP address back in 2001 and the broadband upstream speeds are fast enough now to get the text part of the pages down to the requester in a good time. If you don't have a fixed IP address you can use a service like DynDNS.

Some things I did to make the site more snappy:
Run the web site from a memory stick and back it up.
Put images and big file downloads on a proper internet host like Google groups.
Add Google analytics to your pages!

This arrangement is not suitable if the site is of commercial importance or needs to be up 24/7. Home machines are not as reliable as hosted servers and the xDSL links can go up and down.

Its quite a thrill having your web site hosted in your loft!

The moon @ home

This was the best image I could find that looked like the moon in Somerset tonight. The Moon started to enter the planet's shadow from 2215 GMT.

The sky above me link.

Stealth on my desktop

There seems to be a stealth aircraft (at 90 degrees) hiding on my desktop background. I can't stop looking at it.

Web Poet Machine

So why hasn’t anyone created a “Web Poet Machine”, I’m not saying being a poet is easy and can be replicated by a machine, what I am saying is this sounds like a cool app to write.

The process could be:
1. You type in a word or two
2. You choose a poem type
3. http://thesaurus.reference.com/ is used to get Synonyms and Antonyms
4. These words are then plumbed into Google
5. Millions of pages get returned and phrases get extracted from the pages
6. Rhyming pairs are found
7. The phrases are then ordered into the poem type/pattern

Could it work, sure – would it be any good? As good as any random number lottery generator could be I suppose!