As I (re)evaluate my GTD workflow, I’ve been testing a couple of applications that may help me increase my productivity while becoming a distraction or burden to manage. The next one on my list is Tracks. I decided to put forward a quick howto because it might not be that trivial for some users to git this running with Ruby on Rails.

So tracks going on your Ubunty Hardy you just need to install a few packages, most importantly ruby, ruby gems and sqlite 3 support. Then you just need to enable the sqlite3 gem for Ruby on Rails. Copy paste commands below:

sudo apt-get install rake rubygems libsqlite3-ruby
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Then just follow the instructions on the tracks website. But, if your are lazy as me you can just copy paste the information below, which is a nice quick cheat sheet:

Get tracks, unzip into a folder. Go into that folder and edit the configuration file, making it look like the example shown here for sqlite3:

gedit config/database.yml

development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/tracks-dev.db

test:
adapter: sqlite3
database: ":memory:"

production:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/tracks-main.db

Change a variable in config/environment.rb by putting whatever in it:

gedit config/environment.rb

SALT = "MakeThisYourRandomPhraseToGenerateSalt"

Build it:

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Run it:

./script/server -e production

And that’s it, you should just be able to point your browser at http://localhost:3000 and give it a try. I personally don’t think that Tracks is my cup of tee, but it’s worth a shot.

One a side note, this is probably my last post before my summer break, so I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I hope.

Read the title. Test posts are always welcome. Nothing else to see, move along.

After reading this entry on planet gnome, I thought to myself: “Another try at fail”. I like dark themes. Dark themes are soothing on the eyes, and at least for me, tend to make a much better work environment because they annoy less. Hey, my blog theme is dark, I like it.

After using apt-get to install the ubuntustudio-theme package, I was amazed at the first theme that bring dark windows with light background not compromising usability for a dark theme. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a screenshot:

So far, every dark theme I encounter before is a try at fail mostly because they are not usable. Attention is brought to lines, row or text, like Gtk TreeViews in evolution by using a bold font on a dark background, or a little icon that glows just a little bit more than the rest. This is hardly usable, since you fail to get the visual hints needed to quickly parse through an inbox for example. The same goes for the desktop calendar. Try a dark theme and find your events on it and let me know.

This one doesn’t fail like the rest. I’m not saying it’s a perfect theme, I’m not sure about the window borders (too thick), or about the icons, or even the bright blue highlight colors (but it’s customizable). I’m gonna stick with it, play with it some more, and be happy for a while.

You know your life has taken a wrong turn when you spend more than 15 minutes listening to white noise.

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu hardy, I’ve been trying to give Firefox 3 a fighting chance, mostly because of all the hype around it, along with a couple of bumps with Epiphany.

With Epiphany using the gecko backend, it was hard adding exceptions for every website using self-signed certificates, or broken certificates, including my own, due to the interaction which was covered in Firefox but no in Epiphany. I even started my own Certificate Authority (it’s just a bash script). All of this made me give Firefox a try for a while..

But, after a while, I have come to dislike all the things that made switch to Epiphany in the first place. It’s slugish, it eats all my memory, and makes me squirm in pain…

On the other hand, Epiphany feels lightning fast, snappy and doesn’t eat all my RAM. Meanwhile, with the updates in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 adding SSL exceptions is not a broken process that equals fail. It shouldn’t be easy though, but it should be doable.

Does anyone have any hard facts if the page rendering is faster on Epiphany than on Firefox ? Or is that just a “feeling” people get ?

I can only wait to check out Epiphany with webkit! In the meantime, I’ll take it as it is, and make it my default once again.