Well, there are two most popular ways to do this, first, the old pen-and-paper or notepad way and the new GTD (Get Things Done) way.

For those who don’t want to do this manually, there are awesome software out there available at http://www.pure-mac.com/tasks.html.

Personally, I prefer the notepad way where I don’t have to follow the GTD workflow which is too complicated. And that: Task Management should not be a task itself.

Have a look at Remember, it’s the best in this category, the interface is nice and simple and it even recognizes the time you enter in the task, for example, entering “Pay house rent by Thursday” will automatically set the due date to Thursday, how awesome is that, huh?

A few screen shots:

In other news, I have changed my workplace to a new bank, 6 months have gone by and I’ve left my mark here already with a Retail Internet Banking website and an internal ESB. So proud! Yet tired since I’ve spent many days eating in the office or skipping my weekend trips.

But again, never feel so proud!

Hello the Internet, I am back.

Well, a few new tools for Mac I’ve found recently:

- TaskCard an awesome task management software.

- Sequel Pro, an excellent MySQL browser.

- Path Finder, a inevitable replacement for the default Finder.

Cheers,

I’ve tried it for 3 hours and already felt in love with it, why? This is why:

- It searches my HDD for movies, all kind of movies: divx, mp4, avi…, adds to the library, downloads posters and then downloads the subtitles from opensubtitles.org! How easy can it be just to get a movie to your library?

- Awesome list of apps for movies, radio: Youtube, Hulu, MTV, Discovery Channel, Comedy Central, LastFM…

- Awesome user interface, although the navigation sucks, but over all, it’s a very slick interface.

- Remote App for iPhone, imagine this, connect your mac to your TV, then control your movies, music, youtube movies, shows, pictures with your iPhone from meters away! Awesome!!!

- Built in Torrent software for more movies.

So, thank you so much, the Boxee Team. Just one thing I hope you can make it in the next release: Aperture support! I manage my images in Aperture and publish some of them to Picasa, I guess I can use the Picasa App for it but hei, internet is not always as fast in my country!

Cheers

- 1 propellant.

- 1 nozzle.

- 2 directional stabilization devices

- 4 attitude jets

- Guidance systems

- Inertial navigation systems

- Internal combustion engines

…Oh, wait… these are the parts for making a rocket! My bad.

Here it goes again, Internet Banking is made of:

- One simple web application.

- One interface to Core Banking Solution.

Yeah, just those 2, folks, if anyone ever tells you that building an Internet Banking is like being a Rocket Scientist, tell them that you are a Brain Surgeon!

Rock on…

Firstly, I downloaded Tomcat 5.5 for Windows at apache.org, then tried to use the Admin module interface to deploy the .war file created. It showed up with a immediate 500 error.

Then, I tried to get rid of that deployment by the Admin module since I thought it could be the problem. So, I drop my .war file into the webapps folder, still same problems. Checking out catalina.out, server.log… didn’t show me any suspicious errors, almost annoyed.

So, I thought it could have been something with the xml-api.jar conflict with the app… well, best thing is try to use a different application server, I told myself.

I download the inevitably the best open source app server, Glassfish, then deploy my app on domain1, this time, still 500 error, but fortunately, server.log spits out errors about missing mysql lib. Careless me. Then a simple copy and paste mysql-connector.jar into WEB-INF/lib solved the problem. My app runs as smooth as ever. Sweet daddy.

So a few things to notice here:

1. Make sure all the libs you use are in your foo-app/lib folder.
2. Or config a reference to the lib in the Config.groovy file.
3. Try different app server will give you hints.
4. Glassfish is the best available application server, even for enterprise level application.

Adios, amigos.

Long

Here’s why:

• It’s fast, really! (load, search, everything)
• Great interface (leopard-ish, highlighting search result)
• Great search (relevance sort, search as you type)
• It’s free!

Many thanks to Vyacheslav Zakovyrya for creating ArCHMock, reading CHM on Mac OS X Leopard is fun again!

(Source: http://riyono.com/2008/07/reading-chm-on-mac-os-x-leopard/)

I do own a mailserver for my very own domain, running Postfix on CentOS 5. My personal emails, for my convenience, are all forwarded to Gmail and since Gmail is doing a very good job at filtering spam, almost all spams are filtered.

However, my pride is hurt somehow, after 6 years working as a network admin, software developer, IT consultant, am I not able to protect myself/clients from spams? Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?

Well, that is no more.

At first, I tried to use SpamAssassin. I can filtered out in coming emails nicely, however, for some reasons, my newsletter system on the same server has jammed SpamAssassin and I had a few sleepless nights trying to figure out what happened. To no avail, newsletter never comes out. I decided to go get rid of SpamAssassin.

To temporarily get rid of a few spams, I tried GreyListing by created a few fake MX records. Ended up being listed in rfc-ignorant.org, that was a bad move, I must admit.

Then, deep down my heart, I wish if there were some kind of Mail Proxy which could filter out spams, do a few more SPF, RBL, GreyListing, etc…

…And dream no more, I found this very nice tools, it’s called Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy, available at asspsmtp.org.

At first, I didn’t know how my set up would be? How many servers do I need? Does it require a different IP address from my Postfix server? RTFM is not my cup of tea, let’s just dive into it.

Installing it was painless, just download the latest stable gzip file, gunzip it and run the mail perl script ‘assp.pl’. On my CentOS 5 server, perl was already there together with a few required modules, yours may vary and you may have to install them manually, but hei, CPAN is there for you!

After running the script, port 55555 is opened and I point my browser there. Popped up was around 1000 configuration text fields organized nicely in around 20 categories, I was swamped at first, but I took my time going through changing the first 50 configs and decided to stop from there as I assumed it has already been configured in a good way, my manual modifications might cause a reverse effect, .

So, a few configurations to change here:
- SMTP Listen port: I changed it to my public IP’s listener port only: e.g. 123.12.123.12:25
- SMTP Destination: easy guess, point to my postfix listening port: 127.0.0.1:25
- localDomains: long-tran.com

After that, I changed my Postfix listening port from being “All interfaces” to “Localhost” only, then, send a restart signal to Postfix and ASSP.

I mean, that’s pretty much what you would need to get the spam filter up and runing, the idea is:
- External mails are sent to the ASSP.
- ASSP does all the spam filterings, I mean, a lot of filterings if you configure them all, check out this page for the complete list.
- ASSP then forward good emails to my Postfix MTA.
- And there you go, your emails arrive at your inbox cleanly.

What I really like about this is it doesn’t touch my Postfix configurations, my newsletter system sees no changes, all my virtual domains, users configurations stay untouched, and yet, all this happens on 1 physical server. And guess what, I have received no spams since this was deployed, it’s only 2 days but that would be 200 spams, and the success rate would be 100%, isn’t it, .

Well, I feel much better without spams now. Ways to go, ASSP.

1. Keynote, yes, no doubt about it, Keynote has much more amazing animated effects compared to M$ PowerPoint.
2. OmniDazzle, sometimes, you need to dim the screen and have a spotlight to emphasize your focus, omnidazzle does it, and guess what, it’s free.



3. Jing, Jing isn’t exactly free but the free version is cool enough for you to take snapshots of things, and then add some highlights, comments into it and finally, put into your Keynote.
   

   Jing allows you to annotate your capture screenshots

4. Hotbox, it zooms whatever is on your screen, no need for a ^-Scroll. Can you see me now?
5. Apple Remote, yes, it’s quite convenient doing your presentation without touching your mouse.
6. Laser pointer: Very cool I am, my Jedi apprentices.

Not much of a list there, but with the right combination of these things, they’ll do a great job.

Well, for the folks that are really Catholic or Christian, Grails is a Java framework based on Groovy scripting language and similar to Rails (Ruby on Rails). You can find more details on the website but basically, Grails can make web development a piece of cake for the following features:

• Automatic database binding from your domain classes using hibernates (no hibernate.hbm.xml needed, ever!).
• Automatic validation from your domain class constraints.
• Automatic object CRUD scaffolding.
• Extensive list of available plugins for a nicer user interface and functions such as jquery, yui, internationalizaiton templates, ajax, datePicker…
• Partially component-based user interface framework which makes databinding extremely easy yet allow full control over your html codes.

So, developing websites is not months, but days with Grails.

A few things developers should look for when using Grails are:

1. Netbeans is the best available IDE for Grails to date.
2. Change the CRUD templates to use the fieldset/label pattern (the current ones use tables – uuggglllyyy)
3. Unicode support: if you use MySQL, make sure your datasource.groovy has this:dataSource {
   dbCreate = “update”
   url = “jdbc:mysql://localhost/lunchtime?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8″
   driverClassName = “com.mysql.jdbc.Driver”
   username = “root”
   password = “”
   }
4. In your gsp files, using ${fooClass.barProperty} will rid you of some Unicode problems
5. When creating your database with MySQL, set your default character set:

create database mysuperdb default character set utf8;

Next times, it will be about special Grails features. showcases and problems.

Adios.