Getting Things Done in Thinking Rock

For those of you that aren’t aware, the title of this post; “Getting Things Done” is also the title of a best-selling book on time and task management by David Allen. Although it’s a self-help book, it’s not in the same category of “Become a Millionaire Overnight” style books, what it is, is a good, honest factual book about various systems of time and task management that are actually applicable to the real world and our real lives. If you haven’t read it, and you are serious about getting your life organised, to a point where your brain is used for thought or creativity rather than trying to remember all the things you had to do today, you should go and buy it now. For less than the price of couple of fast food meals, or a couple of pints of beer (depending on where you live!), it’s something that could really change your life, especially if you have a PDA and/or Outlook and everything is as disorganised as it always was!!

For those of you that are aware or do know about GTD as it’s affectionately known, there’s a fantastic tool coming out of Australia called ThinkingRock. the biggest benefit is its value for money, that it is, it’s free! The second great thing is that it’s actively developed, and slowly but surely is improving with each release. They have a very clear idea about where they want to go with the software, and have great community input, they’ve recently added a Windows Mobile GTD partner for ThinkingRock which allows you to synchronise and take your tasks and next actions with you. Although some people may comment that it’s not the prettiest UI in the world, it’s highly functional has all the tools I need on a day-to-day basis, which is much more important than great looking software that’s good for nothing. So go try it, the beta version (2.0) is what I’ve been using on Windows and OSX and it’s been 100% stable so far. It’s written in Java and is almost certainly available for your current platform.

If you already use it, or find it useful enough to use on a day-by-day basis, why not go and contribute something to the software team (you can find a link at the top right corner of the home page), which will only ensure that they are able to spend more time developing the software and making it even better (and perhaps a little prettier )

If you’re already using it, as always I’d love to hear more about it and what you find as the most useful features?. Cheers… ’til next time.

Of PHP Applications, Security, and Modern Database Concepts - Part 1

Here we are again with another geek entry in the weblog, photography stuff will be back soon If PHP or Databases is not your thing, please tune out now.

It’s come to my attention that there’s a significant amount of PHP/MySQL (why I focus on MySQL will become apparent as the post unfolds) application code out there that far more complex than need be. This is partly due to an insistence about backwards compatibility; i.e. I still have 2 users of my application that are using MySQL 3.21, or simply because there are many part-time developers out there that don’t feel that learning about how real databases can improve their productivity is important, because they can squeeze all the functionality we need out of PHP. So hopefully this will be a polite wake-up call to those of you that fall into one of the previous categories, to help you see why having a full understanding of database concepts is not only a “good thing”, it could help you with writing faster code, easier to maintain code, whilst maintaining data integrity, and improving overall security of your application.

I originally wrote this post as a single post, which started to look more like an essay the further along I got. So I’ve split it into multiple posts simply to make it easier to read and digest.

Now the reason I’m talking about MySQL primarily here is something of a history lesson. Love it or hate it, MySQL started out life as a relatively lightweight database, it sacrificed some of the more traditional database features and functionality, for gains in speed, and agility. The downside is that if you were developing real applications with real data, some of the work around methods to regain or replicate some of the missing functionality was quite painful involving some serious incantations of SELECT spaghetti!!. The reason I’m not talking about PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, or any of these other database products, is that anyone developing on top of them without the legacy MySQL baggage, really should know better!! Database abstraction layers are all fine and dandy, but really, what’s the point of making your app work with Oracle if it’s never going to exploit the advantages offered by that particular platform….. anyway… I digress..

The problem is that there are a lot of PHP or <insert favourite web scripting language here> apps out there that have their roots in the early MySQL era and have suffered sprawl and organic growth, don’t get me wrong this is a good thing, it just brings a bunch of baggage with it. You see over the last few years MySQL has made advances in leaps and bounds, it’s barely a shadow of the young upstart database that it once was, however many owners and developers of legacy applications have simply been too busy keeping on top of refactoring and recoding for the base version changes in PHP and MySQL releases to allow the existing code to work with MySQL both old and new. This means that many of the longest running most popular applications are almost certainly running with MySQL spaghetti SQL under the bonnet. Even many of the apps with extensive Web 2.0 and Ajax and other front-end bling, fall into this category. I would imagine that if you think of the top 3 most popular applications in the categories of Weblog, eCommerce Store, CMS, CRM or other mainstream apps, if they’ve come from a MySQL legacy background, that 2 out of 3 (or in some cases 3 out of 3) are running with Spaghetti SQL. In my next post I’ll talk about some of the ways that the features MySQL has added in the last 5 years can help to improve your applications. None of this is rocket science and I’m no database expert, so any DBA’s or Database Guru’s reading this by all means read and correct me where required, but don’t expect to get any useful info from me, I’m mostly harmless in regard to databases (and PHP for that matter!).

And if you still have 0.5% of your users that run MySQL 3.23 or older on their servers, which means that they can’t use a newer version of the application, then I suggest that you point them at an application with similar functionality that has ceased development, then they’ll be able to carry on working with that, whilst editing the files with ed, and viewing the html with lynx, reading their emails with elm, and before I get lambasted, I realise that there is a time and place for these apps and they are still valid, but NOT all the time in everyplace (oh and vi is so much better than emacs too!!).

We’ll start to dive into the detail in the next post, which will cover Triggers.