Yes, it’s Friday again folks! I thought I’d hold yet another unsuccessful amazing competition: Send me your snapshots (or link to an image in the comments) of anything vaguely Plone-like and you might win a quality tee in your size of choice with an image of the never before publicized Plone alpha interface! The winners and runners up will be published here by next Friday.
I try to spot Plone logos whenever I’m out and about. Have a look at my Plone set on flickr to see more examples.
Currently I’m I was at a SecondLife Stammtisch in Cologne at a place called ‘4 Cani‘ on Thursday the 9th of August. As I arrived late after deciding first going swimming, I missed the introduction round and I’m currently I felt a bit isolated for a while (but it didn’t take that long before the conversations started). Thus I’m I was a tad bored and thought I’d blog to look important and busy keep me occupied until contact was initiated.
Here’s a picture taken with my crap webcam:
Thanks to Christian Scholz for the invitation!
I get to do cool things with Plone. Sometimes I even get to do it together with cool friends. On one such occasion we are using a very capable PDF generator called PDFlib to generate print quality PDFs through Plone. The actual version we are using is PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) version 6. PDFlib is license based. More precisely it costs money for PPS licenses. Fair enough. In the course of our project (iconic brand customer to be publicized at later stage) we discovered that we needed more production servers to balance the load, so more servers were ordered.
What we then learned is that the PDFlib PPS v6 does not exactly play nice with new dual core based servers; PPS v6 treats each core as one separate CPU, each requiring a separate license. That is to say the licensing costs per CPU per server has now doubled. The standard price of a single PPS license is € 1350,- (ca USD 1852,-) . In the meantime the current version of PDFlib has matured to 7 which requires only one license per server, albeit a more expensive one.
As PPS v6 is already running in a mission critical system, upgrading to v7 is not an option at this time. All the servers in our new data center have at least dual core Xeon CPUs, adding to the dilemma. I called PDFlib Germany thinking they would be sensible, having changed the licensing for the better with v7. No dice.
No retroactive license change for v6. No flexible migration deals. No nothing.
I could either upgrade all existing servers to the more expensive single server license v7 (and additional licenses for each new server) or buy a single v6 license for each and every core. I would not mind paying something for a single server license upgrade for v6, but the limited options provided by PDFlib at the moment are just plain stupid in my opinion; I have the choice between the plague or cholera.
Update: We are currently considering throwing out PDFlib and using Reportlab instead. Reportlab is lacking some features, but the added development needed to reportlab is possibly outweighed by the senseless PDFlib license costs. Further more, it would be cool to be able to add functionality to reportlab and release it back to the open source community!
Do you think this is a lame clever business decision by PDFlib? Let them know. Do you think I’m wrong? Let me know. Have you ever been left hanging from changes to hardware and/or licensing? I’d love to hear about your predicament and how you dealt with it.
I accidentally came across this sign one night in CGN. It made me giggle: Fence version 0.1.
Come up with a clever caption and enter it as a comment below. Maybe you’ll win something!
Don’t you just hate to be told how to do things? I do. Yet, we keep looking for advice on how to be more efficient. I do too. In this post I’ll try to share what I do to get things done. I never actually put it into words before, but after becoming familiar with the likes of David Allen and his Getting Things Done and Merlin Mann‘s Inbox Zero and 43folders, I found some striking resemblances to what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years. Watch the inspiring Google Tech Talk presentation held just recently by Mr. Mann below if you haven’t already.
Now this is what I do: I identify if any call, meeting, comment or email requires me to take action(s) as soon as they come to my attention.If no action is needed, I forget about it. It’s either resolved by reading/receiving or the action(s) is required from someone else. I’ll label this as a ‘No action’ action. I share info if appropriate, but only after considering signal to noise. I archive, never delete. (Yes, I’m a veritable digital information hamster.)
Next up I have ‘Immediate action’ – Does it take only a couple of minutes to do? I do it straight away or delegate it to someone that will do it instantly. (Delegating in general usually falls into this category, I would think.) Does it take longer? I let it sit in the inbox to deal with at an opportune moment, later same day. Do the gravity of the action require my immediate and unscheduled attention that will take the focus away from my current schedule? I reshuffle and reschedule current actions and do it now or re delegate, redistribute and/or re prioritise if possible. Archive.
Then there are the ‘Time/place action’, in lack of a better label. (Yes, I’m aware that my labeling is lacking in the sexy department. ;) Is my action needed at or before a certain time? At a certain place? I schedule it as a todo and/or a calendar event by date with timely reminders. I try to group similar actions. Archive.
Finally, there’s the ‘Future action’, a fuzzy nondescript action with no deadline. I keep it in the inbox and let it mature or either upgrade to time/place action or forget about it if someone else will get back to you on the subject at some future point or if it becomes irrelevant and automagically expires. I delegate it if needed/wanted. Archive.
Repeat, rinse and lathe.
With regards to mails, my inbox is my list of todos. I reply at once (‘Immediate action’), reply timed ( ‘Time/place action’), let simmer and mature (‘Future action’) or archive/file at once without reply (‘No action’) or after reply or when irrelevant like outlined above. I keep a minimal of mails in the inbox and try to deal with them all within a workday. There should ideally be no mails in my inbox at the end of the day. I do not keep separate folders for anything other than archiving purposes (tech restraint at my place of work). I do not waste time labeling or tagging emails, if you were wondering. Mails get archived naked.
Keeping physical in and out boxes does not work for me. I’ve tried and failed miserably. I keep physical in/out material annoyingly close to the keyboard on my physical desktop until action taken. This is ridiculous suboptimal, but works for me ™.
Does this make sense to you? I would be thrilled to hear about what you do to get your things done!