Wow, for some reason today I discovered a lot of very cool things in a very short period of time. Time for a tab sweep, in a weak imitation of Tim Bray.
First I discovered RescueTime, was about to dismiss them because I use Ubuntu, then discovered a linux client on launchpad.Ridiculously easy time management here I come. This app sounds like exactly what Monty was asking for a couple of years ago, and I dismissed it as being too hard.Wow, Monty has a blog!
Next, the stackoverflow.com announcement sounds very promising. I still read a lot of books, but we need a better way to share information between programmers.
I talked to Tim Penhey in New Zealand today about how things are going in the Launchpad code hosting world, and there are some cool enhancements going into PQM that should make it a lot easier to run your own.
Also stumbled across tipjoy, which is a micropayment system that looks interesting, I've been pondering how to do micropayments for pro bono projects that I work on in my spare time and will be giving this a try.
A lot of folks seem to be using Get Satisfaction for doing customer support. I wonder how this compares to Launchpad Answers - I suspect that there are advantages in both systems.
I've also been pondering how to make it easier for people to interact around projects. I've got a link to a Java applet IRC client in my launchpad profile, and am wondering how useful it would be for more projects to do this on their home page. I think there are a LOT of developers that just never use IRC because they've never tried it. I've asked the Florida Ubuntu Team to add a link to this, I guess we'll see if anyone uses it.
Finally, I ordered a book on Puppet, the system administration scripting toolkit. Since I work from home, I end up doing a fair amount of sysadmin type work keeping my own systems running (usually on various beta versions of ubuntu), and I've never really done enough to automate things, which has led to me doing things like abandoning the PQM announcer bot I used to run for our internal code trees. Maybe puppet will get me back on track with keeping my computers better maintained.