Friday, June 15, 2007

Tracks for GTD

Background :
You can read about (and see) it here. So I am really happy with the combination of todo.txt, PHP and Slickrun to edit the actions. But while I was surfing (not aimlessly) I came across this Ruby implementation of GTD system. I had heard and read about it even earlier, but didn't bother trying it out. This time I decided to try it myself.

Installation
It didn't take much time for me to find this nice tutorial. Obviously, Tracks on Windows is popular and has been around for a while. Otherwise finding such crisp instructions is not common for tools based on open source technologies. The instructions were not without their share of problems , but looking back they were hardly big problems, nothing that little bit of googling can't solve.

Initially I decided to get the latest and (hopefully) greatest versions of all the components required. Needless to say that didn't go well. The instructions were written for specific versions. So this time I decided to follow the instructions to the letter. Downloaded all the exact versions listed in the PDF, from the links provided in the tutorial. I already had Uniform Server 3.3 installed, So that was the only variation from the tutorial.

The instructions were really simple and things worked OK till step 22. rake was not to be found on my system. Having googled about Ruby and rails, I realized that I can download rake separately. I got it from here. Once rake was installed, it was smooth sailing after that.
Note: Later I found that this problem was already reported and solved here

Observations

  1. After following these instructions, I'm using WEBrick, the default webserver that comes with Ruby (?) rather than Apache from Uniform server. It would have been nicer if it used both Apache and mysql. There are notes elsewhere on Web about how to use sqlite instead of mysql. If I did that I would not need Uniform Server
  2. For some reason (may be it is a known issue) when I resume back from hibernate, Tracks doesn't work until I restart the server. Note: I have this installed on my laptop, hence hibernating. Otherwise it may work just fine.
  3. When I start the server from command line using ruby.exe, I can not close the command window where messages are displayed, else it stops Ruby/WEBrick server as well. One possible option is to use rubyw instead, so that there is no terminal to be kept open. But due to #2 above, I prefer to have a command prompt open, so that I can at least restart the server when required.
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