Want to buy a used PC and update the OS on it to XP or Vista? Forget it, unless you want to buy a new license. Translation–an additional $100 or so. As you know, you can’t install your Windows OS on more than one machine. You have to have a unique license for each and every one. I have three older PC’s sitting around, minus hard drives (or non-working drives), that need an operating system. I actually “borrowed” an XP CD that didn’t require registration, as my first attempt to revive them. And that worked fine, except the first machine (let’s call it alpha), only had 4 gigs of hard space, and Windows took up 3.5 gig. After adding Office, I had almost no space left.

On to plan B–Linux. This is a free, open source OS, that I’d read about, but never paid much attention. Now it had my attention. It sounded perfect:

• Free
• Readily available
• Has a small footprint–meager disk and memory requirements
• Runs a free, open source version of Office (Word, Excel, Power Point, etc.)
• You can test it with a Live CD version (you don’t need to actually install it to use it)

It sounded perfect, but turned out to not quite be true. Here are my attempts.

Trial 1

I bought a magazine with a version of Ubuntu on a Live CD. Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux that’s been more or less standardized and packaged so you have a core system that only needs to be updated from time to time with improved versions.

It ran fine on my primary PC with Vista. Except that the wifi connectivity didn’t work. I consulted with a friend of mine who is handy with Linux, and we ended up installing it on my machine with VMWare, a free PC virtual machine. That let me run Linux with all of my Windows hardware, including the wifi card. I was up and running, but not with the machine (alpha) that I wanted to run it on.

So, I figured I just needed to run the Live CD on alpha, and I should be good to go. Well, the first problem is that if you run from a Live CD, none of the changes you make to get something working, like wifi connectivity, will get saved to your next session. You need something called persistence, so any changes get picked up when you run it again. I solved that problem by finding a download of Ubuntu that will load and run from a USB drive, and has the persistence property. Basically, it just saves any modifications to another file on the drive, and the OS looks there for add-ons whenever it loads.

But uh oh, a new problem surfaced. Most older PC”s won’t boot from a USB drive. So, I did more googling and found a solution for that. There’s a neat little program called PLOP that will load from either a CD or a floppy, that will give your OS the option to boot from a USB device. I had CD capability on alpha, so I burned an ISO image to a CD, and joila, had the ability to boot from my Ubuntu-on-a-USB stick.

Except it ran and ran and ran, and would never finish loading. I did some more reading and discovered that Ubuntu needs at least 512 meg of RAM to run. I only had 128 in alpha. But, a smaller version of Ubuntu, called Xubuntu, seemed like it would solve my problem. I tried that, and Eureka, it loaded. But, it ran woefully slow. So slow, that it was impossible. to use.

Now, here’s the irony–XP was a resource hog, but it ran fine in 128 meg of memory. It was hardly slow at all. Yet, Linux, which has an incredibly smaller footprint, was like watching molasses flow. Argh.

Fortunately, memory is cheap ($40), even for older PC’s, so I ordered 256 meg of memory, and moved on to a still smaller version of Linux, called DSL (Damn Small Linux), while I waited for it to arrive.

DSL installed fine, but I still had the problem with wifi connectivity. That was, of course, a minimum requirement for alph–it had to have browser capability. After fruitless hours trying to find a Linux driver for the Belkin card I had in alpha, I tried a technique built into Linux (and DSL), called NDIS wrapper, which lets you use the Windows driver that came with the card. And miraculously, it worked. I had a browser that worked. It was an older version of Firefox, but it worked fine. I thought.

I could browse pretty much any site I wanted to look at, including FaceBook, so I thought I had hit pay dirt. But, of course, it was too good to be true. Hootsuite, a FaceBook and Twitter add on, crashed the browser. And when I tried to use the chat capability of FaceBook, I found it wasn’t there. And I couldn’t get the chat icon to show up, no matter what I did. I think there probably is a Flash add on, or something similar, that this version of Firefox doesn’t even know about.

Well, no big deal, so I can’t chat I can live with that. However, the next problem I found was that I could post updates on FaceBook. Nothing happened with I clicked on Share. So, that makes this experiment a failure.

I resigned myself to using Xubuntu (the wifi worked on booting), once I had upgraded the memory. Well, you’ll never believe this. When you order memory, the companies always make sure you give them the model number of the PC so they’re “sure” the memory will work. The new chips fit into the receiving slot just fine. Except the physical board was larger in one dimension than the original board in the machine. There wasn’t enough room in the memory compartment. I had to send them back.

When you install Dropbox, it adds a folder, My Dropbox, to your My Documents folder. Then, you just move your pst file to the Dropbox folder. When you restart Outlook, you will be prompted for the new location. After you’ve done that on one computer, add Dropbox to your 2nd computer. Wait a few minutes, and the pst file will appear. Then rename your pst file for the 2nd computer and start Outlook up. It will also ask for the location, and after you point it to My Dropbox, you’re in businees.

Dropbox takes care of syncing things automatically from that point on. I was dubious at first, but it works great.

Here’s a sample. Let’s say you’re coding a very complex series of “if” statements. It works. And you understand it. Until two or three weeks go by, and you have to explain to the users why a report line is showing things the way it is. You try to explain to the user why it reflects their stinking business rule. You even resort to looking at the code, and you get lost in the complexity. Geez, it looked so simple last week.

Okay, here we go–this is a way to capture the business rules, and the program logic at the same time. It’s basically a table with decision questions as column headers, and actions for the rows.

Here’s the business logic: if a student is a senior, he is allowed to take Physics II, but only if he’s a senior. Here’s how it looks in the table.

Notice that every combination of logic for Junior and Senior vs. the two level of Physics are taken care of. No ambiguity. Now, let’s add a little more complexity. A Junior can get into Physics II if he has a letter from his adivsor.

With a big table (many decisions), the logic gets hairy, but the with a logic table, you can make sure that every logic decision point is covered. If you try it, I think you’ll find that it makes things much clearer. And it has great value in capturing business logic.

The two dashes denote that it’s immaterial whether a Junior has a letter or not.

Let’s say you’ve got a simple drawing, where you have three boxes, representing three processes, connected with arrows, going from right to left, like so.

Now, you want to insert an “if” symbol between the first two boxes.

With Word, you have to select the three rightmost objects, Prog B, Prog C, and the arrow in between, then”group” them, and then you can drag the group to the right to make room for the new box. If you later decide you want to insert a new box between Prog B and Prog C, you have to un-group the group, and then group the Prog C and the arrrow, to move them around. What a pain.

In Visio, it’s a little easier, because you can simply draw a box around everything you want to move, and it automatically creates a group on the fly that you can move around. Easy enough for a simple diagram, but this creates a lot of clicking and drawing to make room inside a complex drawing.

Excel to the rescue

Surprisingly enough, the answer comes in a tool that I never would have guessed could be useful for flowcharting–MS Excel. Here’s an excellent article that shows how to do it.

And the best part is in how to make room for inserting new objects into the drawing. You simply drag your mouse over a partial row or column adjacent to where you want to add space, and insert new cells. The article referenced shows a nice diagram and full instructions on how to do it.

The elegance of this simple capability, for me, overrides the abundance of advanced capabilities in say, Visio. And, you can even link one flowchart to another, using tabs, with a hyperlink to another tab.

Easy text boxes

And another bonus. In other programs, like Word and Visio, in order to insert a text box, you have to go through a series of steps to define the text box. With Excel, you just select a cell and start typing. How easy is that?

These two features, combined with the other basic tools that Excel gives you for flowcharting, make it my tool of choice from now on. Even outside the mainframe world.

The basics

It uses two basic rules:

1. Put everything you want to do in one place–either paper or computer, in the form of tasks.
2. Organize your task list by context. For example, @home would be the context for things you want to complete at home. Like mowing the lawn, organizing a birthday party, etc. @work would be for filling out your timesheet, making a phone call, etc.

The reason behind rule 1 is that this frees your mind from having to remember things, even the most trivial things.

Number 2 is for simplicity. You can concentrate on those things that are pertinent to where you are.

There other helpful rules, but I find these to be the basis of the concept. Some people actually do use paper to organize their task lists, but I spend most of my time in front of a PC, so I chose the computerized route. I also had another motive–I want to be able to sync to my PDA so I can have my list with me everywhere, and I can enter tasks on my PDA and sync with my PC later.

What software to use?

This also simplified my software approach. I was already a fan of Outlook, and am extremely dependent on it for organizing my life. But in the past, this was pretty much limited to the calendar and address book functions.

I toyed with other approaches–there’s an add on to Outlook for GTD, an add-on to Gmail for GTD, and you can organize tasks by context in Remember the Milk. But, none of these allowed for syncing with Outlook.

Categories and tags

And the frustrating part was that Palm has a built-in sync product for Palm PDA’s, but it can’t sync categories. Here’s why that’s important: the category list was how I differentiated between a task and a context. For instance, a task like getting a haircut would get multiple categories–”me” and “@home.” “Me” is the project, and @home is the context.

The ideal solution would be to use tags instead of categories That way, you can tag a task with multiple tags, and then you have the ability to list tasks multiple ways by tag. But alas,Outlook does not have this capability. Remember the Milk and Gmal have this feature, but they were rejected because of the lack of PDA syncability.

So, in Outlook, if you organize your tasks by category, this task appears in two places. Once under “me”, and once under “@home”. Confusing, you might say, since there’s really only one task, but since “@” appears before any other letter of the alphabet, all our contexts appear first, and that’s all you really care about.

The category sync problem was key, and I finally found a solution from Chapura. It’s called Key Suite. A little expensive ($50), but it did the trick, and that gave me the final solution.

An example

Let me give you an example. I used “me” earlier, but that just to represent personal stuff. Let’s use an example that’s a little more practical, like building a web page for my brother in law. We’ll make a category called “arrowbail,” since that’s the name of the web site. This is also, be default, the name of the project.

Tasks might be:

1. Buy the URL
2. Select a theme (I’m going to do it in WordPress)
3. Collect photos of his office, and a family shot
4. Build the prototype

There will be many more tasks, but for right now, this will suffice. Create a task for each of the above, and assign them all a category of @home, arrowbail. For number 3, add an additional category, @workwaiting. So I can see all tasks that I’m waiting for someone else to do.

The importance of Next Action

Setup is done, now you need to figure out what to do next. Number 1 is obvious, so it gets an additional category of @@nextaction.

Now, in Outlook, make sure you fill in the radio button for Current View with the By Category selection.

You’ll see your first task at the top, under @@nextaction. If you had categorized another task in another project the same way, it would also be listed at the top of the page.

This is a fundamental concept of GTD–the assignment of Next Action. You should review all your projects on a regular basis, and assign it the @@next action category. You never want to have too many, as that defeats the purpose of classifying them that way. You want 3-4, so you can concentrate on just those that should be done next, and don’t worry about the rest until your next review.

Once a task is done, you mark it complete, or delete it, and eventually you’ll rotate everything through @@nextaction.

You might also want to designate @workwaiting as @@workwaiting, and you’ll have the tasks you’re waiting for other people to complete directly under @@nextaction. Your top two “important” lists will then be at the top of your task list.

And there you have it–simple, no bells, no whistles, but it meets my requirements. If you try it, please let me know if it works for you.

1. You can key in an abbreviation, like btw, and it will automatically expand to “by the way.” You define the expansion with a text file.
2. For more common names, and for using in email addresses, you can prefix a name, with say, two periods + terry, and terry’s email address will appear. Great for forwarding internet news articles–they usually require you to key in a person’s whole email address.
3. You can set up hotkey combinations to start up web pages, so the Window logo key + g, would go to gmail.com, for instance.
4. Since most mainframers use a PC nowadays, you can set up hotkey combinations so an abbreviation like pds becomes user072.pds.cntl.
5. And especially for mainframers, you can set up scripts so multiple lines of a form can be filled in with preset values. So, if you’re testing a CICS form that requires several fields to be keyed in, you can do it automatically, with the press of one or two keys. I used this a LOT on my last assignment.
6. It workds with USB drives, so you don’t have to load it onto your work PC.

You only have to execute it once at the start of your work day, and you’re good to go on ALL programs on your PC. I’ve only found one program that it didn’t work well with, and that was one I don’t use that often anyway.

This program definitely makes my keyboarding easier, and I think you’ll find the same true for you. Get it.

What makes it so wonderful?

• It’s free
• It has hundreds of templates
• You can update in real time, without using an upload process
• It’s open source, so you can customize it to your heart’s content
• It’s widely used, so there’s a lot of help out there
• It has lots of plugins that allow RSS, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), search capability, and much more

Are you sold? I’ve been using it for about two weeks now, and I’m blown away.