Category Archives: Life Hacks

Some goals for May

Last month I set myself some goals in the hope that “going public” would be good spur into making me get them done. I was partially successful:

  • Complete tagging system for Geograph – early in the month it became clear that the Geograph server wasn’t coping well with traffic and photograph uploading was becoming a struggle. I stopped working on tagging and switched to completing “Guppy”, a desktop application for queuing uploads. I’ve got the basic framework almost complete, so a new goal will be to release it during May
  • Learn Python – I did enough to convince me to continue using it. I used it a couple of times when I might have otherwise turned to Perl. It’ll be a while before I’m truly up to speed, but I’ll most likely use Python now if I need to write more than 100 lines of Perl.
  • Release Pastebin source – success! I’ll continue enhancing it over the next month now that I’m on a roll. Had lots of positive feedback and ideas I’ll incorporate.

I think that if I hadn’t publically stated those goals, I would not have published the pastebin source or bothered with Python, so it’s been useful “life hack” that I’ll repeat! So, what to aim for in May?

  • Release Guppy – I’ll get a working beta of Guppy out there to aid Geograph contributors.
  • Lose a few pounds – I could do with losing a couple of stones, which doesn’t quite tally with geeking out in front of a PC every waking hour developing software. But, I’ll aim to lose half a stone and at report back on how I did it!

Some goals for April

I’m going to set myself a few goals for April, as there’s a variety of things I’ve been putting off. I’m hoping that by “going public” it will spur me to get them done!

Complete tagging system for Geograph

Geograph has a single “category” for each image and I’ve been working on-and-off since January to replace this with a decent tagging system. It’ll make such a difference to the usability of the archive and open up new possibilities, so it can’t happen soon enough. I’ll write about the design decisions made too…

Learn Python

This “Why Python?” article by Eric Raymond got me thinking I should try and give Python another crack. The next time I find myself turning to Perl I’ll see what Python has to offer. I like Perl for speed of development and the CPAN library, but I find it really time consuming to write decent OO code in Perl, so I rarely bother. Let’s see if I can if I learn to love Python too!

Release source code to pastebin.com

It’s been a year since the last release, and I get a steady stream of emails asking for the source. During April I will tidy the source, add a few common feature requests and release it under the GPL.

I think that’s enough. Let’s see how it goes…