The orthogonality of the two systems causes a number of problems:

• My todo list can grow without bounds, regardless of whether or not I will finish tasks. This causes stress. For most people, the todo list grows in size slightly faster than the "burn down": I'll add stuff I'd like to do until I finally get the courage to just scrap ideas because hey, they really are never going to happen. Oftentimes the things I throw out should have been tossed at the start, but the time it took to force my hand left me expending emotional energy on something I would never accomplish.
• "What do I do next?" is a common question, and one that is pretty easily solved with systems that designate "next actions" or have some sort of dependency hierarchy. This problem gets much more complicated when I can be working towards a number of different competing interests, with different priorities and different due dates.
• It's easy to estimate that a task will take 2 hours, but when will I get that time. For most people the answer is "I'll get to it", which results in reneged promises or late nights. For the requesters (and maybe that is you), an accurate answer is almost always preferable than either of these results.

So, back to resolution. At any given time, your todo list in the past resolved to what you did in the past and your todo list for the future is already partially resolved. This last point is critical for people with a lot of competing priorities, though perhaps less so for people without the mess. There might be a universe where every single moment is up in the air, but for most people the path forward is straight until it changes, and even the changes can be predicted based on historical trends (God help me if I plan to hold on to a solid block of an hour's time any given Monday).

The picture I'm trying to paint here is that your calendar for the next week is already mostly laid out, you just have next to no idea what it looks like. And if you're trying to juggle a personal life, friends, work, maybe a craft or hobby, staying healthy... it's exasperating. I'd prefer to not have to think about it.

Maybe a project can come of this?

So. I'm not here to prescribe a style, but merely explain how I manage what needs to get done and how I go about doing it. What I will say though is that if you're a developer, you must be able to customize and optimize your process. It's in your DNA. Find out what works and do all the extra steps necessary to make sure no time is wasted managing your time.

I use TaskWarrior. TaskWarrior (formerly known simply as task) is a command line task manager written in C++. While considerable development is taking place and is due, the application is truly simple and seeks to stay that way. From my perspective, this make it a great base for scripting. Why script your task manager? Well, let's say I work for a company with a strict policy about issue trackers, how do I integrate? Or what if my boss regularly sends me emails with things to do that I can't forget? What if I want a button on my desk that tracks my time? Shell scripts, baby.

So, for a quick overview (and bear in mind these commands might be aliases, another advantage to a CLI inteface) here's how I list out what I have to do at work:

Easy, fast, and at a glance I know what I'm working on (green), what's due today, and anything else that might be pertinent. Adding a task is also really easy:

TaskWarrior also has two commands task start and task stop that allow you to keep track of what you're working on at a given moment. This is really helpful when you are randomized by someone who stops by or you blank out and forget what you were really doing. A simple task active shows you exactly what you're working on. But what I found is that I tend to work in trees, rather than a flat list. I might put on my list a really big task that could take a week, and as I worked it through I'd break it up into smaller and smaller bits and work through those pieces. Most of the time you have to plan out your course of action, even if it's trivial, to make sure you don't leave out pieces. TaskWarrior's dependencies work for this, but not elegantly. So I fixed it with a vim "outline" script.

By typing two (task work outline), up pops a quick outline of what I'm working on and the related tasks from top to bottom. Not only does this help to form a plan of attack (saving actually updates the individual tasks), but it gives perspective as to where the given piece of the puzzle fits. "Why am I working on the insertion functionality?" is easily answering by traversing the tree: "To get the approval process working for the promotion tab content..."

This breaking process was also solidified by the addition of commands to "break" tasks into subtasks (taskbreak) and suggest what to work on (through taskdone or td) when those tasks are finished. Here's an example of starting on a task that's too big to reasonably manage, breaking it into parts, and having TaskWarrior tell me what to work on next.

Another feature that I found useful is a plugin called tasknote. Tasknote opens up a new note file with your $EDITOR so that you can keep long-winded descriptions tucked away. I fire it up with tn, mark my notes, and save it. I've integrated this with a Vim plugin called notes.vim, which allows me to link tasks from meeting minutes and other notes I have tucked away.

Next, I found that I got a lot of requests via email. It became tedious copying and pasting these into TaskWarrior, so I set up Postfix to dump tasks sent to a specific address into TaskWarrior, with the notes section having the body of the email. From here, I can triage all the emails that require work from me and make sure that they get finished on time.

I realize everyone has their own system, but this works for me!

My roommate asked me if there was an easier way to clear the facebook news feed. When you have several years of "now friends with" and "commented", this process becomes rather tedious especially given the delete confirmation. Here is a bookmarklet that you can type in the URL bar that will do the process for you (albeit a little slowly).

WARNING: This code was written and tested on 4/22/10. Facebook could change their site layout at any time. I offer no guarantees as to the utility or non-destructiveness of this script. It worked when I tested it but there is a small possibility things could go wrong. Use at your own risk.

To use, copy the first line (without the "//", so that it reads "javascript:...") into your address bar and hit enter. Then wait for the magic to stop.

I realize there are some nasty pieces in here (e.g. the code spins to wait on the AJAX requests). This is a "hack" and I have no intention of making it seem otherwise.

Credit Daring Fireball for the bookmarklet conversion script.

So, you just got started with C.

C++ STL introduces vectors.

...and iterators.

...and some hideous ways to do simple things.

Boost makes it easy.

And powerful.

Google calendar provides some pretty neat examples for how to login and retrieve all the events on your default calendar, but neglects to mention additional private calendars under your account. The distinction, which isn't documented, is that when you create additional calendars they are not actually assigned your username but instead get a unique username so they can migrate between user accounts. Secondly, while you can authenticate yourself for private events on your own calendar, you can't authenticate against this new username. This has two implications:

1) Username/password authentication won't work (we'll use magic cookie).
2) The private event feed requires a unique key.

Thus what was formerly:

Becomes:

As far as I can tell, the private key can only be accessed from within the "Calendar Properties" inside of Google Calendar. Additionally, if you copy and paste the result, you will end up with an HTML-escaped @ (%40). Be sure to replace this with an @, otherwise you'll get an invalid user ID.

Hopefully this helps! Comment with any questions and I'll try to answer them.