Just downloaded OpenWorkbench – a free, open source alternative to Microsoft® Project.
From a very cursory glance, it looks pretty sophisticated, although I haven’t really tried to use it or compare it to Microsoft Project yet. Hopefully, I’ll have some time to play with it and see what it can do.
The teacher of my Project Management class, Mike Taylor, mentioned “Gresham’s Law of Planning” in last night’s class and told us to look it up. It turns out that the original Gresham’s Law was actually penned by economist Thomas Gresham and had everything to do with economics and nothing to do with planning – in short, it said “bad money drives out good money”. Later, some folks interested in project planning and time management saw an analogous principle with regards to time management and decided to call it Gresham’s Law of Planning. The best description of it that I could find with a quick web search came from here and it said:
An important principle of Organisation design that relates to managerial decision making is Gresham’s Law of Planning. This law states that there is a general tendency for programmed activities to overshadow non-programmed activities. Hence, if a series of decisions are to be made, those that are more routine and repetitive will tend to be made before the ones that are unique and require considerable thought. This happens presumably because you attempt to clear the desk so that you can get down to the really serious decisions. Unfortunately, the desks very often never get cleared.
In other words, you never get done the things you most want to get done, because life is a never-ending stream of interruptions.
Nice extension for showing thumbnails in search results. New name and a new version.
Wow, I hope this is a joke:
The ,#401 dialing prefix is not working with my new TurboNet for my old standalone Series 1 TiVo. The daily “call” fails with “Service not available”.
The TurboNet is installed and I verified that it’s getting an IP address from the DHCP server. Furthermore, I checked the outgoing log on my Linksys router and it shows that the TiVo is trying to make a connection to 204.176.49.2:80.
I can even access this IP address from my PC (although I can almost swear that earlier in this day, pings were not working):
23:35 Marc@Toshiba-Laptop:~$ nc -v 204.176.49.2 80 204.176.49.2: inverse host lookup failed: : Operation not permitted (UNKNOWN) [204.176.49.2] 80 (http) open : Operation now in progress GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 07:35:23 GMT Server: Apache ...
Furthermore, My DirecTiVo is having trouble as well and I can see in its /var/log/tclient file that it’s successfully doing an HTTP POST to 204.176.49.2/tivo-service/mlog.cgi and getting back a 200 HTTP response, but then shortly after, the server seem to drop the connection.
I posted slightly more info at this thread at DealDatabase.com.
Frustrating. I guess the next thing that I will try is to burn a CD of the TurboNet ISO and see if that helps, although then I will have to take the drive out of the TiVo and put it in my PC. Or maybe I’ll just borrow a hub from somebody at work so I can poke around with Ethereal and see what I can find.
Somebody sent this email to a food mailing list at work:
Anyone have recommendations for a good sharpener for Wusthof/Henckel (high-carbon steel blades) knives? I’m looking for either a reputable shop that does this or a tool for home.
I have both Wusthof and Henckels knives and I really like this sharpener that I have:
I was told by a store clerk to stay away from the motorized ones, as they grind down your knives. What I like about this one is that it has two bars in a v-shaped configuration so it’s like a honing steel, except that you don’t have to guess the right angle to use – you just run your knife straight through it a couple of times before you put it back in the drawer and it is simultaneously sharpened on both sides at once. I don’t worry whether I got the 15 degree angle right or get out my protractor or any of that nonsense. I use this on a daily basis and then once a year or so I get them professionally sharpened.
I realized that I haven’t done any documenting on my blog about how I hacked my TiVo, because this all happened before I had this blog. Not sure if I’m keen on trying to remember and document all the details of what I did, but I can tell you this: 99% of what I did was based on knowledge that I got out of this excellent book:
I’m sure that you could get all the knowledge that’s in this book by reading the Dealdatabase forums, but this would be a highly frustrating, time-wasting experience. Forums are just not a good way to collect this sort of stuff – you end up with zillions of disjointed threads and random scraps of information and lots of outdated stuff (e.g.: Sleeper ISO) that will lead you to dead-ends if you are not careful. The book also came with a very nice bootable CD that had lots of really useful software so I didn’t need to waste time searching for, downloading, and burning all of the stuff to a CD.
I compared this book to:
and there was no contest. The O’Reilly book is outdated and has tons of stuff that is Series 1 only. It doesn’t cover the truly interesting things for Series 2, such as doing a “kernel monte”, enabling the HMO, enabling a bash prompt, mfs_ftp, TyStudio, etc… Von Hagen covers all of this stuff and has step by step instructions that made it really easy.
If you want to hack a TiVo Series 2, you should definitely consider getting this book.