We Need More Tools to Play Nicely Together

I just finished installing Google Desktop 4.5. This is my second try with Google Desktop, I tried it last spring and was disappointed with the performance. However, the performance issues seem to be solved with the latest version.

One thing that it does very nicely is to index my conversations (emails and chats) from GMail and GTalk. This is brilliant. One of the corner stones of good collaboration is good communication, and this helps me work with my previous communications. But, why doesn't Google Desktop work with my on-line files? I have my bibliography at CiteULike, documents and spreadsheets over at Google Docs, bookmarks at del.icio.us, photos at Flickr, movies at YouTube. Shouldn't I be able to index these too?

I think there is an incredible integration of tools that could be done through Google Desktop. I should be able to search for a keyword in my research, something like "biomechanics" or "L-systems", and get back my relevant research notes (from Google Docs), bibliography (from CiteULike), and correspondences (from GMail), all of which exist on line, along side my simulation results on my hard drive.

Additionally, a social layer could be added. If I could index my items online, I could also index my friends' and colleagues' publicly available items too.

And if anyone out there knows of tools to start this integration, please, let me know!

The Importance of Code Formatting

I'm currently working through the mess of code. It's not fun. The code is poorly written. It has no consistency in the spacing, variable names, comment style, or name conventions. There's whole pages of dead code and comments attached to nothing.

How did the code end up this way? As far as I can tell, I am the fifth or sixth person to work on this code base. Naturally, there's a small amount of dissimilarity in styles to be expected. That's a speedbump in productivity, but no big deal. But, the person before me to work on the code clearly had no idea what he was doing. The formatting of this code is all over the place. And now, the consequence is that the code is difficult to read and understand. I've discovered several bugs that are due to extra and missing brackets. From bad names and extreaneous comments, the only way to figure out how parts of the program work is to step through line by line and deduce the logic. All of that adds up to a lot of wasted time on my part.

So, how does one evade this problem? I believe that there are two solutions that are needed.

Firstly, there is a need for better tools to do code formatting. Everytime code is checked in to a repository, in must be beautified. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a tool that does a satisfactory job. But there are a few candidates that may work after a few feature additions.

Secondly, a code and documentation style guide should be used. Had I insisted on the use of a style guide early in the project, a good chunk of this mess could have been avoided. And, a printed version of a guide is handy too. When a programmer stops following it, it can be rolled up and smacked accross his nose.

I need to do more work on both these items before they can be put into practice. Hopefully, I'll come up with something that can make my future collaborative programming a saner experience.

Nature is Opening Up the Peer Review Process

The venerable journal, Nature, is running a trial on opening up the peer review process. The process appears to be quite simple. First, go to the peer review page, scroll down and follow the trial peer review link. Once there, you can see the list of papers up for review, download, read and post comments to the website.

There is still the usual anonymous jury reviews for these papers. That part of the process is still vital. The open comments are an additional check on the content of these papers. By opening up the review process, there is much less chance of error or omissions in the publications. After all, it is not possible to always know who has the most pertinent background knowledge to review a particular paper, and sometimes, the jury reviews can have errors too.

This is a trial project, but I think it has some terrific implications. So, if you have any expertise in the papers currently for review, go and comment on them.

Tick

I've realised that I really should be doing some sort of time tracking to figure out how well I'm using my time. I'd like to know how much I'm spending in productive work compared the work time wasted to tinkering about, spending time in meetings and blogging.

After a quick search, I've settled on using Tick. I've been tinkering around with Tick for a couple days now, and I think it fits almost right into what I need.

Pros:

• Simple, easy to use
• Integrates with Basecamp
• Clear, simple reports
• Supports several users - track time of your whole team
  

Cons:

• The non-free features, like Basecamp integration, are a bit pricey. 9$US a month is expensive for just a time-tracker. I'm not sure I'll keep with it after my free preview is finished for this reason.
  
• The Basecamp integration does not import milestones and to-do items, which are exactly the items I want to keep track time on.
• Adding new tasks to a project requires jumping through a few pages. It would be much better to be able to create tasks on the Time Card page.

Overall, it's a good product, and worth keeping tabs on. However, I'm not convinced that it is yet the killer app for time-tracking. The biggest sticking point is the price. I'm not saying it should be free, but the 9$US a month for the basic package is a bit steep. Especially to those of us that can't file it as a business expense and get reimbursed.

Idea Notes

Here's an item for the wishlist.

What I need is a good way to put together notes on ideas and initial sources that I have regarding nascent research projects. It needs to be a notebook, whiteboard & citation manager, orgranised by topics.

This sort of tool would let me create everything from back-of-the-napkin sketches to literature reviews to full-blown research proposals. When a project moves into the real work and research, then other tools would be appropriate.

I havn't found a tool that lets me do this nicely yet, though I haven't done any real inquiries into this idea either.

Maintaining Good Collaborative Practices

It's difficult to introduce a tool into another's work habits. And, as I've come to realise, it's much harder to keep a tool in another's work habits.

This point has left me with a bit of a conundrum lately. There are a number of tools that offer collaborative features that have been very useful to me lately. However, I've been running into the very large stumbling block that it's has been very difficult to keep my colleagues that are working on the same project using these tools.

Particularly, I've been extensively using Basecamp, Writely & CiteULike. These have all become indispensable tools in my work. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the data contained in these tools up-to-date as my colleagues have been inconsistent in their usage of these tools.

I do save time by using these tools; I waste time because others are not using these tools. I'm not sure if on the balance I've gained something.

What to do?

Vitaly Friedman's Notebook: List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts

Vitaly Friedman's Notebook: List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts

That article contains a nice list of tools for the creation of charts and diagrams, items that are often needed in scientific writing. Some allow for collaboration and some not. I'll need to take a thorough investigation of the tools on this list to see how they stack up. Future posts will probably follow with some analyses.

Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.

Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.

Gliffy is nice, simple, online tool for creating diagrams and, like so many tools do now, it allows for collaboration. I think this fills in a small gap in the collaborative tools gamut needed for writing documents.

Now, if we add in a charting & graphing tool, that could take data from a Google Spreadsheet, and a vector drawing tool and mash all these together with Writely, we would have a great online, collaborative solution for writing scientific documents.

Google Spreadsheets

Google has let their on-line, collaborative spreadsheet application out into the world. So far, it looks fantastic. A good, solid set of features (less than Excel, but it's the stuff we need 99% of the time). For basic, day-to-day spreadsheet tasks, it's quite capable. Additionally, it can read and write Excel files, so that 1% of the time, when some heavy calculations or advanced features are required, the same spreadsheets can be tossed into Excel.

The best part is that this is a collaborative application. Spreadsheets can be edited by several people at concurrently. They even thought to put a little chat window in there to keep the authors' interaction easy.

It's still in limited availability, so if you need in, just ask me nice.

Planzo.com

Planzo.com

Another online calendar, this one is being used by David. It seems to have a comparable feature set to Google Calendar, but without the searching and iCal support. However, it does have some more refined categorisation and custimisation options. Definitely one worth looking at when deciding on an online calendaring service to use.