MousePotatoPower

I bring you this article to show you possibilities. This story does not need to be sensationalized, anybody with half a brain should be able to realize that this is not normal and that this situation could have happened even without MySpace. Dangerous things can happen online, dangerous things can happen at your front door, the more you are aware, the more you can take steps to avoid disastrous situations or prepare for them when they become unavoidable.

The original article appears to come from the St. Charles Journal in Missouri. The events took place a little over 1 year ago.

The article is well written and is followed by over 100 pages of comments by readers.

To summarize the story: A 13-year old girl who had a lifelong struggle with weight and self-esteem commits suicide after being rejected and ridiculed by a boy on MySpace. The boy turns out to be a fictitious character created by one of the 13-year old girl’s ex-friends and the ex-friend’s mother.

Be careful online. Take care of yourself and take care of your kids.

Opensource software is a wonderful thing. It’s free and most opensource software has a big enough market that somebody has put together a decent forum where you can get help.

Then again, you need the guts and tech-savvyness to experiment on your own, because sometimes, the forums aren’t very good and sometimes, the documention isn’t very good.

I have been looking for a Personal Information Manager (PIM) for a while. Here is a short list of my wants/needs:

• I prefer opensource, since free is good
• I frequently use multiple computer from different locations, so it should be web-accessible so that I can add information from anywhere
• a portable app is a possiblity (can be run from a USB drive)
• it should be based on either Stephen Covey’s top-down planing method or David Allen’s GTD method. flexibility to support both is a plus
• it would be fun if I can host it on my web server at home
• the interface has to make sense
• I don’t carry a PDA, so sync-ing is not an issue

I’ve seen a few links to Chandler, an opensource PIM that is primarily a desktop application. However, it also has an option to use a Hub (a free web-based version) or to download your own server (and provide your own web-based version).

To save you the reading, I will tell you up front that I was not impressed. The app is still at version 0.6, so there’s quite a bit of room for improvement, but Chandler just didn’t fit my style of information management. Read on if you want to learn more about my gripes.

I went straight for the Chandler server…and I had problems configuring it. Chandler runs on Java and requires that an environment variable JAVA_HOME be set (on Windows computers) for the server to work. I have Java installed on my computer, but the JAVA_HOME was not set. After a couple of hours of Google-ing, I finally figured out where the setting is and that JAVA_HOME needs to point to a JDK, not a JRE. Your path to the JDK must also include a trailing slash.

For whatever reason, I have multiple JREs and JDKs installed on my computer. I chose the most recent JDK and set the environment variable. Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables. In the System Variables section, click on New.

Variable Name: JAVA_HOME
Variable Value: pathToJDK (don’t forget the trailing slash)

You’ll need to restart your computer to update JAVA_HOME, at least I needed to.

Continue following the instructions for running the server and the installation was complete.

I could now connect to my new Chandler server at http://127.0.0.1:8080 to see the snazzy web interface. But good grief, the interface was confusing. The “list of items” took center stage and the content of each item gets displayed in the lower right corner of the web page. Being a Java app, it’s a little bit sluggish. Entering tasks and calender events is NOT intuitive, selecting the start and end time of an event is cumbersome, and the concept of Collections is a bit alien to me.

After playing around with it for a few minutes, I eventually figured out how to create tasks, events, collections, and I downloaded the client. Playing around with the sync feature on the client and “pushing” events and items to my Hub account and to my server account was pretty neat. After adding items to the desktop client, then sync-ing, my desktop items became available via the web. Too cool!

Alas, I am not a big fan of the interface. The list of “items” takes up a majority of the middle of the screen and even after re-sizing some of the sections, having the item details (like date, start time, end time, and notes) over on the right side of the screen doesn’t feel right.

There is no way to prioritize things other than Now and Later. I guess I could add a priority code to the beginning of the title of each item, but the app as a whole just doesn’t appeal to me.

The ability to store contacts would be nice, but that doesn’t appear to be in the scope of the Chandler project.

Overall, I think this project has potential. For now, it’s too early in the development phase to have much use to me.