I think I hit upon a trick of fusing GTD and DIT in a way that makes sense for me. I shift my DIT daily “will-do” list to a weekly “will-do” list, but keep daily lists. As part of the GTD weekly review, I identify which projects I will work on in the upcoming week, and slot the next actions into the daily list for a day based on what I “think” my schedule is going to be. As the week gets dynamic, I might not finish everything on a daily list, but each morning I reschedule everything that is not yet done, based on how my week is looking now.

I realize this has the potential for getting back into a situation where things always slip and never get done, but they’re still all captured in GTD. It’s really adding a bit of the DIT strategy to whittle down the next actions. It HIGHLY depends on making a good assessment during the weekly review of how much work can be taken on over the next week.

Security Stuff

• bugtraq @ insecure.org http://www.djeaux.com/rss/insecure-bugtraq.rss Good to skim for early warning of vulnerabilities you may see later.
• Cisco Security Advisories http://newsroom.cisco.com/data/syndication/rss2/SecurityAdvisories_20.xml
• Cisco Security Notices http://newsroom.cisco.com/data/syndication/rss2/SecurityNotices_20.xml
• Dark Reading: Dark Reading News From Other CMP Sites http://www.darkreading.com/rss_simple.asp?f_s=318&f_ln=Dark+Reading+News+From+Other+CMP+Sites
• Dark Reading: Dark Reading News Feed http://www.darkreading.com/rss_simple.asp?f_s=297&f_ln=Dark+Reading+News+Feed Strikes me as a trade rag, but I skim it anyway.
• Microsoft Security Bulletins http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/secrss.aspx
• SANS Internet Storm Center http://images.dshield.org/rssfeed.xml These guys often get the straight scoop pretty early, because of the reputation they have earned.

General IT Industry News and Commentary

• Gizmodo http://www.gizmodo.com/index.rdf Gadgets galore.
• Slashdot http://slashdot.org/index.rss Ok, so I’m kind if Old School, but I still check out slashdot.
• RoughlyDrafted Magazine http://www.roughlydrafted.com/feed/ I love the author’s style and the way he intelligently and reasonably tears up the pro-Microsoft media machine and the IT pundit industry.

Web 2.0 and Related Development

• Riding Rails - home http://feeds.feedburner.com/RidingRails

I haven’t really paid much attention to the next three in a while, but I haven’t removed them, either:

• Web 2.0 Blog http://feeds.feedburner.com/Web20Blog
• http://ww.xml-dev.com/blog/blogrss.php http://ww.xml-dev.com/blog/blogrss.php
• Sphere of Influence Blogs http://www.sphereofinfluence.com/blogs/rssmerge/fullrss.aspx

Personal Development

• Matt’s Idea Blog http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/atom.xml Matt does a great job of synthesizing a lot of the other books out there, and makes some great reading recommendations.
• Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/feed/ Steve’s generally a bit New-Agey for me, but he does have good ideas in there that I have found useful from time to time.

And because I’ve come to realize I can’t get by on tech skillz alone:

• Men.Style.com Daily News http://men.style.com/services/rss/feeds/daily_news.xml
• Men.Style.com: Latest Features and Articles http://men.style.com/services/rss/feeds/mens_features.xml

There are a lot of ways to work around this, but I just wanted a quick hack to the display name so I could take this one off my list and move on. It turns out to be easy to do even if you don’t have a lot of development skill.

WARNING: I’m just passing on a quick and dirty hack. I haven’t tested this on a variety of platforms. The more our circumstances vary from mine (OSSEC HIDS 1.3 on Linux), the more you may need to adjust this. I’m not responsible if you screw up your system!

I unpacked the source tarball into /usr/local/src/ossec-hids-1.3, which I will call the install directory.

The file you need to change is src/os_maild/sendmail.c. Save this file off somewhere before you modify it!

Look for a line that looks like

#define FROM                    "From: OSSEC HIDS <%s>rn”

Change the “OSSEC HIDS” to say whatever you like. I used the name of the domain, followed by HIDS, e.g. “MACIDOL HIDS”.

Now you need to recompile. This is also pretty easy. Go back to the install directory and rerun “./install.sh”. If you have installed before you will get a prompt that says

You already have OSSEC installed. Do you want to update it? (y/n):

Say yes to this, and you will not damage your old config.

I like to restart OSSEC HIDS after this with

/etc/init.d/ossec restart

The installer probably does this, but I gives me a little kick to do it, so I do.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This only applies to 1.3. Future versions will wipe out the hack, so it may need to be reapplied (if future versions don’t give a way to specify the display name in the config file.) It may be in a different place in future versions.

I’ve had one session with the Apple documentation trying quick tweaks to the Quicktime embeds, to no avail, so I’ll have do dig a bit deeper.

It’s great being able to participate in the forum and even perform administrative tasks on the go, though.

If I can get a good checklist/schedule going, I should be able to keep current with all of them, and not waste more time than I need to during the rest of the day going back and revisiting all the time.

Some of what I originally intended to accomplish with this blog is better done there, but when I post an entry there that I think should be here too, the system will let me publish both places.

So if you want to see the dirt on me, go to http://43things.com/person/chrooke.

I particularly like story points as a measure of size, and the idea of lowering the precision of the story point estimate as the number of points goes up.

The biggest issues with relating these principles to my life right now are being essentially a one man team (though occasionally with other team members), and how to charge for iterative development when consulting.

Here’s what the server does now, which defines what the replacement needs to do:

– fetchmail grabs mail for about 10-15 e-mail accounts out in various places on the Internet. I’m guessing around 200 e-mails/day.

– at one point fetchmail passed the e-mail through SpamAssassin, but I lost this on the last upgrade and never bothered to set it up again.

– fetchmail passes the mail off to procmail, which sends the mail off to a Cyrus IMAP/POP3 server. Once upon a time I had procmail doing lots of sorting, but this is another one I lost and never set back up.

– Any of the computers at home can connect via IMAP to look at the mail. Ditto for our Treo 680s, plus we use Thunderbird Portable if we want to check in from a friend’s computer. At one point I had SquirrelMail set up for checking mail from the web, but (you guessed it!) I lost this on the last upgrade and never set it back up.
Overall this has served us well for 10 years. Through desktop upgrade after desktop upgrade and multiple operating systems our e-mail has always been there for us. But do we really need a 350W power supply, multiple hard drives, video cards, etc. to accomplish this?

Next Part II: The new hardware