For original entry, click here

I've been tracking my time for the past few months. I'm able to do this perhaps because I'm just a housewife with plenty of spare time(Yeah right, the truth is, being a mom is a 24hr job!). Let me share with you about it.

In the beginning...

In the past I have been thinking about how to track my time, mainly to find clock in hours I spent doing different projects. However, no tools have struck me to be particularly useful. Some tools are too confined within one PC (i.e. time tracker in Google Desktop Sidebar), and some tools are too disconnected that they can't be synchronized with the PC (i.e. some pocket pc tracker program, or even manual notebook with pen). Or, I had to pay hefty price to buy time tracker software. In short, I needed a time tracker that can be accessed anytime anywhere and can aggregate the data into a report.

Using Twitter and Google Spreadsheet

Come Twitter and Google to the rescue. During the past months I have been using twitter to track my time together with Google Spreadsheet. Why twitter? Because I am able to access it from many different platforms, namely PC/Laptop, pocket PC / cellphone web browsers (with twitter mobile version), instant messenger, and SMS. I found that the cheapest way to input data offline is via pocket PC web browser connecting through GPRS/HSDPA/wifi into twitter mobile webpage. The webpage is only 3Kb long which means one pageview equals to 1 cent SGD. Of course the cheapest way is to input data through stationary PC, which is free.

Then I use Google Spreadsheet to aggregate the data into report. The problem with twitter is that I had to manually input the time tracking data into a Google spreadsheet in order to summarize it into a more sensible report. This is because I can't find any way for Google spreadsheet to import data from twitter. Although it only take me 30 minutes per week to input the data manually, I dreaded to do that because it's so boring.

Using Google Spreadsheet with Form Input

Anyway I just realized (too late) that Google Docs has launched new features on the spreadsheet since early February 2008. Now the spreadsheet can directly receive data via an online form webpage. This is cool because then I do not need to manually input twitter data into the spreadsheet. Moreover, the online form webpage is very simple, enabling me to open the form webpage in my pda quickly despite only using GPRS connection. The webpage is only 1.8Kb long, which means one pageview equals to 0.5 cents SGD, and I didn't have to spend time doing additional data entry. Basically, this enables me to create time tracking report on the fly.

Creating Time Tracker: Step-by-Step

First I created a new spreadsheet, with the first sheet to keep time-tracking data. I rename this first sheet as "time detail". Make sure that you have plenty of rows, say, 1000 rows, if you use the spreadsheet to track 24 hours of your life in great details. If you only use it to track only a few tasks, you might not need 1000 rows.But ensure you have enough rows, because that's what is written in the Google help instruction.


The form editing view


The form webpage view in browser

Then I created the online form according to the instructions. I made three input points, namely "Task", "Tag", and "Achievements/Notes", which will be depicted as three different columns in the spreadsheet. The "Task" column is to record the task name. "Tag" column is to assign three letter category into the corresponding task, and you can put as many category as you want. I have many categories, ranging from breastfeeding time to travel time, blogwalking, and categories dedicated for each separate projects. "Achievements/Notes" is to put down any additional notes on the task.


The grey rows are the ones input through the form, while the white ones are input directly on the spreadsheet

By using the form entry, Google also automatically creates new column within the sheet for timestamp, which marks the exact time when the particular entry is added into the spreadsheet from the webpage form.This timestamp marks the beginning of a particular task.

Then, in the column next to the ones used for form data entry, I added one column to calculate the duration of a particular task, using the formula =MOD(A4-A3,1) for row no.3, repeating this formula according to the next row numbers.

On top of the duration column I added a "total hours" data using a simple =SUM(E3:E1000)*24 formula, which will be used in the summary report later on.

Second, go to the second sheet and rename it as "summary". Then assign the columns to aggregate data according to the "Tag" by listing all the "Tag" that you have made.I made two columns for this, "Tag details" and the "Tag" itself.


The data, summarized according to the "Tag" or categories

Aggregating data is done by simply adding all the durations in the first sheet, depending on the assigned "Tag". This is done in the column next to the "Tag", using the formula =SUMIF('time detail'!C3:C1000,"Tag",'time detail'!E3:E1000)*24  (This formula will give the numbers of hours in decimal form, meaning the numbers behind the decimal point is the fraction of an hour. For example, 1.5 means one hour and a half, which is 1 hour and 30 minutes).

To make the number more sensible, I added two more columns "Percent" and "Daily Average". "Percent" shows how many percent of my time used for a specific task, and to make that number more tangible to me, "Daily Average" shows how many hours and minutes I spend each day for a specific task.

In summary, Google Spreadsheet with form webpage input enabled me to track my time both on and off my PC, even on the road (using my cellphone web browser), while generating summary report on the fly. Using flexible "Tag", this spreadsheet can be adapted both for extensive time tracking use or to only track a few projects.

Do you want me to create a Google Spreadsheet template to be shared publicly? Or do you have any advice to make the process easier? Let me know by writing your comments below.

Update:
The template spreadsheet is here, you can copy it into your own google account.

For the original entry, click here

Thank you A. Fatih Syuhud for having selected us (Indi + Rani) as blogger(s) of the week! True enough to his review, we write out of passion of different topics that we encounter in our daily life. Why do we do it? No reason other than wanting to update our family and friends in Indonesia while we're stranded here in Singapore. That's why many have criticized our blog for lacking focused content. But we never really intend to be focused, and as such we will keep on writing whatever comes across our mind at any given moments.

What Fatih wrote about "keep on writing" echoed to us to be very true. In this website, you can see the transformation of our writing when we began blogging in 2003. It began with mundane, short paragraph, ramblings with focus more on what we had been doing on a particular day, more like a meaningless day - log. Eventually, as we received comments from people / readers, we began to write with a more focused theme or issue per entry and spiced it with bits of research to back our bullshit. In a bigger perspective, the website still serves the purpose of logging our thoughts and activities of particular moment, but now it is more refined, although it is not excellent … jut yet (or else we would be star bloggers by now).

So basically, we learned how to write, by writing often and a lot hence slowly improving the quality. But not only that, we also learned how to write, by reading other people's writings and taking good comments seriously.

Rani is in particular indebted to Jeremy Wagstaff, who, as her boss in 2001, gave her lessons in journalism and writing. Thank you, Jeremy, and may you cope with Indi's jokes everyday.

To AF Syuhud, we apologize that we write this linkback a bit late, because we've been occupied with things that diverted our attention from blogging these past few weeks.

For the full article, click here

I know, I know, I'm a bit late in highlighting the war between three biggest webmail provider: Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. But this week it becomes quite interesting.

As you might have known, three months ago Yahoo announced that it gave unlimited email storage, and they began to phase in the mailbox upgrade.  In June, I became one of the lucky customer who got unlimited storage.



Then, I just discovered that today Hotmail is increasing their mailbox size to 5GB, dwarfing Gmail 2.8 GB mailbox! Admittedly Hotmail is a bit late in jumping into mailbox upsizing bandwagon, but when they do it, they seems to intend to surpass Google.

Nevertheless, the upsizing measure by yahoo and hotmail is not compelling enough to make me sway back to their service. I'm currently a happy user of Gmail because:

• Gmail's spam filtering is fabulous
• Gmail offers pop3/smtp access for free
• Gmail allows me to access my other pop3 mailbox with ease and for free, and additionally, enable me to send mail as if I'm accessing my original pop3 account, allowing me to organize my different emails from one centralized location
• Gmail works well with MSGTAG service
• Gmail allow me to preview attachments without having to launch the full application
• It has versatile searching and flexible tagging capability
• Despite having ads, Gmail offers clean, sleek, interface
• Accessing Gmail from my mobile phone is a breeze
• I love the conversation display. It just make sense to read emails like that (too bad my desktop email organizer, Outlook, cannot do it as smoothly as Gmail)

Some people would argue and scream about lack of privacy in Gmail. But hey, nowadays, you can never be totally private, can you? Who says that yahoo and hotmail keeps your email in better privacy compared to Gmail? I think all of them are essentially the same, putting the email service onto the corporate hands. Perhaps the  only perfectly private way to email privacy is to buy a dedicated server hardware, plug it into your home network, and set up a mail server protocol there, isn't it?

Anyway, Gmail seems to be responding fast to upsizing war. They slowly phase in 9GB of mailbox size to its customers. Moreover,  Gmail also offers paid mailbox service in order to upgrade your mailbox up to 250GB. Let's just hope that this is true, and let's hope that this service spill over to the Google apps service, which I also use a lot.

Competition is good!

For full entry, click here

I arrived in Jakarta on the evening of 4th of July, for my sister’s wedding and Anggi’s sister in law’s wedding. Somehow many people are getting married in July 2007, I think about three or four of my high school friends are getting married during the period, and at least two of my university friends. Interestingly, during this trip, I experience a few “culture shocks”, as I haven’t been home for more than one year. I’ll list down those “shocks” in a two parts: the first one is about internet connectivity, and the second one is about other stuff.

Getting Connected in Indonesia

When I go to Indonesia, I would always prepare myself to stay disconnected from the internet during the period. Not that I want to, but internet connection in Indonesia is expensive, really slow, or impractical (like, I have to go to a mall a few km away from my inlaw’s house to get free wi-fi, or that I have to subscribe to a broadband service: impractical for my short-term stay).

But this time, I can’t avoid being disconnected any longer. The reason is that I didn’t manage to finish a few papers to be submitted to my bosses, the professors. So, this time around, I couldn’t relax in Jakarta, since I have to fit in a few hours a day to work. And just working on those paper isn’t enough, I still need to send them over to my bosses. Those papers are at least 5 megabytes in size, because it has a few images. For Singapore standard, 5MB in filesize is peanut. But for Indonesian standard, sending it over the internet pipe is like fitting an elephant into a Volkswagen.

So during the first few days, I tried to stick onto Telkomnet Instan, the only service available in my inlaw’s house. I used to remember that Telkomnet Instan wasn’t that bad: the connection rate is quite fast for dialup Indonesian standard. But this time, I felt like pulling my hair out because sending 1MB of document took me at least 60 minutes, and sending 8MB of document took me two hours of effort, and failed because it got disconnected at 60 percent upload. My gmail accounts kept getting disconnected. And forget about browsing images: I had to turn them off in firefox. And my laptop modem port and HD were at the brink of being overheated. I gave up and send the files using thumbdrive over at my uncle’s house, which has cable internet, several hundred meters from my inlaw’s.

A few days before my departure to Jakarta, I asked my pak-bos-dangdut Jeremy Wagstaff for the solution to my problem. He promptly suggested that I try HSDPA 3.5G connection, which he had been very satisfied about. So, back in Singapore, I did a quick research about this and agreed that it’s quite promising. However, it was not easy to make a decision. First, the upfront cost for HSDPA modem is high, so, I had to do a research on market price very carefully and look for lobangs for a bargain. Second, most HSDPA connection requires subscription, something that is not worth for my short-term stay in Indonesia. Third, not many people are using HSDPA, or most of them are on subscription, therefore it was difficult for me to find a solution specific to my needs: for a short term stay in Indonesia.  

Then I found out that Telkomsel had just released their FLASH scheme. There are a few things that attracted me into this scheme: First, it does not require subscription. Second, it’s time-based rather than use-based: which fits to my needs for downloading and uploading big files. So, the first thing I did upon arriving in Jakarta is to buy a prepaid Telkomsel SIM card which I would use solely for HSDPA.

But there’s another problem. I need an HSDPA modem. It was difficult finding one because most of my friends who are using HSDPA are on subscription scheme (so they got a bargain deal). Moreover, I want a modem that is not locked to specific network, because I would want to use it outside Indonesia. If I buy the modem from Telkomsel, it would be locked to Telkomsel network. I could get a modem in Singapore for free (as part as M1 subscription), but it is also locked. The Singtel’s HSDPA modem looks like unlocked, but it costs more than 400 SGD and I had to sign up for 2 years contract. (note: I found out that unlocked / non-contracted HSDPA modem is far more expensive in Singapore, perhaps because there wasn’t a very high demand for it due to nationwide Wireless@SG scheme).

Thanks to Othe and Bram, who are very active in forumponsel and have an understanding on HSDPA market due to their work with the telcos, they recommended me to buy a modem from a shop in Taman Anggrek. It was quite a bargain, about almost half the price compared to buying it at bhinneka.com, and worth the hellish traffic to go to Taman Anggrek. The shop even installed the modem for me and it came with one year warranty. The only downside is that the built-in software comes only in German. Perhaps it’s a smuggled product or something, because I couldn’t even log into Optic Globesurfer Icon Website to download the manual using the serial and IMEI numbers at the back of the modem. Nevertheless, when I tried to get connected to Flash Telkomsel, I got 1.8MB speed, and it was quite a breeze. A far cry from Telkmonet Instan’s 52K crippling speed!

In a nutshell, looks like cellular based broadband has a strong prospect in Indonesia due to the strong demand, telco competitions, and less cost in building cellular network compared to fixed line or wi-fi network. Correct me if I’m wrong. But I felt that the demand is really strong, that the current modem price is almost 80 percent compared to a few months ago, and even that dodgy HSDPA modem seller in Taman Anggrek has already reduced the modem price for the next shipment by 100,000 rupiah (I bought the last unit of their first shipment). So, thanks to my dad, Jeremy, Othe, Bram, Ankz, and Phoebz for helping me in the quest for HSDPA connection. And for Singapore residents who want to go to Indonesia, I suggest you to rent my modem (hoping to recoup the cost).

For full article, click here

(Ditulis di sini biar gak lupa langkah-langkahnya, maklumlah, masih amatiran soal beginian. Apalagi sambil hamil, jadi pelupa banget. Ditulis dalam bahasa Indonesia soalnya yang tulis beginian dalam bahasa inggris udah banyak)

Anda bisa menjalankan test site Drupal di Windows XP dengan menggunakan XAMPP. Langkahnya adalah sebagai berikut:

Install XAMPP

1. Download XAMPP
2. Ikuti langkah selanjutnya di sini. Unzip installernya, sebaiknya di root directory di HD anda, misalnya di D. Bahkan anda juga bisa menginstall XAMPP di portable hard disk atau thumbdrive
3. Jalankan setup_xampp.bat
4. Mungkin anda perlu me-restart komputer anda, meski secara teori sih gak perlu. Tapi dalam kasus saya, menjalankan xampp pertamakali tanpa restart kok menyebabkan konflik dengan Skype (port:80), Windows Firewall, dan Norton Worm Protection. Setelah restart gak ada masalah sih
5. Setelah restart, jalankan xampp-control.exe dengan memulai modul-modul yang dibutuhkan. Seharusnya anda akan bisa mengakses http://localhost
6. Sebaiknya anda mengamankan xampp anda dengan mengeset kata sandi di http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php
7. Anda akan dapat mengakses phpMyAdmin di http://localhost/phpmyadmin

Meng-kopi situs drupal ke komputer lokal anda

• Backup mysql database
  1. Masuk ke mysql server anda, dan pilih database drupal anda, lalu pilih Export -> Select All -> Save as File. Simpan file .sql database anda di mana saja di komputer lokal anda
  2. Jalankan phpMyAdmin di XAMPP. Buat database baru
  3. Impor database drupal yang anda download ke dalam database baru tersebut
• Backup drupal engine
  1. Copy file dan subdirectory drupal ke dalam komputer lokal anda
  2. Simpan downloadan tersebut di Directory/xampp/htdocs/drupal

Menjalankan duplikat situs drupal anda di komputer lokal

1. Edit settings.php di subdir Directory/xampp/htdocs/drupal/sites/default sebagai berikut
2. Ganti baris 81 sbb: $db_url = 'mysql://root:password_root@localhost/nama_database_drupal';
3. Ganti baris 90 sbb: $base_url = 'http://localhost/drupal';
4. Sementara itu, ikuti cara ini untuk menjalankan Clean URL di komputer anda. Yaitu dengan mengganti beberapa parameter di Directory/xampp/apache/conf/httpd.conf , yaitu: 1. Uncomment (hapus tanda #) LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so dan 2. Ganti AllowOverride None menjadi AllowOverride All
5. Duplikat site drupal anda sudah bisa dijalankan secara lokal di Windows XP anda di http://localhost/drupal

Apa perlu pake skrinsyut? Males banget bikinnya nih. Ini sekedar untuk catatan aja biar saya sebagai ibu hamil gak gampang lupa dengan langkah-langkahnya.