.perlcriticrc

My .perlcriticrc

Archiving Ideas

Project management with Google Wave

Project Ideas can be archived with an "Archived" tag or if there are too many tags in use a "Completed" tag will work. This will keep the Ideas search smaller and limited to current Ideas.

Current Ideas search:

tag:Project Name, Idea, -Completed

Old Ideas search:

tag:Project Name, Idea, Completed

Separating Ideas and Tasks

To separate Ideas from Tasks just use an "Idea" tag or a "Task" tag. Project tasks would be sorted with:

tag:Project Name, Task, -Completed

Project ideas would be sorted with:

tag:Project Name, Idea

Project management with Google Wave

Finding unread tasks

To find all unread tasks (eg: all unread waves) use the following search:

is:unread

Project management with Google Wave

Finding tasks that don't have a project

To find all tasks that don't have a project (eg: all waves that don't have a tag) use the following search

-has:tag

Project management with Google Wave

Using Google Wave for basic project management

I recently got an account on Google Wave and I think it has promise. What interests me most is the possibility for project management. Previously I was using ThinkingRock which is a great application and has tons of features. However I didn't use most of the features and I wanted to share projects, to-do lists, etc with other people. I then started to move my projects to Google Tasks with hopes that it would allow sharing similar to Google Calendar's sharing.

When I got my Google Wave account I was glad to find out it has the ability to selectively share a wave with another person (isn't that the whole point behind Google Wave?). I looked for some sort of project management or to-do plugin but I realized that Google Wave provides everything I need without plugins. Granted I'm using a very small subset of project management ideas but it works well enough for me.

My setup is as follows:

• New projects are identified by a specific tag
• Each task is represented by a wave
• New tasks are given tags according to which projects they belong to
• Users can be added to tasks, unfortunately they can't be removed (yet)
• Users can update tasks with new info
• When a task is completed a "Completed" tag is added to the task
• Tasks can be sorted by project using Saved Searches
• To search for all open tasks in a project use the search
  tag:Project Name -tag:Completed
  or just
  tag:Project Name, -Completed
• To search for all completed tasks in a project use the search
  tag:Project Name, Completed

That's all I'm using Google Wave for right now. I'll provide updates for any new processes I come up with.

Some notes about searching:

• There are several search terms to choose from.
• The only operator I have found is '-' used to negate a term; I have not found other operators such as 'and' or 'or' in the documentation.

Handling Perl DBI errors

Just something I've been working on recently. Previously I would check the result of every DBI statement with RaiseError set and an eval around each statement:



The evals added a lot of repetitive code. DBI database handles have an attribute called HandleError that allows a subroutine to be run when an error is encountered. The code is much cleaner with rollback and confess in the HandleError subroutine.



Also if something different needs to be done with errors for a specific statement the HandleError subroutine can be disabled temporarily by saving it to a temporary variable, setting HandleError to undef, then setting HandleError back to the temporary variable later.