Anyone looking to stay productive with their work, errands or chores keeps a to-do list. You need to have that to-do list available at all times and be easy to manage.

With that in mind, I am introducing an application that I think will help you with that: Cheqlist. A desktop application powered by Remember The Milk that does 2 things very well: make managing tasks very efficient and look sweet on your desktop.

What makes Cheqlist awesome

I wanted to build an application that I, myself, would use everyday. There are a few key features that would make that happen:

• Adding tasks quickly using RTM’s new Smart Add feature
• Visual appeal and lots of room for customization. Special thanks to Rakesh Menon for allowing me to use his JavaFX color picker
• Easily search tasks and use RTM’s custom search keywords
• Must work on all the OSes I use: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux

On top of that, I think there are some things you’ll come to appreciate:

• Easy-update: Cheqlist checks for updates on startup, and if you want to upgrade, it takes just seconds!
• Free and open-source
• Lots of nice “easter egg” features for those of you who take time to find them ;)

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I recently switched to hosting all of my own websites. While it is liberating to have much more control over my web host, it begs for more maintenance time and better tools to help you monitor your server.

While browsing my GitHub account I came across Mark Sanborn‘s site monitoring script and thought: “Hey this is a good idea, let’s see what I can make of it”. I have been meaning to post more Python here so I updated his code a bit and thought I’d share it with you. I hope you have ideas for improvements.

Checking site availability with Python

I didn’t feel that this script was big enough to go full OO with it, but if you want to add to it, fork the gist on GitHub and provide a link in the comments. You know what’d really be cool is if someone used timeit to get the response time and set thresholds for when the site is too slow.
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Last week, I wrote about why programmers should twitter. My article met with heavy criticism at DZone. Today, I intend to answer people’s doubts and try to approach the subject from a slightly different angle.

Not just small talk

A lot of people seem to think that Twitter is all about “sitting on patios” or “my MBP did these things”, and that’s understandable. There is a lot of generally useless stuff and a lot of people just use it for that. You don’t have to. You don’t have to follow anyone that only posts that and you certainly don’t have to tweet that way. It is what you make of it.
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