Found a site that I thought should exist, and as if by magic it does: AlternativeTo. Fed up with Basecamp? Thinking there must be SOMETHING better than iTunes? Big lists of alternative options. That’s all. Good to know it’s there.

Time to get organised: I’d been reading a lot about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methods of organising life and work, and it seemed to chime with moves I was making by myself. I got the book from the library and I’d recommend it for people like me who might seem organised on the surface, but at the cost of a bit of stress at remembering everything.

GTD is a methodology that recommends getting stuff out of your head and into a system, so that it doesn’t clutter everything up and get in the way of creative thinking and the kinds of things your mind is good at. ‘Stuff’ comes from your inbox, or colleagues, or mail or phone messages and has to get done; brains are good at remembering, but not at the right time, so you’ll remember you need batteries when you turn on a dead torch, not when you’re passing them in the shop.

It’s a good argument that Allen makes, but it leaves us needing a system to put our ’stuff’ in. I’m using Remember The Milk, which I signed up for a couple of years ago but didn’t take the time to properly investigate; now, with GTD, it makes sense. It’s extremely flexible, and you can add tasks, tags, locations and dates to make your own taxonomy that works for you. I’m working towards a system described in a post by Doug Ireton that implements GTD’s principles; it’s early days for me, but he says his system took a year of tweaking to perfect, so I’m happy to follow the same route. My head is clearing as I write….

One of the best things about working with ColdFusion is the <cfdump> tag: give it a variable and it will lay out a visual representation of it in nice colours, which makes debugging so much easier and faster than in PHP. Trying to make sense of a four-dimensional array with just a bit of indenting causes brain injury, so dBug is a wonderful addition to the PHP developer’s toolkit. Arrays, objects and resources returned by database queries are all now beautifully readable:

The dBug site says it has been downloaded 26,000 times, which doesn’t seem like a lot given the size of the PHP developer community as a whole; maybe it helps to have used ColdFusion in order to know what you’re missing.