Why I'm Sticking With Remember the Milk

I'm a list maker by nature - my wife sniggers at me sometimes as I add something to my to-do list that I've already done, only to mark it completed immediately (I like having a record of those things).

For years, my to-do list flow was something like this:

• Remember just before bed that there are a couple important things I need to do the next day.
• Grab a piece of paper (blank paper, a bill, whatever's laying around).
• Make a quick to-do list in the corner, rip it off the full paper and put it with my wallet.
• Come home from work the next day and find the piece of paper with my wallet with most of the tasks undone.

When I got an iPhone a couple of years ago, I decided I was going to start using a better system.

For the past couple of years, I have used Remember the Milk, a fantastic to-do list manager that has a great iPhone application.  It has some benefits and drawbacks though:

Remember the Milk Benefits:

• Easy to use
• Keyboard commands
• Great iPhone app
• Reminders
• Repeating Tasks
• Tasks can be set for a specific time as well as date

Remember the Milk Drawbacks:

• iPhone app requires a $25/year Pro membership
• Email reminders are only for that day's tasks, not for anything that's overdue
• Can't reorder tasks other than using priority or the like

When the time came for renewal of my $25 Pro membership this year, I decided to look around.  My only major requirement was that whatever I did needed to have a native app on the iPhone so it could remind me about tasks.

I discovered Wunderlist fairly quickly, due to the amount of buzz around it and gave it a try.  I really really wanted to like it.  I went all in, migrating by hand my entire existing list of short term and long term tasks.  I gave it a full month before I finally threw my hands up and had to go back to Remember the Milk.

Wunderlist Benefits over Remember the Milk:

• Reorder tasks to your heart's content
• Native Mac App
• FREE

Wunderlist Drawbacks:

• Reminders only worked when adding tasks from the iPhone app (if you set them at all).
• Any tasks added from the web interface don't get a reminder email.
• Can't set a time on a reminder (Call John at 1pm tomorrow)
• No repeating tasks

These drawbacks all ended up becoming an overall deal breaker for me.  I need my to-do list to remind me every month when various bills are due, every 6 months to renew my auto insurance, etc.  I need to be able to be reminded at a specific time about something.  Finally, I needed to be reminded when I had something due, regardless of where I entered the task.

I hope Wunderlist can add these features someday and if so, I'll give them another shot.  For now though, I am happily back at Remember the Milk as a Pro member again.  It's just not that important for me to be able to reorder tasks and save $25/year.

Now if Remember the Milk could just let me reorder tasks and add subtasks into the mix, I'll be a member for life!

Setting up Atlassian FishEye with GitHub

The other day a co-worker asked me if we could point our Atlassian FishEye instance at GitHub repositories.  I did some poking around and after having a hard time finding any specific instructions in any one place, I decided to write a post about how I made it work.

Assumptions

• Admin access to FishEye.
• Admin access to a GitHub repository.
• Git client and SSH client installed on the FishEye server and available in the PATH.

Instructions

1. Login to FishEye, go to Administration -> Repositories and click "Add Existing...".
2. Choose "Git" from the dropdown, give it a name/description and click "Next".
3. Grab the SSH url from your repository in GitHub and enter it into the "Repository Location".
• Will look something like "git@github.com:ORGANIZATION/REPONAME.git"
4. Under "Authentication Style", choose "Generate key pair for ssh" and click "Generate".
5. Copy the resulting block of text into your clipboard.
6. Go to your repository in GitHub, go to "Admin" and choose the "Deploy Keys" tab.
7. Click "Add another deploy key", name it "FishEye", paste the block of text into the "Key" field and click "Add Key".
8. Back in FishEye, click "Test Connection" and if all is well, click "Next" and then click "Add".

You will very quickly start seeing that the GitHub repository is being indexed and when done, you'll be off to the races!