Development

CSV file converted to PDF, with variable column widths and footers Printing a CSV file as a nicely formatted table is easy if you import it first into a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc. I found it surprisingly hard using common Unix utilities. Toolchains like Latex are overkill, designed for complex publishing. My typical use cases are simple. I want to dump selected fields exported from an application like my Kanboard task list on a single sheet of paper, without over-running the margins.

Asana is a great task manager for individuals and teams. I’ve used it on the job, to help me track new issues. The main feature I miss is the ability to save all your tasks to a local file. Asana’s built-in export truncates the output at 500 records. This limits your ability to work with the data in other applications, or switch to another service. Fortunately, you can export all your entries using the Asana API and a bit of Python.

Git has become the de facto standard for web development source control. However, there are times when you don’t need all its features and complexity. If you’re developing alone on a single machine, and want a repository mainly for backup and comparison, consider a simpler application like Fossil. It’s an easy installation: you drop a single executable file anywhere in your system path. There are downloadable ready-to-run binaries available for Linux, Mac, Windows, and BSD, or you can compile it yourself.

Some nice applications for task and issue management are being written in the Ruby on Rails framework. I can even install them from Cpanel on my website. However, I had some reservations about Rails on shared hosting. The first issue was that I’d be competing for resources with hundreds of other sites on the same server. Performance was going to suffer. If the app consumed too much CPU time, the web host might throttle or suspend activity for my account.