Hi, I'm Benedikt Deicke. I'm a web and software developer at flinc. I'm mainly building user focused web applications using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. Additionally I'm currently finishing my studies for my master's degree and enjoying photography in my spare time. Feel free to get in touch with me!

January 7th, 2008
Getting Things Done with Tracks

As my current term at university is crammed with projects, presentations and term papers, it is quite hard to remember every deadline. I was constantly worrying about them and pretty badly needed a way to manage all my tasks. As I mentioned Getthing Things Done on this blog some time ago but hadn’t tried it yet, I decided to give it a chance. I didn’t buy the book by David Allen, but searched for a simple tool to implement GTD in my everyday life. (Rails applications preferred, of course) What I found was Tracks – Doing Things Properly an open source rails app providing everything I needed. Its slick interface makes it easy to manage actions, projects and contexts. Additionally actions can be exported in RSS or iCal format, although I customized the RSS a little to reverse the order and display the due-date.

After using it for about one month now, I really recommend it! No more worrying about forgetting deadlines or entire tasks!

If you want to try Tracks without having to set it up on your own, just contact me and I’ll add an account for you.

Posted by benedikt – Filed in Other, Ruby on Rails
1 comment

September 21st, 2007
ActiveRecord: Using the "type"-column

By default it’s not possible to use a database-column called “type” for anything else than single table inheritance. To change this, simply use set_inheritance_column() and read_attribute():

   1  class TypeTest < ActiveRecord::Base
   2    set_inheritance_column(:something_else)
   3  
   4    def type()
   5      read_attribute(:type)
   6    end
   7  
   8    def type=(value)
   9      write_attribute(:type, value)
  10    end
  11  end
Posted by benedikt – Filed in Articles, Ruby on Rails
0 comments

August 14th, 2007
ClockingIT

Since last week I’m using ClockingIT to track the time I spent on client-projects. Some of the features are (taken from clockingit.com ):
  • time tracking & reports
  • milestones & due dates
  • timeline & activity log
  • notifications, rss & iCal
  • integrated wiki
  • english, brazilian, french, german, spanish & norwegian languages

The application is totally free. You’re able to download the sources or simply register an account … Oh, and by the way: it’s a rails-app … ;-)

Posted by benedikt – Filed in Other, Ruby on Rails
1 comment

May 2nd, 2007
UFTG Shop online

It’s done! My first Rails application is online. Hope it works fine … :-) Go visit http://shop.uftg.de/ and order some merch …

Posted by benedikt – Filed in Ruby on Rails
0 comments