Programming
Chronos
A Task Reporting system
I was sitting at my desk at work a week or two ago wondering where another day had just disappeared to. Then the idea struck me: “Why don’t you find out?” and thus Chronos was born.
Chronos is a system of two parts. The first part is a C# application which takes a snapshot of the titles of all the windows you have open once a minute and adds them to a database.
The second part is an ASP.NET web interface (also written in C#) that allows you to assign each of these windows to a specific task. The system can then provide summaries on what tasks you spent what amount of time on!
Here is a quick run down on what needs to be done to get it installed:
- Install IIS
- Install the MSDE or SQL Server database (used mixed mode authentication, don’t just use the windows authentication)
- Get and install the .NET 2 framework
- Configure IIS to use .NET 2.0 instead of 1.1, you may also need to add default.aspx to the list of default documents.
- Copy the contents of the .zip file into your inetpub/wwwroot directory
- Create a config file & database by running config_generator. Save the file to the same directory
- Edit the create_task.bat file to reflect your installed path then run it.
- Alter the new scheduled task to only run when logged in
- The system should now be collecting data, if the scheduled task fails, ensure the configuration file is in the same directory as the snapshot_generator executable.
- Go nuts!!
I must stress that the code available for download here is only a proof-of-concept that I whipped up over the course of a couple of days. I am hoping to improve it so it can be released as a semi-professional open-source product boasting:
- An installer;
- Multi-user support;
- Data export options and
- An extensive array of reports to run.
Download the source code for Chronos
Mini-CMS
A lightweight CMS
Mini-CMS is a content management system based on the brilliant TinyMCE rich-text edior. The system works completely independantly of a database, perfect for those small sites with budget hosting.
A demo is available on the website.
PKSMailer
A Secure MIME PHP emailing classPKSMailer is a secure mailing API for PHP based on PHPMailer using the PHP OpenSSL functions.
The alterations were mainly for my own use and I never really intended to release it, so don’t expect to find any documentation of the changes. I didn’t really want to see it disappear, so I’ve decided to put it up in its current state. There is example usage in the “secure example.php” file; the rest of the documentation refers purely to the excellent PHPMailer class it was built from.