Click above to get started with your 30 day trial account, which you can convert to a free forever account (limited to two projects.)

I’ve been looking for a good method for tracking time on projects and tasks. My previous solution was GnoTime, which worked relatively well, but had a few points I was unsatisfied with. Deciding to try something new Google lead to this post from which I discovered  Harvest, which is a hosted time management solution. Previously, I’ve only used desktop applications such as GnoTime, Ktimetracker, etc. though I liked the idea of a web tool, as easily accessing it from both work and home was appealing, as well as mobile support for Android.  Not having to sync files via Dropbox between systems was certainly appealing, and Harvest offers some very nice features including reporting and even invoicing capabilities.

Setting up a Harvest account takes about two minutes, and I had an initial project and tasks defined right away. The web interface is easy to navigate, and provides start / stop timers for each task, which is a feature I wanted. I should note this is a paid hosting service, however pricing is reasonable, there is a 30 day trial, and the website also is currently promoting “The Harvest FREE FOREVER Plan – 2 Projects, 4 Clients, & 1 User, absolutely FREE” – perfect.  Update:  Once signed up, you can change simply convert your 30 day trial account to the free account under you account management, upgrade settings.

But it gets better. The first day I left a timer running at work, and the next morning received an email from Harvest informing of this. Nice. Also, over the course of the first week I received some helpful emails (non-spam) to get new users started using some of the features, a web cast invite for how to do invoicing, etc. I also sent them a ticket asking about converting to the free account, and if they had a referral program, and received a response the next day. The referral program credits you time for anyone you refer, though does not credit them – though they of anyone can join the referral program. The big orange button at the top of the article is an example of one of the referral buttons you can get.

You can also export your time to a csv file, which is quite handy, and the invoicing capabilities might be extremely helpful for those needing them (I do not currently use this feature, but it is very nice it is there.)

Now, the icing on the cake would be a Linux desktop widget. While the download site has widgets for OSX and Windows, none was listed for Linux – and, unsurprisingly, the OS X one does not work when installed in plasma. However, this post pointed me to the Harvest Command Line Tool (hcl), a ruby tool designed by Zack Hobson which provides a command line interface which uses the Harvest API to allow task management via the command line. Wow. The Harvest devs are also apparently looking at providing an actual widget in the future per this feature request, but hcl is fine for me. The fact there is a useful API which is being used for tools like hcl is another huge benefit to Harvest.

Installing Harvest Command Line Tool

Installing hcl is extremely easy, as it is available as a Ruby gem. You may also install it from source via the hcl git repo.

Installing with gem was simply a matter of installing rubygems for my distro and then the hcl gem:

#zypper install rubygems
#gem install hcl

(For Ubuntu and Fedora users, this should simply be a matter of installing rubygems as well via yum or apt-get.)

Running hcl the first time prompts for your Harvest account credentials, and your Harvest subdomain  – this is the yourdomain part of you yourdomain.harvestapp.com account you created earlier. You may now list your project and start / stop tasks, etc. For example:

paracelsus@linux:~> hcl tasks
1782588 1165030 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – ARM
1782588 1165024 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – Admin
1782588 1165031 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – BDS
1782588 1165029 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – DAAC
1782588 1165032 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – GPGPU
1782588 1165034 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – ITSD
1782588 1165025 Prime Enterprises – ORNL – Project Management

You can view the time for a specific day:

paracelsus@linux:~> hcl show last friday
8:09 ORNL
————-
8:09 total (as of 10:12 am)

And of course start and stop the timer for a project / task and include a log message:

paracelsus@linux:~> hcl start 1782588 1165032 Testing hcl
Started timer for Prime Enterprises – ORNL – GPGPU (0:00) (at 10:21 am)

Additional options are available via hcl –help and further usage examples are available in the documentation at git hub, such as: https://github.com/zenhob/hcl/blob/master/README.markdown

Summary

So far I am quite impressed with Harvest. It provides the features I needed, and the inclusion of an API and tools like hcl are all I needed. I’m looking forward to using it over the next few weeks on my projects.

The referral program is a nice bonus. I had very good success with the Dropbox referral program, so we will see how this one goes.

If you are looking for a time tracking tool, Harvest might well be worth test driving.

All you need to do is download a bootable Linux CD, such as AVLinux, boot your computer with it, plug in your guitar using the realtone cable, and run the software on the CD and you can unleash a vast array of guitar audio effects (pedals), as well as easily record yourself (with multiple tracks), add vocal tracks, etc. If you have a MIDI capable drum kit or keyboard (especially with an M-Audio MIDI adapter), you can very likely use them as well.

And the best part: it’s free. There is zero cost for the software as it is based on an Open Source operating system (Linux), and Open Source applications such as Rakarrack, Guitarix, Ardour, Soundgarden and others. AVLinux also comes with commercial software, and previews of other available tools, but everything on the CD is free to use.

Here is how it works:

The realtone guitar interface cable Rocksmith uses is really just a simple USB sound card which is seen as a USB microphone by a computer or console game system. This is actually identical to other 1/4″ to USB adapters such as the Behringer UCG102 Guitar to USB interface. Linux has excellent support for USB audio devices, and the Rocksmith realtone cable uses a chipset which is support by the snd-usb-audio Linux drivers (and for Mac by  OS X 10.6). Support is built in to Linux, so you can simply connect the realtone cable to a Linux system and jam away. (However, you can not connect something like the Behringer UCG102 to your PS3 or XBox to use with Rocksmith. Although they perform the same function, the game will only work with the realtone cable. Yep, lame.)

The real magic is not the cable, but Linux. If you have never used Linux, don’t be afraid. If you can download and burn a CD you can get started using Linux. You will actually find Linux itself easy enough to navigate around in, but learning to control the vast number of audio application which are now at your fingertips may take a bit longer. (You can also very likely use Garage Band for OSX, but the wealth of audio tools on AVLinux is an order of magnitude beyond this and is more comparable to ProTools and more.)

The below steps are written assuming you know nothing whatsoever about Linux. If you get stuck you will find there are many online forums where help is available. NOTE: Please see the AVLinux user manual, found on the desktop – it is an excellent guide and will quickly get you started. Also, get help from a computer geek friend – especially if they know anything about Linux. (Make sure to provide the beer.) It might seem daunting at first, given the extent of software available, some of which is very full featured, and complex. However, you should be able to at least get up and running so you can hear your guitar and uses pedal like effects pretty easily. From there you can dive into the more complex tools, like Ardour for recording, etc.

Here is how to do it:

While there are many flavors of Linux other there, and several ways you can do this, I highly recommend downloading the LiveCD version of AVLinux from here.

(For more information on other Linux versions available, see the geek notes at the end on “Other Linux Environments”. Just use AVLinux for now though unless you have reason not to.)

Make sure you download the “live” version, and burn the .iso as an image, and don’t copy the .iso file itself to the blank CD. Then, restart your computer with this CD in it. It should start up and take you to the Linux Desktop. (NOTE: If it does not, you may need to configure you computer to boot to CD first. If you are using a Mac, hold down the alt or ‘c’ key while powering on the system and until after you hear the chime.)

Be patient, it may take several minutes for the desktop to appear.

Now, simply plug in the Realtone audio cable. Next, you must configure the system to use the Realtone cable as the proper input, and the computer as the output. This is done using the Jack audio server, which can be controlled by running qjackctl. There is a little green icon on the system tray at the bottom of the screen which will start qjackctrl.

Configuring Jack is likely going to be one of the hardest parts to set up the first few times. The idea is you are patching together software audio tools, as though you were connecting them to each other using physical audio cables. You can then string together different tools. The first thing you need is to ensure the Realtone input is connected to the system output. The basic JACK configuration  should look something like this:

Click for full size.

TOP TIP: Click on the > button in Jack next to the input device to see more descriptive names for the inputs and outputs. If you just try to use the drop down menu (hw0, etc.) it is easy to get them wrong. The Realtone cable will be list as a “Rocksmith USB Guitar Adapter” or “Hercules” or “Sony Entertainment”.

Now you can start other audio software and connect those applications to Jack as well. For example, we will now start Guitarix (a guitar effects processing tool) so we can jam with all those nifty effects, and make our own. Start Guitarix from the audio applications menu (Hint: Not all entries are alphabetical, it’s actually at the bottom of the list). The interface, with a couple mono plugins and tuner enabled might look something like this:

Click for full size.

TIP: the red and green power lights on the left must each be powered on by clicking it for it to be active in your effects loop.

qjackctl should automatically now see Guitarix as another available application to “plug” into, and the connections should look something like this:

TOP TIP: Many users find the default patch bay display in JACK very confusing. You can also try out Patchage, in the audio application menu, which I find displays the patch connections in a much more intuitive and manageable way. Also see this helpful diagram of how to connect guitarix to JACK at the Guitarix site.

You can now jam away, and explore a huge number of guitar effects. Add more effects from the Options -> Mono Plugins menu. Chain them together to get the exact sound you like.

NO SOUND: Most likely you need to re-examine your JACK configuration. Also it helps to activate the tuner in guitarix (Options -> Tuner), to verify the signal is getting to guitarix. If so, you are very, very close. Check your JACK configuration setting, both in the patch bay and the inputs and outputs under the “settings” tab. Its easy to get something wrong here. Also, make sure to turn up the pre-gain, drive and master gain knobs as needed. (This applies to other applications too: Effects often have power switches that must be clicked on to activate them, and volume levels may need adjusted – things may be working perfectly, but you just need to bump up the gain.)

Whats Next?

This is just the beginning. Using the same steps you can now also use other applications. Want more guitar fx? Try Rakarrack – the possible sounds you can create with it are endless. It has pre-configured banks of effects, and you can make your own custom sound. (Again, enure you active the fx power switch (top left) and adjust the volume sliders.)

Here is a screenshot of Rakarrack configured for JACK. This is an amazingly fun guitar fx tool with a stunning array of sounds:

Click for full size.

Want to record yourself? Try Ardour – also already installed and available in AVLinux. Plug in a USB microphone (Rockband and Guitar Hero ones work fine), configure it in Jack and you can record vocals in Ardour too. (Ardour has extensive features, and you will want to head over to the website to check out the tutorials.) For keyboards check out Rosegarden and for Drums try Hydrogen.

Record yourself with Ardour:

Click for full size.

Next Steps

Running from the LiveCD is a great way to get started, but you most likely will eventually want to install AVLinux either to a USB stick, or to your computer. This will allow you to save changes, and improve performance. The AV Linux control panel on the system tray even includes an option to make a bootable USB stick, as well as many other very useful tools. This attention to providing a very user friendly environment, and the excellent user guide on the desktop are additional reasons why I recommend AVLinux.

Summary

Take your playing and skills to the next level using powerful and freely available open source tools. Linux is a fantastic platform for musicians, and the number and quality of tools available is impressive. If you run into trouble, you will likely find places like Linux forums, and forums for tools like AVLinux, Rakarrack, and Guitarix, to be quite helpful. It can get complicated, its true. But if you stick with it you will be well rewarded.

Advanced and Troubleshooting Advice
(Warning Nerd Stuff Coming – you can skip it unless you want more info)

First off – check out the user manual on the desktop (or from the AVLinux site). It has tons of good info, useful terminal commands, etc. Here are some basic tips for common issues:

No Audio
Start a command shell and run:
$speaker-test
$aplay -vv /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Left.wav
If you don’t hear anything, restart the sound server:
$sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
Then re-try the speaker test. This must work before JACK or any other applications will.
If it still does not work, make sure your sound card was detected (cat /proc/asound/cards )

Troubleshooting the realtone cable
Prior to plugging in the cable, open a command terminal and run:
$sudo udevadm monitor
Plug in the Realtone cable and see if udev correctly detects it and assign it as an audio device.
Also, ensure it is visible when you run
$sudo lsusb -v

Using VirtualBox
Running for a LiveCD forever is not the way to go. Instead, you can install AVLinux as a virtual machine using VirtualBox. You will also need to VirtualBox USB extensions. Note there is going to be  increased latency this way for sure, in fact so far the latency has made it pretty unusable in my tests. You may well need to increase the “Frames/Period” in JACK settings to 1024 or even 2048. I did have trouble with the VM crashing in VirtualBox (4.1.6) running on my OpenSuse 11.4 system with VERR_NO_MEMORY errors, despite having plenty of memory allocated to it. It does seem to work okay when I briefly tested it with VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro, OS X 10.6.8 Audio was working okay – though getting the Realaudio cable recognized by the VM was a bit tricky, even when adding a USB filer for it. All in all, my experience shows that due to latency and timing demands, and overhead of the hypervisor may make this unrealistic except under ideal hardware and conditions. A better option would be running from a USB stick, which should run considerably faster than the LiveCD, or better yet of course actually installing Linux.

Other Linux Environments
You can install any mainstream Linux distribution (OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) on your computer, and then install the needed audio applications for the repositories, or build them from source. However, I recommend using the AVLinux LiveCD to start users off without needing to install anything so they can just jam, have fun, and test drive things.

OpenSuse MultiMedia Studio
(LiveCD and Installable)
Based on Suse 11.4, this is both a LiveCD and installable Linux environment. It can also be customized using the OpenSuse Build Service, and built a an .iso, usb, or VirtualBox image, which is very cool. You can add guitarix and rakarrack to the build. I do want to test drive this fully, though it lacks the extensive collection of pre-installed audio specific applications that AVLinux offers.

Studio64
(Only 2.0 version available as Live CD, newer versions are install only.)
Other LiveCD options include the 64Studio 2.0, but that is based on Debian 4.0, which is very old at this point. While 64Studio is available in newer versions, they are not available in as a LiveCD. If you wish to install a full Linux OS, I would certainly recommend looking in to it.

Ubuntu Studio
(Latest is Ubuntu 11.10 base. No LiveCD option)
Developed for a mix of audio, video and graphics arts. Looks pretty good, but not music focused – and there is no LiveCD available.

However, VisIt would launch when X-Forwarded, but not when using NXClient & NeatX. The only messages were:
…
Running: mdserver2.3.2 -host 127.0.0.1 -port 5601
VisIt's viewer exited abnormally! Aborting the Graphical User Interface. VisIt's developers may be reached via the visit-users mailing list.  Please see:
htttp://visit.llnl.gov/FAQ.html#1

I also found that glxinfo would return:

$ glxinfo
name of display: :826.0
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig

Solution:

First, I created an xorg.conf to ensure GLX was actually being loaded. (It turned out this was not required as X was autodetecting everything fine without an explicit xorg.conf, but I include it here as it may be helpful in some cases to have an explicit xorg.conf)

Xorg -configure
(renamed xorg.conf and moved to /etc/X11. Ensured Section “Module” included Load “glx”, etc.)

glxinfo still would not work. I then set the following environmental variable:

export  LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=yes

Which allowd glxinfo, glxgears, etc. to work. For more information on this environmental, see:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1437/what-does-libgl-always-indirect-1-actually-do
https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/384001

This could then be made into a Gnome Desktop Launcher:

cat VisIt.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon[C]=gnome-panel-launcher
Name[C]=VisIt
Exec=env LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=yes /usr/local/visit/bin/visit
Name=VisIt
Icon=/usr/share/icons/visit.jpg
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;

Perhaps the above may be useful to other VisIt users.

The Google Go Programming Language, currently under development by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and a fellow by the name of Ken Thompson looks to be quite interesting.

Some of the merits include:

Fast compile times. Wicked fast.
Familiar C like syntax.
Ease of programming – a pseudo marriage of C and Python.
Built in concurrent process execution and messaging.
(MPI clustering and CUDA are under discussion.)
Support for AMD64, x86 and ARM

New languages come along all the time. So why should this one be any different?

Ken Thompson, and his experience with systems programming and languages, is one good reason. For another I can foresee that, for scientific computing in particular, there could be a very good future for Go. By providing an easy to learn and use programing environment, with a C and Python-like style, with easy to use messaging and concurrency and which compiles extremely fast and runs at near C speeds – there is a very good potential. If the future added to this MPI capabilities, and especially bindings for existing libraries (e.g. Thrust and SciPy ) and for CUDA – it could very well fill a perfect niche. This just might be the start of something grand.

Official Sites

http://golang.org/

Install instructions, beginning tutorials, etc.

This site also provides a cool browser based write-compile-run environment where you can achieve instant gratification with Go.

http://code.google.com/p/go/

The actual Google code site.

Getting Started

To get a feel for the language and start using it immediately, you might want to read the sample hello world in the writing programs section of the install instructions.

You can execute Go programs using the above mentioned browser based compiler and run time tool.

Of course, you can also install the Go compiler and tools locally. You have two options for the compiler: the native Go compiler tool chain (6g, 6l, etc.) or gccgo, which uses gcc for the backed.

The official site has full instructions for setting up your environment. Requirements to build Go are minimal, and you can likely be up and running in minutes.

Nifty Cool Bonus: Note the following comment from the install instructions on how the Go linker works:

There is no need to list hello.6‘s package dependencies (in this case, package fmt) on the 6l command line. The linker learns about them by reading hello.6.

Other References to the language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29

A reference for GO language bindings can be found at:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/library-bindings

Scientific Computing

The suitability of Go for scientific computing is discussed in an interesting Google Groups thread here.

Syntax Highlighting

Exploring the misc/ sub directory shows the source includes syntax highlight files for Vim, Kate and other editors as well as some other goodies.

With any of these solutions, security is of course a concern. Regardless of if the data is encrypted in transit, or if the provider encrypts it on their server, I wanted to also encrypt it locally. This is where a combination of Dropbox + encFS comes into play very nicely.

There are many options when it comes to file encryption, but encFS really shines in some areas. Encryption is per-file, and no dedicated space need be reserved before hand. Setup is very simple, and encFS is well supported on all major Linux distros.

Using this solution, encFS stores encrypted files in a Dropbox directory. This is then mounted via encfs to a local folder where the unencrypted files are made available. When I am done, I can simply unmount this directory, leaving only the encrypted files in my Dropbox folder on the local system, encrypted via encFS with AES or blowfish. The information is also thus encrypted in transit, and additionally encrypted by Dropbox/Spideroak on their side.

Setting this up is very simple and takes just a few minutes. More detailed howtos can be found in the reference section, but here is an encFS in 5 minutes quickstart guide:

Ensure you have fuse and encfs installed via your package manager and that the fuse module is loaded
lsmod | grep fuse

Create a directory in Dropbox which will hold the encrypted files, and a mount point outside of Dropbox where the unencrypted versions will be mounted. (For Spideroak simply create two directories in your home folder and add the encrypted directory in your list of folders to back up in Spideroak.)
mkdir ~/Dropbox/encrypted/ ~/unencrypted

Mount the filesystem:
encfs ~/Dropbox/encrypted/ ~/unencrypted/

Note: provide full paths or at least a ~ prefix to encfs.
The first time you do this encfs will set up the encryption. You may choose your options, set the passwords, etc. A “paranoid” auto-config option is available, and full details for options are in the man page.

Using encFS

Now, simply create and use your files in ~/unencrypted. Normal filesystem permissions apply and the use of these should be completely transparent. Anything stored in this mount point is automatically encrypted, and you will see matching (encrypted) entities in ~/Dropbox/encrypted

When you are done, unmount with:
fusermount -u ~/unencrypted

Cryptkeeper Applet

Cryptkeeper is a systray applet for KDE and Gnome which provides a simple GUI for the creation, importing, and mounting of encFS folders. It is quite easy to use. For Suse 11.4, I simply used the rpm available for Fedora 13. Cryptkeeper is maintained by Tom Morton and the source code is available on his site here

By default it uses Nautilus, though KDE users who prefer Dolphin or another file manager can simply change this in Cryptkeepers preferences.

Cryptkeeper also allows you to view information about an encrypted folder, or change the password. These option are available by right clicking on the folder name in the list of encrypted folders.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncFS

Setup Guides:

http://movingtofreedom.org/2007/02/21/howto-encfs-encrypted-file-system-in-ubuntu-and-fedora-gnu-linux/

http://www.net-tools.org/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=124:dropbox-automated-backup-with-encryption&catid=20:scripts&Itemid=40

The last link provides this suggestion on auto-mounting using the enfs extpass option and a compiled file containing your password. However, be aware this simply compiles your password into a binary which spits it out to std out when run. You are creating a program that will spit out your password, or if strings is run on it your password is visible. Man encfs suggests directing –extpass to ssh-askpass as another method, and there is also the option to use libpam-encfs.

PAM Configuration:

For a guide on setting up libpam-encfs see:

http://choffee.co.uk/ramble/2006/06/02/paranoia-at-home/