OStatic

Thank god Macworld is almost over. The furor over the new iPhone (or whatever it is going to be called) is ending, and hopefully we will all be rational soon. The best part of Macworld, apart from a fantastic theatrical performance by the Count of Cupertino, is a chance to meet some of the developers who write applications we often use.

According to Alec Saunders, who apparently never sleeps and was awake to see an early press release, Adtran COO Danny Windham is moving over to Digium to be CEO of the open source IP PBX vendor.

Open-source IP PBXs were supposed to target the incumbent telephony world's lunch. But right now the Asterisk community finds itself in a food fight over the free, small-installation market, between upstart Fonality and the house of Asterisk itself, Digium.

One thing many web workers have in common is that we're also chair workers. It's not too likely that you're out in the sun working up a sweat as you go about your daily job. More likely, you've gotten engrossed in some intricate online task, and by the time you look up and realize it's past dinner time fourteen hours have gone by without you moving any muscles other than the ones in your fingers. While this may be great for your clients, it takes its toll in flabbiness, sore backs, and repetitive strain injuries.

Mark Cuban has somewhat of a mixed record predicting BitTorrent's future, having once suggested that nobody would ever download HD content over peer-to-peer networks. Obviously, he got that one wrong. But he does have a point when it comes to a growing obstacle to P2P becoming mainstream:

If you frequently use both Outlook and Google Calendar for scheduling, and are finding it quite tiresome to always export calendar details and upload them into Google Calendar, you might want to look into SyncMyCal.

With all the hype surrounding BitTorrent, it's easy to forget the other mainstream P2P network, Gnutella. While LimeWire still rules that roost, Phex should make a strong showing with their first major software update in a year and a half, version 3.0. The open-source Gnutella client now runs on top of Java 1.5, and is available for download on SourceForge.

How many ways are there to manage your task list? Almost as many as there are people with tasks to do. Here are 20 different ways of tracking your to dos, with examples of each.

You probably use more than one of these options, depending on what you're trying to manage and what suits your temperament. Or maybe you have some other ideas. If so, share them here.

Once you've figured out how to store your contact database, now you have to manage it effectively. Can you open your address book right now and pull up a name of a client, co-worker or vendor and at a glance see a record of every communication you've had with that person, including phone calls? Do you remember weeks later that you left a message that was never returned? Do you know whether or not you owe that person a phone call or note? Do you have a record of the fact that you sent them a package of materials last month? Do you link your business contacts together, so you can visually map relationships between them?