A Place in the Forest

I'm looking for advice, reviews, testimonials, on project billing software.

What I'm visualizing is being able to make a list of projects, and then with a very simple UI select and switch between what project I am working on at that moment, and then at the end of the day and month have a useful report suitable for massaging into a billing statement.

Bonus points if it has a nice web UI, as well as has clients for Windows, Mac, Linux (running in the desktop tray or equivalent) and on smartphones (iPhone, Android, & Blackberry) and also has a RESTful API.

No bloat, please.

Does it exist and done well, or have I just described a business opportunity?

Dopplr can generate a "blog badge" of my Dopplr location and future trips, like so:



I want a little bit of JS that can reach into either Dopplr or Fireeagle, and give back just the name of the city I am in, so I can put in my home page something like "today, Mark is in JS_SCRIPT_REFERENCE_HERE", and it will render as something like "today, Mark is in Seattle".

Am I doomed to write it myself, or has someone else done it?

For the past twenty years, I've always assumed that, given knowledge of a file's inode number, there was some efficient way to open(2) that file by inode instead of name, and I've just never felt the need to use it.

Now I feel the desire to do that, and cannot find how. Searching google for "open by inode" just gives me references to stuff on how to implement Linux VFS, and/or how to open a file from inside kernel space, not from user space.

The openat(2) looks like a half-assed way to get some but not all of the same optimization.

So, is there a way to "open by inode" from user space, and how do I do it?

Is there a lightweight website that uses ajax or flash such that someone can work a wacom tablet and sketch out visual ideas, while other people can watch live and in realtime?

Even just a constantly updating GIF or PNG, like a cheap webcam server, would do.

No ActiveX, no plugins.

I think I may have had a couple more gigs just drop into my inbox.

I'm going to have to start tracking tasks, task completion, hours, clients, and potential clients.

There has to be an app that does this. Lawyers and graphic designers do it all the time. The trick will be, finding one that is open source and that doesn't suck.

I recently upgraded my laptop from FC5 to FC6.

When I graphically login to my account, the login process hangs on a blank grey screen for a couple of minutes, and then proceeds to login normally. If I create a new user account, when I login to it, here is no hang.

It smells like a network or name resolver timeout. I think it's the WM, Metacity, that is hanging. I suspect there is something present or absent in my gconf configuration that's causing it. Howeve, the Gnome people have copied one of Windows bad features, in that the login process and WM and Desktop initialization process is not logged or recorded anywhere.

Anyone else seen this? Is there a simple, or even complex, way to find out whats happening and fix it?

And "just create a new account and use it" isn't an answer.

Clues?

I'm running Linux Fedora Core 5, and the latest standard versions of Firefox and Adobe Flash plug-in. Flash stuff does load and run, but text won't display. This is especially problematic for the text in buttons and wigets, because it makes it very hard to use flash bashed applications.

I've removed the plugin and reinstalled it several times.

Any ideas as to the problem, or at least how to better diagnose it?