nyerm

I’ve been using an old Palm OS program called Timesheet for keeping track of billable hours now that I’ve become a high-priced consultant. It’s an old program; the most recent version (1.5.3) was last updated by the author (Stuart Nicholson) back in November of 1999. However, it’s got a better interface than all the commercial timekeeping applications I’ve tried, it comes with a simple executable for throwing its data into CSV, and best of all, comes with source code.

One of these days I might even find the time to do something with the source code, like fix a couple user interface quirks that I’ve grown accustomed to.

Someone else has made TimesheetMate, a lovely Unix tool that produces beautifully-formatted Excel sheets from Timesheet’s data. I’m dying to give it a try, though I’m stymied by two problems:

• The Unix machine I have regular access to is a modern-age dumb terminal running Knoppix, without any support compiled into the Knoppix image for connecting a Palm OS device to the USB port.
• My primary machine at home connects with a handheld just fine, but it’s a Windows machine, upon which this lovely program won’t run.

I think the easiest solution to this problem is to make the Excel output pretty all on my own. In my copious spare time.