Time tracking with Hamster indicator

At work, I find it very handy to track the time I'm spending on some tasks. Especially, if you have to report to someone the time you spend on certain projects or whatever.
Hamster is such a time tracker that I found to be very useful, easy to use, and enables you to obtain statistics about your daily/weekly/yearly work.

It gives you the possibility to introduce information from the shell, but there's also a graphical indicator available, which fits perfectly with Ubuntu Gnome and Unity.

Install instructions

If you need more details about the following installation and configuration commands, you can consult this article.

# Add repository
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:albertomilone/hamster-indicator

# Add description to repository for easier identification
sudo sed -i.save 's/$/ #Hamster-Indicator Time-Tracker/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/albertomilone-hamster-indicator-natty.list

# Install Hamster Indicator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hamster-indicator

Configuration

The hamster indicator permits to change how and which information to show on the Unity panel.

# Show all possible configuration values and values
gconftool-2 -R "/apps/hamster-indicator"

# Toggle Icon Glow
gconftool-2 --toggle "/apps/hamster-indicator/icon_glow"

# Toggle Show Label
gconftool-2 --toggle "/apps/hamster-indicator/show_label"

# Set enough space for label
gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-indicator/label_length" --type int "20"

Database location

It might be interesting to now, where Hamster stores it's data, for example for backups, or if you want to copy/share the data to another Ubuntu installation.

~/.local/share/hamster-applet/hamster.db

Gantt Charting

A Gantt chart is a popular type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project.

I don't like Gantt charts much, which you'll understand if you work with Agile Development methodologies like SCRUM.
But these kind of diagrams are still heavily used in lots of projects, so sooner or later you'll need a program to handle them.

Windows

There's the mother of all: MS Project.
What should I say, as many of MS Office programs, its heavy, slow, and error-phrone. And it's not free and doesn't run on Linux.

Ubuntu

For Ubuntu there are several free applications available, and some of them can handle MS Project files, which is very important if your boss only handles this program.

Read my special article about this kind of applications, their dis-/advantages, special installation instructions aso.