Comments for Jawmaster's Den

Comment on Shamelessly plugging for Khet by gymcoach

gymcoach — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:03:23 +0000

Hey jawmaster, I have seen you around the http://www.ascendingintegration.com/khet site but I don’t think we have played. I am also addicted to this game and hang out on the only online site that I can find. I am heading for your facebook page to see what it offers. I stumbled on to this page looking for information on iPhone Khet development. Looking forward to seeing you online.

Comment on Trying out RescueTime, and expressing my concerns by jawmaster

jawmaster — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:47:08 +0000

Thanks so much for responding to my post, Tony. Yes, folks, you can specify whitelists on RescueTime’s website, giving very good control over your privacy options. However, RescueTime’s creators make a good point: “a startling 40% of RescueTime users’ time is spent outside of their top ten apps and sites.” With this is mind, it can often be counter-productive to set a whitelist immediately, as major time sinks can escape detection. It is worth noting that you can blacklist specific sites and applications, but as far as I can tell, this can only be done efficiently once the usage of those sites is recorded by RescueTime’s servers (plus, the list of ignored sites and applications is still stored online, and some might find this to be slightly unnerving). This illustrates a difficult paradox to overcome in comprehensive whitelisting and blacklisting, and is one of a small few reasons why I’d like to have the option (as an individual user) to be able to set the program to run analyses privately on my computer, WITHOUT sending data to online servers. I would be shouting praises from the hilltops if RescueTime had this option, and the truly paranoid would be able to firewall the closed-source program while still retaining program functionality and usefulness.

As far as the YML log files go, I am glad to have the ability to see what usage data is uploaded. This data is separated by folder into pending uploads and uploaded data. I am curious to know if RescueTime has a feature that limits the amount of space taken up by old log files, and read in a forum that this was a planned update. Has this update been released yet? And suppose that RescueTime were being run as a standalone application on a single user’s computer — how much space could a few months’ worth of log files and statistical data potentially occupy?

Thanks Tony, for the mention of your funding from Y Combinator. I mentioned in a previous post on here that I am a bit addicted to Reddit. I have also dabbled in Scribd, and I’m a proud beta-grabber for Xobni. It goes without saying that Y Combinator knows where to send their money. Your quickness in responding to my completely-unknown blog is proof of that, and I admire your willingness to answer any questions and concerns. I hope to hear more from you about what I mentioned earlier in this response.

Comment on Trying out RescueTime, and expressing my concerns by tony wright

tony wright — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:51:53 +0000

Thanks for writing about RescueTime! We definately hear your privacy concerns! A couple of points for privacy focused folks:

- Whitelists- this feature let’s you list the sites that you WANT to track. All other sites get sent to our servers as “non-whitelisted web browsing”.

- the data is written to your hard drive as YML files (ugly, but readable). You can see exactly what we send! As you say, we could be sneaky, but so could any installable app. Given that geeks are a big part of our userbase, I don’t think we’d get away with it if we tried.

- We’re good guys. We were funded by Y Combinator, which is a pretty prestigous seed funding firm. We’re very google-able (the founders). We’re very contactable.

- The phone number on our contact page is my direct line. You can call and chat any time!