tadhg.com » organization

Trying d-cubed for Task Management

Tadhg — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:58:51 +0000

I’ve been falling behind somewhat in keeping track of my tasks. That’s not to say I haven’t been productive, it’s just that most of my productivity has been focused in things I’ve been working on obsessively, like preparation for the roleplaying campaign I started running last week, Vim customization, and Python workflow coding.

It would be good to track other things better than how I’m doing it right now, but somehow returning to TiddlyWiki for my task management wasn’t appealing. I used it for quite a while, but a bare install of it doesn’t seem to quite work for task management, even though it’s still really good for keeping notes about things in general. I’m going to try d-cubed, a TiddlyWiki-based tool, instead.

One of the reasons for this is that I like a little organizational reward when I finish a task; I find that this kind of thing helps my motivation. This is partly due to my liking for lists (which may be related to my left-handedness) and partly due to the benefit of formally marking something as “done”. So a bare TiddlyWiki wasn’t quite structured enough for this, and I found that moving stuff around became too unwieldy. Instead of fixing the problem at the time, I gradually abandoned that list, and have managed mostly fine without it—but now occasionally forgetting an idea for a post is annoying me too much again.

Incidentally, this highlights my somewhat schizophrenic organizational state: various aspects of my life are either highly organized and usually stable that organized state, using some toolset that I’ve made work for me (like my blog, my subversion repository, tracking my CrossFit results, etc.); or are completely disorganized, with me getting by on them just by keeping stuff in my head and getting to it from time to time. The former is generally better than the latter, but finding the right tools for the right area isn’t always easy, especially when you’re as picky as I am (it took me a long time and quite a bit of research to settle on reStructuredText as my primary document format, for example).

In any case, I’ll see how d-cubed works; I might also try out Team Tasks, another TiddlyWiki-based tool.

During these trial periods, I’ll do my best to ignore the fact that I really want an API (preferably Pyton-based) to interact with TiddlyWikis via the command line, and that while some tools are close none match this requirement; I’ll eventually tackle that project if nobody else does, but adding another dependency in front of the task of keeping track of my tasks just doesn’t seem like a good idea, even if it wouldn’t be entirely out of character.

Tags: handedness, organization, personal, productivity, psychology, software

Version Control Recovery

Tadhg — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:40:06 +0000

Last year, the server with my Subversion repository on it died suddenly. I’ve made several attempts to revive it, none of which have worked. I tried to get the data off of it, but had trouble doing this as well. Having been frustrated a number of times, I gradually got used to not having it… which is something I should have fought harder against.

Yesterday, with a lot of help from my brother, I finally got the repository data off of the machine. This ended up being a pretty complicated endeavor, ultimately involving using power supply units from two machines (one machine doing nothing but giving the PSU the “turn on” signal) and wiring the drives into the RAID controller from the first machine, then going through a process of trial-and-error to get that wiring right. Niall has a lot more experience with this kind of thing, and so it took a while, but not the forever it would have taken me to do it on my own. So, eventually, we got the correct volumes mounted, and we got internet access, and I was able to copy the repositories out.

My Subversion repositories are flat-file, and since I use the svn+ssh protocol, there wasn’t any setup on the other end. All I had to do to get my local copies to work with them was to use svn switch --relocate to tell them where the repository lives now.

One bummer is that in the time the repositories were unavailable, I’ve done a bunch of file renaming, and will now have to write some scripts to get Subversion to track those renames as part of its file history. That’s not going to be too hard, I suspect. I could write a shell script to do this, but I think I’ll do it in Python instead, because I haven’t done much Python filesystem manipulation and it wouldn’t hurt to know that.

The other thing this reminds me, as I check in tons of RTF files, is that I really wish I could find a good editor with a good plain-text file format. Recent searches haven’t turned up anything new, sadly.

Most importantly, though, I’m extremely happy to have my repositories back. (And this eliminates a dependency that was in the way of work on sfmagic.org…)

Tags: organization, personal, software, tech, version-control

Literary Awards in Freebase

Tadhg — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:04:58 +0000

I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.

Naturally, looking at long lists of books, the first thing I realize is how few of them I’ve read, and how I’ve never heard of lots of them. I haven’t been reading much recently, but these lists have plenty of ideas in case I needed any.

One of the reasons I wanted to input a bunch of the winner data (the data on nominees/shortlists is a project I have yet to undertake) was to do some comparisons between the sets, particularly gender comparisons. I haven’t gotten there yet, but I did find some other things—such as the fact that Michael Chabon appears to be the first person ever to have been awarded one of the Pulitzer/Booker/National Book Awards for fiction (Pulitzer for Fiction in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay) and one of the Hugo/Nebula/Locus novel awards (Nebula in 2007 for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union).

I’m not sure that the Pulitzer, Booker and National Book awards really constitute the “big three”, but I’m not sure what competition there is, apart from the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which is better in some respects (partly due to the fact that it’s not geographically-based) but has only been giving awards since 1996. (I’ll enter its data into Freebase as soon as I’m sure I’m using the correct model for translated works.)

As for the genre side, I’ve only looked at the Locus science fiction award, not its fantasy award. In addition, the British Science Fiction Awards are probably worth including as well.

One of the great things about the Freebase technology is that it’s really easy to add more constraints like that. There’s a Wikipedia list of joint winners of Hugo and Nebula awards, but once the data was in Freebase it was really easy to turn that into a list of novels that have won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards combined.

Tags: coding, database, organization, personal, reading, semantic-web, web-development, work

Data Fever

Tadhg — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:56:43 +0000

Since last Thursday I’ve essentially been in the the grip of a compulsion to enter data into Freebase.

Some good has come of this, as every BART station, every DART station, and almost every Dublin Suburban Rail station in Freebase now has geocoding information attached to it.

Despite this compulsion, I can’t help but ask what value that really is. Sure, in some cases I went out and found the location data on Google Maps, but in other cases it was out there somewhere (e.g. dartmaps.mackers.com) already. It seems worth it to me to have it on one location, connected to properly-typed information… but is that just because I like the idea of properly organized information per se, or because it’s of practical value?

I’m going to hope it’s the latter. Information like this tends to be useful a lot further down the line, when someone writes some application to make use of it. The whole point of Freebase is to collect the information and then make it available in a rational (and hopefully predictable) way.

I have abandoned my ideas for creating the schemas necessary for handling Magic: The Gathering, because minor investigation revealed that to be an absolutely huge task.

Instead, I’ve got my eye on entering more Irish political information. Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of information on Irish elections, e.g. election results from Dún Laoghaire, and it would be really fantastic to have all that info available in a structured and easily-queried way…

So, yeah, feverish.

Tags: coding, database, organization, personal, semantic-web, web-development, work

Freebasin’

Tadhg — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:39:31 +0000

Despite having worked at Metaweb for almost a year, and despite my OCD tendencies, I had avoided getting sucked in by the allure of correcting/completing/entering data in Freebase, the web frontend to our attempt at structuring all the world’s information. I had avoided it until today, that is.

But today, I sent out an invite to a bunch of people inquiring whether any of them wanted to see Thief, Michael Mann’s early-80s crime thriller, with me at the Castro on Tuesday. I included a link to the Freebase page for Thief in the email.

Looking at it myself, I noticed that Tangerine Dream did the soundtrack. Looking at them, I noticed that one of their members during the 80s was Paul Haslinger, whose name I recognized because I have the soundtrack for Underworld.

That’s when the descent really began… I noticed that the sixth track, “Red Tape”, was listed as “Red Tape – Agent Provocateur”, and all the tracks were listed as by Haslinger. I know that Agent Provocateur recorded that track, but I wasn’t sure whether or not the Recorded By property of Musical Track was the right place to enter that.

After some consultation with the people who do know, it turned out that it was. So I entered that info, and renamed it to “Red Tape”.

I suppose I could have left it there, but no. The page for topics is new, a recent change, and it’s far superior to the old version. And it sucked me in, so that I looked at the Underworld movie page and noticed a few things were missing, and decided to add them.

After doing that I noticed that only the US film rating (R) was present, while the IMDB page had ratings for a lot of countries. When I was about to enter some of those, I realized that Freebase didn’t have a lot of those other ratings (meaning, the topics for the ratings themselves, not which ones had been assigned to Underworld).

I started to add those. I found myself adding the German ones first. Here there was a pause as I attempted to use our “list pusher” tool to add a pile of them at once, with their ancillary data. That didn’t work, for a variety of technical reasons… we have a more complicated “data pusher” tool, but sadly I wasn’t able to figure out how to get that to do what I wanted, and the in-house expert on it wasn’t at their desk when I went looking. So after a fruitless detour (but one that’s made me determined to understand that tool in future), I ended up entering the German film rating data myself.

The page for the German film ratings started off missing more or less everything except the article blurb, which we grabbed from Wikipedia. The fact that it is a film content rating system, and an organization, are relationships that I added. I also added what else it’s known as.

I added some of this while adding the film ratings that it gives out as topics themselves. One of the very simple/basic yet amazingly great things about Freebase is that if you add a realtionship to thing A saying that thing B is related to it, thing B then shows that relationship as well. Sounds like it should be that way, but compare to Wikipedia, where in order to get the same effect, someone has to edit the pages for both thing A and thing B. When you started large-scale edits, it’s no longer a trivial deal to have to support those kinds of relationships. Freebase just takes care of that, because that’s one of the things it was built to do.

After adding the various German film ratings, and also classifying the SPIO’s relationship to the FSK and adding some details there too, I ran into a bug on the live site that I was able to fix quickly and place in a patch already on its way. Nice to find a bug like that while using the site as a user, though.

After that, I let myself get sucked back into film ratings, and decided that since I’d entered the German ones I might as well do the Irish film ratings too. From film ratings to the Censorship of Publications Board, from there to (I’m not joking, this was a bad time in Irish history) the Committee on Evil Literature.

A detour led me to discover that Samuel R. Delany’s Mad Man was banned in Ireland—in 1997 (and is still banned). That info isn’t available in Freebase, sadly, and I’m not sure whether or not all books, films, etc. need a Censored By property (but it’s tempting).

A few more relationship edits meant that after I was done, the Committee on Evil Literature was the only sub-agency listed for the Department of Justice, Equality, and Law Reform. That’ll get rounded out eventually, but I don’t think it’s too bad an outcome for now.

From there I ended up looking at and cleaning up Kevin O’Higgins, then establishing a relationship between him and the Vice-Presidency of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, then entering the rest of those office holders (plus dates), and then on to the Presidents of Ireland.

Okay. I stopped there, but it took an effort. And there were a few other info-entering sprees along the way that I left out.

Now, I’m starting to think about how some of this stuff should be represented a little better—for example, I think that the Cabinet, as an Irish Government Body, is necessary, and that Ministers should be members of that body. If all that data were entered and hooked up, and the politicians in question also properly represented, you could start doing more interesting queries, like: how many Irish Cabinet members were not Fianna Fáil while in office? How many were never in Fianna Fáil? Not earth-shattering info, but the kind of basic list stuff that might be interesting… and that’s also not so easy to do without a system that understands links as Freebase does.

Anyway, it’s clearly gotten its hooks into me, and I think a lot of that has to do with the new topic view, which makes viewing complicated data far easier, editing it far less painful, and correcting/filling it out more immediately rewarding. If you’re a data, info, or stats geek, or you have some niche area you’re into, it would be worth it to have a look.

(As for me, I’m eventually going to put an attempt at a canonical schema for MTG cards, and related info, in there—it’s a more difficult schema to get right than it might appear. Until then, I’ll probably dabble in random other data.)

Tags: coding, database, organization, personal, semantic-web, web-development, work

To-Do Lists FTW!

Tadhg — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:55:52 +0000

I know that this was on BoingBoing so everybody’s probably seen it already, but I thought it was good enough to highlight. (For the record, sometimes I obsessively check to-do lists, and sometimes I ignore them completely.)

Really, it’s all about focus:

Tags: humor, organization, video

Some Project Status

Tadhg — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:06:37 +0000

Since I started this incarnation of my blog (either about two or about one-and-a-third years ago depending on your criteria) I’ve mentioned quite a few projects, and thought it would be worthwhile to look back at them and check their status.

I might have missed some, but these are the 17 I could remember/find, in no particular order:

Blogging: the project of blogging itself, starting with a plan for one month’s daily posting in August 2006. That project went smoothly, and I extended it into a year’s full daily blogging, and since then I’ve stuck to my five days per week schedule. Looking back, the first month of doing this was incredibly important as proof yo myself that I could stick to such a project, and the blogging has done wonders for my ability to let go of my work enough to let it be seen in public. This one counts as both finished and ongoing.

Microfiction version of my science fiction novel: Another section-every-day project, I did this on time and without many hiccups, and it was also rather important as a demonstration that I could do creative work every day. Finished.

The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour: Although I achieved in 35 days exactly what I intended, there have been more episodes since that time, so this project is no longer complete (and hasn’t been for a while). Due to the rather significant amount of time it takes to annotate and analyze an episode, this project was extremely time-consuming on a daily basis, and was the most challenging ‘do every day’ project until I tried to finally edit the second draft of my novel in a month. Unfinished, stalled at 35/40 episodes.

The second draft of my science fiction novel: Although I still owe the PDF to people, I did complete this, nine days past the deadline I set for myself, and with some serious struggles and stalls in the middle. This was the hardest project so far—and that’s just referring to the effort to edit in November, not to the overall project of the novel itself. Finished.

sfmagic.org rewrite: The first coding-oriented ‘do every day’ project I’ve tried (although the original creation of the site was in that vein, it was before this blog). It was quite successful, and got me a lot of the way there. The data entry side is still undone, and is quite a lot of work in itself, but in any case the project of working on it every day helped a great deal. Unfinished, ongoing.

The second novel: Not the second draft, but the second novel, this one in a fantasy setting. Sadly, I haven’t yet managed to plan this one out as I had intended, meaning that in a sense I’m already behind schedule… Not started.

Subversion migration: I started moving my files into Subversion early last year, and have moved almost everything, but many of the files are still a mess, and the duplicates haven’t been removed, and there’s still a lot of work to be done there. On the other hand, it’s allowed me to move all new projects into subversion immediately, and that’s been fantastic. Unfinished, ongoing.

Metadata overhaul for old files: Related to the project of cleaning up my Subersion repository, this is the plan to make sure that all my old files have good metadata and are in a clean format (most likely HTML). I did a lot on this at the time but stalled while working through essays from my undergrad days. Unfinished, stalled.

Regular backups: Also related to the Subversion project, I want to have regular on-site and off-site backups of more or less everything, particularly my Subversion repositories but also my databases. I made some significant progress here (Subversion on its own helps a great deal) but stalled out on this also, probably due to dependencies on upgrading my server… Unfinished, stalled.

Server upgrade: This has gone nowhere at all. I haven’t even started it, which is rather disgraceful. It just gets more and more urgent, this one. Not started.

Writing fiction every two days for about a month: I don’t think I announced this one as a project per se, but I certainly had it as a goal. It started out with ‘Wishes’ and went on from there. Near the end it was extremely tough creatively, but I was very happy with it overall, and am still extremely happy with some of the stories I wrote during it. Finished.

Book-tracking project: I can’t find the link, but I’m sure I’ve mentioned at some point my intent to build a web application for tracking my reading, including ISBN lookups to various sources, and a variety of database tables to track just about everything regarding the reading I’ve been doing. The current plan is to do this in Python/Pylons (of course) and to try using SQLAlchemy’s ORM layer for it. Not started.

Writing up my reading for each year: I made it from 1996 to 2000, but since then haven’t touched that particular area—in fact it’s been more than a year since my last post on that subject. I’m not sure why, especially since I read very little in 2001, just 39 books, which I think is my lowest yearly total since I started keeping track. That should mean an overview wouldn’t take long. Unfinished, stalled.

A film script: In Some Medium-Term Plans I mentioned this plan, scheduled to start after the next novel. I haven’t started it, obviously, and I’m not lpanning to for a while… I guess that means it’s not started, on schedule.

Bookmarking project: I’ve had a working version of this in place for quite some time, with the backend mostly working (in PHP) and the JavaScript side working in the browser, but somehow I didn’t bring it all the way to completion. It needs something else, I’m not sure what, to encourage me to actually use it. Statistics, graphs, and targets, probably. Unfinished, stalled.

Thematic photography: I had planned to try taking photos based on specific themes, but this hasn’t gone anywhere, partly because I haven’t been taking any photos at all, something I really need to work on. Not started.

Writing ‘Coup’: This story was in my head for more than a decade, having come to me in a dream, and it was way past time to get it done. It wasn’t as large a monkey to get off my back as the second draft of the science fiction novel, but it was an older and sneakier monkey. Finished.

That’s not a terrible showing. More unfinished stuff than I would like, of course, but I made a lot of progress last year in terms of finishing projects. I need to keep that trend going this year, and try to finish every unfinished project on this list. It’s only January, so it’s easy to look at them and conclude that this is definitely possible…

Tags: coding, organization, personal, photography, tech, writing

Metaweb Machine Setup Steps

Tadhg — Wed, 16 May 2007 06:45:58 +0000

Starting at Metaweb, I had to set up a new machine, something I haven’t done in a while. One thing that made it a lot easier this time is that I have a lot of my config in my Subversion repository, which saved me quite a lot of time. This also reflects some changes I’ve made since writing Essential Windows Software last year. (Oh, and all the software is Free Software.)

The very first thing I did was to add a password to the Administrator account, which I was logged into by default. At this point I considered creating a new user (tadhg) instead of Administrator, but decided against it. It’s possible I’ll regret this later, in case I have to do any LAN access where some service expects me to have matching local and LAN usernames.

Now that I’ve moved to keeping more or less everything in subversion, there are three directories to set up that matter. The first isn’t in Subversion, it’s just where I keep all my applications: c:\usr. The second is the local sandbox of my personal repositories: c:\lsvn. The third is my work sandbox, c:\wsvn for now (this might require some tweaking, depending on the build system here, etc.).

This setup doesn’t have a space for “random” stuff, such as audio, video, temporary files, or a non-version-controlled workspace. If I need them, I’ll probably create c:\home\tadhg for that purpose.

After that, these are the steps I follow to make a Windows machine into something I can use.

1. Install Firefox

Go to http://getfirefox.com/.
Download Firefox 2.
Close Internet Explorer.
Run installer.
- Do a custom installation.
- Check DOM Inspector and Feedback Agent.
- Install in c:\usr\net\browser\firefox2.
- Create no icons.
Run Firefox 2.
- Do not import anything.
- Set to default browser, uncheck “always check”.
Get Extensions.
- Firebug: http://getfirebug.com/.
- Greasemonkey: http://www.greasespot.net/.
- HTMLValidator: http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
- Stylish: http://userstyles.org/stylish/.
- Foxmarks: http://www.foxmarks.com/.
- Tab Mix Plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122.
Restart Firefox 2.
- Configure Foxmarks.
- Tell HTMLValidator to use the W3C SGML Parser.
- Configure Tab Mix Plus.
Go to http://getfirefox.com/.
Download Firefox 1.5.
Run installer.
- Do a custom installation.
- Check Developer Tools.
- Install in c:\usr\net\browser\firefox15.
- Create no icons.
Make modifications necessary to run Firefox 1.5 alongside Firefox 2.
- Rename firefox.exe to firefox1.5.
- Create the following batch file:
  set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 start "Firefox" "C:\usr\net\browser\firefox15\firefox1.5.exe" -P "Firefox1.5" set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0
Run Firefox 1.5 via that batch file.
- Do not import anything.
- Do not set to default browser, uncheck “always check”.
Get Extensions—same list as for Firefox 2, above
Restart Firefox 1.5.
- Configure Foxmarks.
- Tell HTMLValidator to use the Tidy Parser.
- Configure Tab Mix Plus.
(After Subversion setup, to point to my bookmarks, I will add this to prefs.js: user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "c:\\lsvn\config\\firefox\\bookmarks.html");.)
(Also after Subversion setup, one of my priorities is to make sure my core TiddlyWiki file is available and working.)

2. Adjust Windows/Explorer settings

Select the View menu, then Details.
Select the Tools menu, then Folder Options.
In the General tab, select Use Windows Classic Folders.
In the View tab:
- Check Display the contents of system folders.
- Check Show hidden files and folders.
- Uncheck Hide extensions for known file types.
- Check Show Control Panel in My Computer.
- Click Apply.
- Click Apply to All Folders.
From the Display item in the Control Panel, select the Appearance tab and change to the Windows Classic theme.
From the Regional and Language Settings item in the Control Panel, select the Regional Options tab and click Customize. From there, select the Time tab and change Time format to HH:mm:ss. Select the Date tab and change Short date format to dd/MM/yyyy and Long date format to dddd dd MMMM yyyy.

3. Install PuTTy

Go to http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/.
Grab all the utils except puttytel.
Install to C:\usr\net\terminal\putty.
Run puttygen.exe, generate SSH2-DSA key pair.
Save private key on desktop (move later).
ssh to my subversion server.
Put public key in .ssh/authorized_keys on subversion server.
Run pageant.exe.
Add key from previous step.
Test another login to subversion server using PuTTy.
Add saved sessions to PuTTy for my servers.

4. Set Up Subversion

Go to http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ to get TortoiseSVN.
Install to c:\usr\versioning\tortoisesvn\.
Ignore Explorer crashing.
Ignore restart request.
In c:\lsvn, do SVN checkout with TortoiseSVN (right-click, it’s integrated with Explorer at this point):
- URL of repository: svn+ssh://username@domain.tld/path/to/subversion.
- If username is the same as the username with the public key file in the .ssh/authorized_keys file from the PuTTy installation steps, TortoiseSVN will pick this up and work seamlessly (since pageant.exe is already running with this user).
- Check out config repository.
Go to http://subversion.tigris.org/project_packages.html to get command-line svn.
Install to c:\usr\versioning\subversion.
Create no icons.

5. Install AutoHotkey

Go to http://autohotkey.com/.
Install to c:\usr\util\autohotkey.
Run AutoHotkey. In the startup script, add:;Work Wrapper #Include C:\lsvn\config\autohotkey\work\mw1\wrapper.ahk ;/Work Wrapper
Create c:\lsvn\config\autohotkey\work\mw1\wrapper.ahk directory and file, and work_shortcuts.ahk in the same directory.
In that file, put this line:;Work Shortcuts #Include C:\lsvn\config\autohotkey\work\mw1\work_shortcuts.ahk ;/Work Shortcuts
Create that file, using shortcuts from home as starting point.
Add shortcut to AutoHotkey to Windows Startup programs (c:\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup).

6. Install jEdit

Go to http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html to get JDK.
During install, change c:\j2sdk1.4.2_14\ to c:\usr\lang\java\j2sdk1.4.2_14\.
Go to http://jedit.org/ to get jEdit.
Download jEdit 4.2.
Install to c:\usr\text\jedit.
Install everything.
Create no icons.
Don’t launch jEdit.
Launch jEdit using Winkey+J to load settings from version-controlled config dir checked out in step 4. (This runs the following:javaw -jar "c:\usr\text\jedit\jedit.jar" "-settings=c:\lsvn\config\jedit\version4.2"

7. Install command-line ssh

Go to http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/download/ to get OpenSSH for Windows.
Install in c:\usr\net\ssh\.

8. Install Thunderbird

Go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ to get Thunderbird.
Install in c:\usr\net\mail\thunderbird\thunderbird.exe.
Create no icons
Add email address with email server for imap server.
Add outgoing server via ssh—see http://tadhg.com/wp/2006/08/16/email-via-ssh-tunnel/.
Add work email account.
Correct spelling of name with work IT department.
Attach personal sig to personal account—c:\lsvn\config\thunderbird\sig.txt.
Attach work sig to work account—c:\lsvn\config\thunderbird\worksig.txt.
Install thunderbird feeds—c:\lsvn\config\feeds\thunderbird_feeds.opml.

9. Install GAIM/Pidgin (IM client)

Go to http://www.pidgin.im/ to get Pidgin.
Install to c:\usr\net\im\pidgin.

10. Install OpenOffice

Go to http://www.openoffice.org/ to get OpenOffice.
Install to c:\usr\office\openoffice2.
Install no icons.
Associate with all Microsoft Office file extensions.

10. Install Windows Filesystem Linking

Check to see if linkd.exe is already available on the system.
If not, get junction.exe and put it in c:\windows\system32.

Filesystem linking is unbelievably useful, especially if you want to store application config in subversion but the applications you’re using have hardcoded application directories.

11. Install WinSCP

Go to http://winscp.net/eng/index.php to get WinSCP.
Install to c:\usr\net\filetransfer\winscp\.
Add saved sessions for commonly-used servers.

12. Install Cygwin

Go to http://www.cygwin.com/ to get Cygwin.
Install to c:\usr\os\cygwin\.
Install everything.
Install no icons.
Because I installed OpenSSH in step 7, I have to move c:\usr\net\ssh\bin to c:\usr\net\sshbin.
For the same reason, I have to use junction.exe or linkd.exe to point c:\usr\net\ssh\bin at c:\usr\os\cygwin\bin.
If you hate the standard Cygwin console as I do, you could install puttycyg to c:\usr\net\terminal\puttycyg.

13. Install Songbird

I haven’t done this yet, but will visit http://songbirdnest.com/ for it.
I’ll put it in c:\usr\audio\songbird.

14. Install 7-Zip

I haven’t done this yet, but will visit http://www.7-zip.org/ for it.
I’ll put it in c:\usr\compression\7zip.

15. Install VLC

Go to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ to get VLC
Check the Mozilla plugin, File type associations, Context Menus boxes, and possibly the ActiveX plugin checkbox.
Install to c:\usr\mm\vlc.

That’s it. There are more applications and plugins out there, of course, but those are the necessities for me for a work machine. Keeping my configuration (especially for jEdit) in Subversion has made this process far easier, and I hope to increase the amount of configuration information I’m storing that way. Again, junction.exe or linkd.exe make doing so a lot easier (it is possible to get Subversion to version-control files anywhere in the directory tree, but I much prefer having the files in a separate place, as doing otherwise requires another script to cover the disparate locations that will require checking in and updating.)

Tags: organization, software, tech, version-control, web-development

Morning Time-Wasting

Tadhg — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:33:49 +0000

I’ve been doing well in eliminating “time-wasting” activities. The main one that remains is still web surfing. I’ve managed to get rid of a lot of that at work, which is good, but still do it at other times. Especially in the morning.

It’s not entirely clear to me why this is, or why I can sustain a good morning routine for months only to abandon it entirely. But of late I’ve been lucky to get just morning pages and DDR done in the mornings, and even just those tend to make me late for work far too often. A big part of the reason for this is, yes, because I start surfing when I get up.

I’m not a morning person. I tend to be sluggish, tired, and unenthusiastic for most of the morning. The bike ride into work helps this a great deal. DDR helps too. But I don’t seem to be able to convince myself to do DDR immediately upon waking. The prospect is somehow too appalling to my just-risen self. Instead, I clamber from the warm and soft comfort of the bedcovers to the information-rich distraction of the Internet. Distraction is the key: I want something that will occupy my mind and push back the awareness of wanting to go back to bed, but without requiring much from me. Reading online is just right for this, as it doesn’t take much concentration and is somewhat fragmented, not really requiring sustained attention as a book might. And there is something quite comforting about it, although it’s very hard for me to explain what this is or how it works. Part of it could simply be the long-term habit of reading news early, as I’ve done for years. But there’s something else, too, perhaps the illusion of engagement with the world? I suspect that’s a part of it, the illusion that by reading I am somehow involved in world affairs.

So I read news, and sports. It’s very routine, in that I always check Salon, I always check Gleen Greenwald on Salon, I always check Alternet, and I always check news.google.com. Then I check other sites also, but those are usually my first stops. (Cursor usually hasn’t been updated yet, so I don’t check that.)

This sucks up time. Significant amounts of time—but the key problem is really that I don’t consider the time significant right then. My sleepy mind thinks “I’ll just read this one article”, or “I’ll just spend ten or twenty minutes surfing”. Sounds okay… but that time seems a lot more important later. When I’m ten minutes late, those ten or twenty minutes are clearly what would have made the difference.

And this is the lesson that I seem to have to learn over and over, every day: time is valuable. It doesn’t seem so when I get up, but later in the day I find myself wondering what the hell I was doing, spending that time reading online when I should have been (for example) writing my morning pages. This is also true on weekends, when I generally have things I want to do, but don’t quite get into “doing” mode until I’ve spent far too long reading online, erasing hours of the day that I could have used to achieve something.

In an attempt to get out of this state of mind more quickly, I’m trying to form a new first-thing-in-the-morning habit, vaguely similar to the first-thing-at-work list I have (which has worked extremely well for me). The first step, as usual, is “take five deep breaths”. Bizarrely, it’s tough to get myself to do even that as soon as I get up, but hopefully that will become easier as it becomes habitual.

After that, I write down (in TiddlyWiki, naturally) five things I want to achieve that day. They don’t have to be big things, but just anything I want to get done. I’m hoping that this focuses my mind on the fact that I need to get things done that day, and that if I waste my time in the morning, it means that when I get back from work, I have to do the things that I didn’t do in the morning, and thus will have less time to do the five things I’ve listed.

So far, it’s been okay. It’s helped me focus a little earlier, but it hasn’t been a complete mental shift. I’m hoping that at least I’m going in the right direction, and eventually I’ll get back to the good morning routine I had going last year. (It would be nice to eat breakfast again, for example.)

The idea of larger import, however, is about the importance of time, even little bits of time. I haven’t absorbed that wisdom yet, because I believe that strongly every night, and yet forget it first thing in the morning.

Tags: consciousness, organization, personal

Organization/Disorganization

Tadhg — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:42:54 +0000

Organization makes a lot of things an awful lot easier. This is pretty obvious, but what’s been surprising to me are two ancillary points: small amounts of organization can make a big difference, and small amounts of disorganization can terminate entire projects.

I think that resistance to activities on my part can often come down to really, really minor things. I also think that the lack of an overall plan is something that bogs me down. The flip side of this is that simply formulating a plan san get me past something that I’ve been stuck on for quite some time. Lists are great for this.

Despite all the terrific progress I’ve made in organization, however, I still have a lot of trouble getting certain things done. My taxes are a great example of this… I wanted to do them today, and have spent literally hours avoiding doing them. There’s no real excuse for this—they’re not even particularly hard to fill out. But I’ve avoided it nonetheless.

I suspect that if I’d had a plan (say, one that I wrote out when I did them last year), then I would have done a lot better on them. Not necessarily finished them by now, but I’d be somewhere with them as opposed to nowhere.

List approaches like that seem to work best for me when they do one thing in particular: break down my resistance to starting the task in question. My resistance to doing things tends to be caught up with regarding those things as large monolithic wholes. Breaking them down into constituent parts both makes them seem smaller (and hence more achievable and less onerous), and in addition makes the first step seem small indeed. The approach of lots of small steps has been fruitful for me—but apparently not fruitful enough to ensure that I apply it, or remember to apply it, across everything I find myself resistant to.

Not all plans work once I start on them. I can get stuck here with specific steps where I’m not sure what to do, and usually encounter a lot of trouble trying to just skip past details. For example, in trying to move my old files into Subversion and into a rational structure (and converting them from old formats), I couldn’t seem to simply ignore the questions of licensing and/or metadata, and was somewhat stuck there until I decided on answers to both. They’re not comlpetely false dependencies, but they are cases of the perfect being the enemy of the good, which I think is something I have trouble with—if something’s not going to be ‘perfect’, I get stuck and don’t do it at all.

Again, breaking things down into steps can help here, at least by making apparent the dependencies I’m creating.

Being organized is essentially not having to deal with decisions in as many place along the way to completing a task. Unbelievably (or almost), one of the things that kept me from dealing with email effectively for years was being unable to decide which overdue email(s) to reply to in a limited span of time. Having finally cleared out the ancient email, and having decided on replying to all email every weekday morning, I don’t have that problem, and get just go through my mail fairly quickly. Being organized, or disorganized, in other ways often ends up being about eliminating decisions also—such as the decision of where to look for your keys in the morning if you don’t put them in the same place every night.

A lot of it definitely comes down to committing to eliminating (or “pre-making”) decisions. If I have chores to do and haven’t decided on the order in which to do them, either none of them get done, or the least onerous one gets done. Whereas if I’ve committed to an order, the absence of having to make a decision about which one to do makes things a lot easier.

The only problem there is that the resistance to the most onerous one can get applied to the whole list, and managing that is something I haven’t yet perfected.

So, a list of suggestions for increased organization (which really means increased effectiveness in getting shit done):

* Break tasks down into steps.
* Attach an order to the steps, and ideally put easier tasks at the start, because getting started is hard.
* When stuck, write down why and try to break that specific task into substeps (see Shorter Undistraction Steps).

Another thing I haven’t yet cracked: making sure I remember the tools and techniques I’ve come up with already, such as the undistraction steps, and making sure I keep them in mind for whenever I get stuck—instead of thinking “oh no, I’m stuck, clearly there’s no way out and I’ve never solved this problem before”.

Tags: consciousness, organization, personal

Applying Metadata

Tadhg — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 07:28:17 +0000

As I’ve been continuing the process of moving files into my Subversion repository, I’ve decided on metadata to use with each file.

Metadata is extremely useful, since it’s obviously good to know things about files that aren’t necessarily contained within the files themselves. The first piece of data that comes to mind is date, because after files are moved around a bunch, recreated in different formats, moved in and out of repositories, and so on, they don’t usually still have their original timestamps (unless you’ve been really careful to preserve those, and I wasn’t). So relying on the metadata contained in the filesystem for date (or much else) isn’t a great idea.

Beyond that, there are plenty of other useful bits of metadata. The tagging used on this blog (and in many, many, many other places) is an obvious example: you want to mark things as being in particular piles so that you can find them in those piles later.

As I’ve decided on (X)HTML as my document format, I use the meta element to store most of the metadata (obviously enough). These elements, and their contents, don’t show up in the document when it’s viewed, and are also part of a well-understood standard. And while the meta elements are now mostly ignored by search engines because of abuse, this doesn’t matter to me for my documents as I don’t care about search engine ranking and just want standards-based metadata.

In addition to these, I also use a more structured standard for metadata, the Dublin Core. This is an attempt at a comprehensive metadata standard for more or less all documents, and has wide acceptance online.

Examples of what I’m using are below, but it should be clear that documents need metadata, and that if you’re going to add metadata to documents you should really use a widely-recognized standard, as this will make life easier for you in the long run (and life easier for anyone looking for works you make public). I’m not aware of any alternatives to Dublin Core that seem as well-thought-out, or that look like they’ll have as wide acceptance, so I recommend using that standard.

An example of the standard HTML metadata from one of the files I’ve converted recently:

These are mostly self-explanatory, although “abstract” versus “description” isn’t spectacularly clear. The former is supposed to be longer, and I suspect that my content for it tends to be too short. The last element tells the browser that the file is HTML in text format and that the character set is UTF-8, but is probably redundant as the first two lines of each file (the XML and DOCTYPE declarations) do the same job.

An example of the Dublin Core metadata from the same recently-converted file:

For more information, see the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set 1.1, the DCMI Metadata Terms, and the Usage Guide, particularly the Simple HTML Examples and Qualified HTML Examples sections.

“DC.Title” is the same as the HTML title (and is probably redundant, but I suspect it won’t do any harm). I use “DC.Subject” identically to “keywords”, but in theory it’s supposed to use a controlled vocabulary.

“DC.Format” is supposed to be a valid MIME type, but I’m using text/xhtml anyway because, well, files in plain text with markup are text in my view, and not application data, so I object to using application/xml and/or application/xhtml+xml. text/html is most likely what the browser will read it as… and is also what I claimed it was in the last standard meta element above. So I’m clearly being inconsistent there. text/xml is another possibility, one that I’ll have to look into. There are all kinds of tricky content-negotiation issues here that don’t matter for local files but would matter for consistency if the files were online.

Now I need to add this kind of metadata to my blog entries, too…

Tags: coding, metadata, organization, web-development

Document Conversion

Tadhg — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:08:25 +0000

I spent a significant chunk of the weekend getting files into my Subversion repository. As I was trying to recreate historical versioning from a a bunch of files that weren’t in version control, it took rather a lot of time to do this. I’m rather happy to finally have all my personal stuff under version control. However, there’s a lot of cleaning up left to do.

There are duplicate files, and, sadly, a bunch of corrupt files, so I need to go through every single file in the repository to check it. Time-consuming, but once that’s done, I can rest a lot easier about data integrity.

Another project of mine is to get my files into better formats. I wrote about document formats a while ago, but that was referring primarily to documents I was in the process of editing. For documents that I’m unlikely to edit, (X)HTML seems like a good document format. I like the idea of having all of my stuff in a plain-text format and theoretically available via a browser.

Friends have argued for LaTeX, but I prefer XHTML for now. Naturally, I want valid, semantically-rich, well-structured, clean XHTML, which means that my conversion process isn’t quick. Especially for old Word documents…

(I used to use Word a lot, more or less before I learned better, so tons of my stuff is still in that format. Getting it out of that format and into XHTML will be a good thing.)

RTF files, which are what I still write in, aren’t that much easier to convert to XHTML. Finding acceptable translations from .doc and RTF isn’t that easy, because a lot of them focus (understandably) on trying to preserve formatting details that I simply don’t care about. For the most part, I don’t care what font text was in, or what its margins were. I just care about what that means about that text—was it a heading? A quotation?

So, I’m trying to get from .doc or RTF to clean markup. This will require manual steps, I don’t think I can avoid that. The current process is to open the document in OpenOffice, check to see that it’s readable there, then save it as RTF (if it’s in Word format). Then use AbiWord at the command line: C:\usr\office\abiword\AbiWord\bin\AbiWord.exe --to=html sample_file.rtf to convert the file to XHTML. AbiWord’s XHTML is verbose, but for my purposes is still the best of the converters I’ve found (others might be better if you’re trying to preserve tables or other layout).

At that point, I have an XHTML files that’s full of cruft, and I started out with a series of regular expressions as a jEdit macro (since I have to look at the file to make sure it’s okay anyway, and hence will be opening it in jEdit, I decided I might as well write the cleaning script in jEdit too). I made a lot of regular expressions before realizing that I would need a DOM parser to do it right… so now I’m exploring jTidy with jEdit.

Eventually I’ll have something that converts the files to my liking (or very close), and then I’ll start going through them, a process which is likely to take a while. However, I can get through that working on a few files a day, and that’s not going to be too much hassle. In the end, I’ll have files that are much more easily searched, indexed, diffed, and read.

A bunch of the regular expressions I was using (and might still use) follows, just in case anyone out there might find them interesting.

// Replace useless empty spans
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
//Remove Style Element
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Remove AWML:Style attributes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" awml:style=\"[^\"]*\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Remove left-to-right directional attributes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" dir=\"ltr\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Replace inline text-style blockquotes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" style=\"[^\"]*margin-left:[1-9]*[^\"]*\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" class=\"blockquote\"");
// Replace inline text-align styles with classes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" style=\"[^\"]*text-align:([a-z]+)[^\"]*\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" class=\"align-$1\"");
// Remove body_text classes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" class=\"body_text\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Remove elements containing only breaks
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("<[^>]*>
]*>(\n)?");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Replace multiple class attributes with one, space-delimited
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("class=\"([^\"]*)\" class=\"([^\"]*)\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("class=\"$1 $2\"");
// Remove align-left (it should be the default)
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" class=\"align-left\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("class=\"([^\"]*\")");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("\"class=\\\"\" + _1.replaceAll(\" align-left\\\"\", \"\\\"\")");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" class=\"([^ ]*) align-left\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" class=\"$1\"");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" class=\"align-left ([^\"]*)\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" class=\"$1\"");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("class=\"([^\"]*\")");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("\"class=\\\"\" + _1.replaceAll(\" align-left \", \" \")");
// Add extra line break after paragraphs
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("\n");
// Remove empty paragraphs
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("]*>[ ]*\n");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Replace blockquotes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// Remove empty spans
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("]*>");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("]*>[ ]*");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" ");
// Remove xml:lang and lang
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" xml:lang=\"[^\"]*\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" lang=\"[^\"]*\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Remove font styling
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString(" style=\"font-size:[0-9]*pt[;]*\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Remove spans with font styling
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// Remove useless spans
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// Remove font styling
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("font-size:[0-9]*pt");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("");
// Replace italics
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// Replace underline
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// Replace bold
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// re-do footnotes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([0-9]+)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$3");
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("([0-9]+)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$3");
// Make headings
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("]*)>([^<]*)");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$4");
// Remove useless space after p tags
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("(]*>)[ \t]*");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("$1");
// Replace XML-style ids
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("id=\"__([^_]*)__\"");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("id=\"$1\"");
// Replace extra amp; for em dashes
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("—");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("—");
// Remove empty lines
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("^(\\s*\\n){2,}");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString("\n");

Tags: coding, organization, personal, web-development

Backups

Tadhg — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:55:47 +0000

For years I’ve had no coherent backup strategy. For someone who does so much on computers, that’s rather insane. It’s been a project of mine to have a comprehensive and regularly-executed backup plan for about a decade. I’m not quite there, but I think that it’s finally within my grasp…

The first question is: “what do I want to back up?”, and the second question is “what is the ideal post-data-meltdown scenario?”.

Ideally, of course, I want everything backed up, and I want to resume immediately after any loss of data/hardware. More realistically, however, I want to make completely sure that I can recover the following:

* personal files (writing, notes, contact information, non-email correspondence, etc.)
* email (yes, it deserves a category of its own)
* application configuration
* web development code and assets
* other code
* databases
* graphics
* photos
* work files

I’m not as concerned about music. Perhaps I should be, but it seems like it’s a) replaceable, b) awkward to back up due to size, c) already backed up by physical media.

Naturally, I don’t just want backups, I want history. Version Control, specifically Subversion, gives me this. It also gives me something else that makes backing up far easier: centralization. If I use Subversion for everything, it follows that there’s a central place for everything to go. My move to Subversion is a key piece of why a backup strategy seems close at hand.

One tool that’s proven incredibly useful on Windows in my move to using Subversion for everything is linkd.exe, which is a rough analog of the Unix ln command, although it works only on directories. It allows you to create a new “quasi-directory” that points to another directory, and acts like it. So, if your checked-out Subversion stuff is in C:\Documents and Settings\username\someotherdirectory\subversion, you can use
linkd c:\svn C:\Documents and Settings\username\someotherdirectory\subversion
and thereafter refer to c:\svn to get there. This also means that you can “trick” applications that are finicky about where their configuration files go into being fine with those files living in your Subversion sandbox.

So, after centralization, the following files (will) comfortably live in Subversion as part of my everyday practice:

* personal files (writing, notes, contact information, non-email correspondence, etc.)
* application configuration (after some linkd.exe setup)
* web development code and assets
* other code
* graphics
* work files

It doesn’t make sense to put email into Subversion, because I rarely go back to edit prior email, so it doesn’t really need version control per se. My mail system (using Maildir rather than mbox) can be effectively backed up using rsync, which essentially does “smart copy”—copying files to a remote location, but only doing an actual copy per file if that file is new or has been changed since the last write. So the first time I back up my thousands of emails, it’ll copy all of them, but the second time it’ll only copy the new files.

My databases (primarily for this blog and sfmagic.org) aren’t really files that I work on, so they won’t get caught in the centralization net. Instead, I’ll have to write scripts to export them, and then add the results of these exports to Subversion. Version control does make sense for these, since it might be very important to be able to roll back to specific revisions. So these will go into Subversion via automated processes.

While I put my graphics work in Subversion, photos are different. They’re rather large, and they don’t tend to change—like email, they’re better suited to additive storage, and rsync. If I work on photos, I move them into graphics, where they will be put into version control. But for the vast majority of them, that would be overkill.

So the areas split into:

* Subversion daily practice (personal, web development, other code, graphics, work, application configuration)
* Subversion via automated export/backup (databases)
* rsync (email, photos)

So what about the actual backup part? Where does this stuff get backed up to?

For Subversion, I’m going to keep a second copy of my repositories on a second server on my local network. In addition, every machine on my network will have the latest version checked out daily. So two copies of the total history, and multiple copies of the latest version

For rsync, I’ll copy everything to a second server.

That takes care of local “soft” backups. Next is remote “soft” backups. These will go to unworkable, a server in Ireland run by my brother and some of his friends that I’ve paid for space on, and hopefully to Seth’s server (we’ve talked about a reciprocal backup deal for a while). The remote backups are trickier, because I want to both encrypt and compress most of the stuff before backing it up, making straight rsync less useful, and because disk space and bandwidth concerns make filesize more of an issue. The process I’d like to follow is this:

* Keep 8 weeks’ worth of weekly backups
* Every week, test the 7-week-old backup for data integrity
* If it fails, raise the alarm…
* If it passes, delete the 8-week-old backup
* Pass or fail, copy the newest backup over

The main problem here is that “testing for data integrity” might be difficult and/or time-consuming. I suspect that I’ll be able to automate it at least to some degree. If I use straight rsync for the photos, this will be easier, since grabbing the stuff to my local network before performing operations on it becomes easier.

Lastly, I haven’t addressed backups written to storage media, like DVD. I’ll plan for that too, because there are data-corruption scenarios in which the local stuff gets tainted somehow and corrupts the off-site backups over time. But writing to DVD will be easier once I have all of the rest of this in place.

That’s the plan. I think I’ll have most of it in place by the end of March, and the remote aspects by the end of April. And that will be one less nagging worry to carry around.

Tags: organization, personal, software, tech

Subversion/Organization

Tadhg — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 07:52:25 +0000

I’m gradually moving more and more of my personal files into my various Subversion repositories, and figuring out how to organize those repositories. I highly recommend Subversion (or some form of version control, but Subversion is free (and libre)) to anyone who uses computers to create documents that they consider important.

I haven’t set up Subversion on Windows, but it looks like it would be fairly easy, so for those of you without access to servers running it, I suggest having a look at running a local Subversion repository. (OS X users might be able to get away with waiting for Time Machine—but you might also prefer to have full control using Subversion.)

I wrote an introduction to version control last August. Reading over that introduction, though, I’m not sure I made clear how easy it is to use, or how much of a bonus it is. Again, if you have documents you care about on your computer, you should use version control. If you’re on Windows, get Subversion, and get TortoiseSVN, which plugs right into Windows Explorer and makes using Subversion really easy.

Anyway, back in that earlier post I wrote about the categories of repository I had created:

* code
* config
* graphics
* misc
* personal
* web
* writing

I’ve since reversed my decision and put writing back into personal. I’ve been on the fence, and found this easier because it didn’t then require having “personal” writing and “public” writing in separate repositories. I can see myself changing my mind again on this in the future.

In any case, I’ve come up with a structure for that personal repository, which was harder than I anticipated. These are its primary directories:

academic
contact
correspondence
culture
financial
games
misc
notes
writing

This is pruned down from rather more, and seems about the right amount.

academic covers the relatively meager materials I have from my academic life. I didn’t keep digital notes until quite late in my academic career—partly because I didn’t take that many notes at all—so it’s weighted to my M.Sc. and M.A. It’s divided into subdirectories according to course.

contact covers contact information. This could perhaps be a subdirectory of notes, but seems important enough to warrant being at the top level.

correspondence covers letters, primarily. Not email, because email is outside of my version control system (although I’m conflicted about that at the moment). Since I don’t really write letter anymore, this is primarily historical, rather than being something I’ll be updating in future. On the other hand, it’ll be updated automatically if I put my IM logs in it.

culture covers lots of things, mainly writing I have that isn’t my own, and records of what cultural experiences I’ve had (primarily lists of books read and films seen).

financial should be self-explanatory.

games covers my gaming life. There’s some tension here between it and writing (should my MTG reports be in writing, or in here?). Also, this could clearly go in culture, but is probably important enough in my life to be at the top level.

misc because no organizational system is complete without a category for miscellany. Includes random stuff written by others that ended up going via my machines (e.g for typing), like Helen’s first-year German essay from 1994, The origins, manifestations and character of xenophobia in modern Germany, and the responses it has provoked in German society.

notes covers what you’d expect. Lists, schedules, flight numbers, party times/addresses. Chaotic indeed, because I didn’t have TiddlyWiki until last year.

writing covers both personal and public writing, divided according to form (novel, poetry, etc.) and/or purpose/medium (blog, morning pages, etc.).

I hope some reader gets inspired by this to use version control, and/or derives some organizational insight from how I’ve organized my stuff. For no particular reason, here’s a random file I came across while sorting my archives:

Questioner: Mollen Commission, appointed my Mayor Dinkins (New York) to investigate police corruption.
Answerer: Bernard Cawley, ex-police officer now serving three years to life.

Q: While you were at the 48th Precinct, Mr Cawley, did you develop a nickname?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: What was that nickname?
A: The Mechanic
Q: And why were you given this nickname?
A: Because I used to tune people up.
Q: What do you mean tune people up?
A: It’s the police word for beating up people.
Q: Did you beat up people who you arrested?
A: No, we just beat people up in general…
—Irish Times, 02/10/1993

Tags: organization, personal, software, tech, version-control

Reminder Plugin for TiddlyWiki

Tadhg — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:35:27 +0000

I created a very hacky plugin for TiddlyWiki that will place a node titled with the date at the top of the page if you open the page on that date. In other words, you can create a node with a specific date, and when you open TiddlyWiki on that date you’ll see that node.

On days when you have nodes with that date, it will look something like this:

It’s a primitive reminder plugin. I think there’s a more sophisticated reminder plugin out there, but I wanted to get something that did exactly what I wanted.

It’s hacky for a few reasons. The first is that you can’t just add the plugin to your TiddlyWiki and tag it with “systemConfig” and save and reload the page (which is the standard method for installing plugins). With this, you have to do all that and then also add the plugin node to your DefaultTiddlers. Once you do that, however, the hackiness is then invisible to the end user, who won’t see anything other than the reminder nodes when they’re supposed to show up.

Behind the scenes, though, when you open TiddlyWiki, it will open the plugin node and then hide it immediately. I couldn’t see another way to do it while keeping the code inside a plugin (it started out as raw JavaScript in the TiddlyWiki file, but that was a bad approach).

When you load plugin code in TiddlyWiki, it executes before the page is fully finished loading. So if you try to display a node at that point, you’ll get an error. There might be hooks you can add to run things when everything else is done, but I couldn’t find them.

The way most plugins seem to work is to assign a macro handler, which can then be invoked with <> in a node—that is, when a node with that syntax in it is loaded, or when you click on something with that syntax, the handler is called and the macro is run.

So I needed to open a node with that syntax in it every time the page started. TiddlyWiki has a DefaultTiddlers node that lets you do this. But I didn’t want to actually open a node that contained nothing but that code, and I didn’t want to stuff that code into one of the nodes I open by default, either.

I thought I’d put it in the MainMenu node, which is always open in my setup. However, that’s a systemConfig node, and apparently they’re treated differently, because it didn’t work.

I then decided I’d open a node in DefaultTiddlers and have it hide itself when it opened. That’s what I’ve done, and that’s why a reference to the plugin has to be in DefaultTiddlers for it to work.

Installing it should take about three minutes, using the following steps:

* Copy the code below into a new node (tiddler—I don’t like that name, so I call them nodes. But all the docs call them tiddlers).
* Name the node HackyCalendarReminderPlugin.
* Tag it with systemConfig.
* Put a reference to HackyCalendarReminderPlugin into your DefaultTiddlers node.
* Save your TiddlyWiki.
* Reload your TiddlyWiki.

That should do it! To test it, create a node titled with the current date (must be in the DD/MM/YYYY format!), save your TiddlyWiki, and reload it. The new node should be at the top.

I use it with CalendarPlugin, which you may find to your liking.

The contents of the plugin:

/***
<>
|''Name:''|HackyCalendarReminder|
|''Description:''|Puts Tiddlers named with the current date on top of the TiddlyWiki at load time|
|''Version:''|1.0|
|''Date:''|23:23 Thu 01/02/2007|
|''Source:''||
|''Author:''|Tadhg O'Higgins http://www.tadhg.com/|
|''License:''|[[BSD open source license]]|
|''~CoreVersion:''|2.1.0|
|''Browser:''|Firefox 1.0.4+; Firefox 1.5; InternetExplorer 6.0|
|''Notes:''|This is rather Hacky. To make it work, you have to include HackyCalendarReminderPlugin in your DefaultTiddlers.|
|~|It will close itself the first time it's opened, making the assumption that you don't really want the plugin open, just the reminder. After that, you can open it normally.|
|~|It has this weird behavior because if you open a tiddler while loadPlugins() is running, you haven't loaded enough of the structure to put the tiddler somewhere, and you'll get an error.|
|~|Therefore you need to run a macro from a tiddler, and that only happens when you open a tiddler, and systemTiddlers apparently don't count for this.|
|~|So I had to open a tiddler and then make it close itself. Might as well put that in the plugin itself.|
***/

//{{{

config.macros.hackyCalendarReminder = {};
config.macros.hackyCalendarReminder.handler = function(place, marcoName, params) {
    var todayDate = new Date;
    var todayNum = todayDate.getDate();
    var monthString = (todayDate.getMonth() +1);
    if (monthString < 10) {
        monthString = "0" + monthString;
    }
    if (todayNum < 10) {
        todayNum = "0" + todayNum;
    }
    var dateString = todayNum + "/" + monthString + "/" + todayDate.getFullYear();
    if (store.tiddlerExists(dateString)) {
        story.displayTiddler("top", dateString,1);
    }
    if (typeof alreadyClosed=="undefined") {
        story.closeTiddler("HackyCalendarReminderPlugin", false, false);
        alreadyClosed = true;
   }
};
//}}}

Tags: coding, JavaScript, organization, software

Organizational State

Tadhg — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:15:40 +0000

I’m on a heavy organizational kick right now, especially concerning digital information. I’m using lists more, and I’m digging up archived stuff from way back because I want to put it into a rational and unified structure.

As I wrote the other day, I’m really liking TiddlyWiki. It’s rather amazing to me how useful it is, and how much of a kick I get out of using it.

I started out using it primarily for list management. I previously used text files for this, but they don’t have hypertext as a feature, and that’s unbelievably useful. So now I use it for list management and for the storage of notes that I take while doing the things on the lists. This solves the niggling problem I’ve always had about where to put information like that—if I figure out some trick to make something work, I want to record it, but I don’t want to have to invent (or use) some heavyweight directory structure for doing so. At the same time, I don’t want to just jam it into a “miscellaneous” section. Furthermore, it’s nice to have it connected to whatever task I was doing when I ran across it. TiddlyWiki solves all of these problems.

TiddlyWiki is aided immensely by Subversion, which I’m using more and more often. If I didn’t have version control, and easy version control at that, I’d be worried about storing everything in TiddlyWiki, and that worry would slow me down. As it is, Subversion makes me feel fairly secure about experimenting with TiddlyWiki’s features while not having to worry about data loss. At the same time, TiddlyWiki’s list management help is making me move stuff into Subversion faster.

I have a set of TiddlyWiki files. The main one contains the lists of what I want to be doing, including some work lists. The major nodes are:

* lists “A” and “B”, which are work and not-work;
* Getting Things Done-inspired lists of things to do in specific contexts “@Home”, “@Errand”, and “@Email”;
* lists of potential and completed tasks;
* steps to get myself to make decisions about something, to create something, and to focus;
* a list of ideas for blog posts;
* a list of links to the other TiddlyWiki files I use;
* and finally, an element which simply has in it a short description of what my current task is. This last is a new development, and seems to be helping a lot in terms of focus.

I also added a calendar plugin, but haven’t used it much yet.

Easy hypertext/information management and easy version control. I recommend them to everyone.

However, being in this organizational frame of mind seems to make me less creatively driven. I haven’t done creative writing since last week (I’m not counting the editing of the novel, just because it’s not quite the kind of creative activity I have in mind). Partly it’s a question of time, in that I’m eagerly spending the time working on organizing stuff instead of writing. I should probably do my best to focus on the writing for the next couple of weeks, though, in order to finish the second draft of the novel.

I need to use the creativity steps I came up with last month to alter this bias—but the problem is that I’m enjoying the organization right now. I need to fight past that to get back to the editing, and working on new stories.

Tags: consciousness, organization, personal, psychology, web-development

tadhg.com » organization

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