endperform.org

Last night it occurred to me that my online life is in a bit of a disarray, still. The last time I spoke about this, I had planned on moving to username per web service. Unfortunately the username I want is taken on some, and not on others, so that of course leaves me in a bit of a bind. I think the easiest (and least painful) thing to do is just keep the accounts I have and create a contact page on my site, so everyone can find me easier.

Now, as far as organization in general goes, I’m still trying to find a balance of accessibility vs. usability. Right now at work I have a wiki set up on my box, which works pretty Ok. The problem is when I work remotely, sometimes the connection can slow to a crawl, which in turn slows me down when I’m trying to look at something. I was looking at planner mode for Emacs, but for one reason or another there are some issues. Someone previously mentioned org-mode, but I’m not a huge fan of the outline format. My other options are just straight up text, Muse mode for Emacs, or else running lynx and trying to navigate my wiki that way.

My reminders setup is working well. For those who don’t know, I’m using Remind + Wryd, which is lightweight and pretty simple to use. I’m also running a cron job to create a popup prior to me logging in for the day so I know at a glance what I have to look forward to. It works nicely, and stays out of the way.

I had a problem at work. I get scheduled for things such as installs / upgrades and general support, but couldn’t find a decent reminder app that I liked in either Gnome, KDE or XFCE. That’s where Remind, and the curses-based frontend Wyrd come into play. Remind in and of it self isn’t the greatest when it comes to being a user-friendly application, but slapping Wyrd in front of it makes it a bit more bearable. You still need to know the basic Remind syntax, but it’s not bad. The bonus of this setup is that I can look at it remotely with ease through an SSH session, which is a big deal to me as sometimes I work from home.

Remind syntax is pretty basic, and rather than get into a full-blown tutorial right now, I’ll share a basic reminder entry from my .reminders file:

REM Nov 14 2008 AT 17:00 DURATION 1:00 MSG Timesheet

On November 14 at 5 PM, I need my timesheet done. Duration is one hour, and the message shown is Timesheet. If I look at this through Wyrd, I’ll see 17:00-18:00 blocked out on my calendar. Pretty nifty. So, where does cron fit in to this solution? Well, using cron and GXmessage, I can display a list of upcoming reminders. Here’s the line from my box at work:

30 07  *  *  *  export DISPLAY=:0.0 && remind -q -g ~/.reminders | gxmessage -title "Reminders" -file -

At 07:30am every morning, my machine generates a list of reminders for the day in a dialog box waiting for me when I unlock my machine. Eventually I may just send the reminders to my email, but for now the dialog box gets my attention much easier. The best part about this setup is that it will work under any desktop environment you have, it’s text/curses based and not heavy on resources at all. Other options I had evaluated, and why I didn’t choose them:

Sunbird/Lightning
At one point I was using Lightning and Thunderbird for email, but it got too heavy, and I couldn’t easily read email remotely with Thunderbird. Sunbird is just the standalone calendar app, but again, not easily checked remotely.

Google Calendar
I like to stay on the cautious side and not keep anything work related on servers outside of the realm of my workplace. While it would work OK, I don’t think it would sit well with the higher-ups. This also goes for any to-do type applications online.

Links

• Remind
• Wyrd

At work, I’m still (even after a year) experimenting with a “perfect setup” to keep track of my tasks, emails and other work-related things. My biggest thing is making sure all of my information is (relatively) easy to access from a command line since from time to time I have to log in from home. Of course, I could go through the trouble of setting up something like FreeNX or the like, but I’d rather not have to deal with that. So right now, I’m playing with the following:

• Mutt – email
• Remind/Wyrd – reminders / calendar
• Todo.txt – Task list

I’m finding this setup is not quite effective as I like. I have to flip between three different terms in a screen session, need to remember keyboard shortcuts for things, and then also hope I have everything in either Remind or my todo.txt file. This setup is working for the most part, but it’s slowing me down a bit. For a while, I was using Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin for tasks and email, but I can’t really access that outside of the office without X forwarding, which I’ve found is painfully slow. There’s always the option of just reconfiguring mutt to point at Thunderbird’s mail directory, but that doesn’t help me much as far as tasks go.

I’m also trying to figure out the best way to organize notes. The setup for that is rather overkill: Mediawiki. I’ve got Apache, PHP and Mysql running on my workstation, and the wiki is installed. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems a little too overkill. I had tried Tiddlywiki, but that wasn’t robust enough for me. I think I’m going to do a bit more research and see if I can find a decent balance, perhaps something not dependent on a database. I’ve got a lot of information, but it’s pretty much tossed in the wiki without too much categorization. I’m thinking something with tagging would work best.