Present Perfect

While doing various tasks around the house and ripping CD's I have from bands playing at next week's Pukkelpop festival I've been tackling some simple moap bugs so I can do a next release.  I've reworked a patch Tim sent in (a project starts getting fun when outside people start contributing and send in patches, making it heaps more easy for you to actually get stuff done if you just have to review and adapt patches), fixed another one of the bugs he filed, and fixed a bug for Philippe who seems to think French is a perfectly fine language to run a computer in.

In fact, for the first time I've picked a milestone date for 0.2.6 so I can coax other contributors like Marc-André Lureau into getting their patches ready for this Saturday.  He has been doing work on the git and git-svn VCS backends.

In related news, I talked to Martyn Russell (who works on maintainer.py) while at GUADEC to see if we could possibly merge our efforts.  I was specifically avoiding copying any functionality maintainer.py provides until I had some time to discuss this idea with Martyn himself.  I don't want to jump the gun but  we agreed on merging the projects and should now figure out the practical details.

On my side, it probably involves changing the logo and moving SVN and Trac to Freedesktop, a more neutral ground.  This means I have to double-check with people like Daniel who have an aversity to SVN, but hey, I should be able to be FDO's Subversion bitch right ?

After that, it's a matter of bringing all of maintainer.py's functionality under, for example, a "gnome" subcommand.

I've also had some interest expressed from people hacking on Gentoo, Debian, KDE, and Nokia to integrate some stuff into moap, but we'll see how that pans out when we get there.  It should in fact be easy to extend moap by dropping in additional command classes, so I guess I should make that possible in the future.

In related news, my Practical Project Maintenance talk at GUADEC went fine for a first version, and seemed to be well received.  I'll write more about that in my GUADEC wrapup, but for the people who asked me for the slides - I am going through Flickr withdrawal, I have all the links from where I got the photos and should now figure out if I can actually use them in the presentation or ask for permission if not.  I'll get going on that this week.

While doing various tasks around the house and ripping CD's I have from bands playing at next week's Pukkelpop festival I've been tackling some simple moap bugs so I can...

Greetings fellow Thinkpad fans in Europe,

please share with me how you recently were able to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. Did you order from the US site directly ? Did you find a local dealer ?

I am getting thoroughly confused by the Spanish dealers that carry Lenovo. They keep coming up with models that don't match my relatively simple request (T series, no widescreen, 14 inch, Intel graphics chip) or trying to sell me a Dell. They claim that Lenovo Spain can only get widescreen and no faster CPU than 2 GHz.

The site is getting a bit confusing for me too - are there actually any non-widescreen T61 laptops ? I would think that if it says WXGA it would be widescreen, and normal if it's XGA, but I can't be sure.

Really Lenovo, why can't I just directly customize on your site a laptop I want, and your organization takes care of shipping it through one of your dealers so I can just drop by and collect the damn thing ? It's like you don't even want money.

Greetings fellow Thinkpad fans in Europe, please share with me how you recently were able to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. Did you order from the US site directly ? Did...

It feels good to get on top of my TODO list and take back control over my life one task at a time.  I finally got round to finding out what Getting Things Done is all about (stop yawning in the back there) and it seems to help me much more than the ad-hoc methods I've used before.

I think the reason  it works so well for me up to now is that the book actually explains *why* simple time   management systems fail.  The book takes the time to explain this and this resonates with my experience.  For example, lots of tasks can indeed be done within 2 minutes.

Keeping your INBOX completely clean and moving things out that are in fact action items to do later is a lot better than having them sit around in your INBOX  (broken window theory at play again).  And the idea of contexts (I feel tired, give me some phone calls to make) is so natural I wonder why I didn't think of it myself.

Getting tasks outside of your head and into a system helps wonders to sleep at night and not lie awake thinking about stuff to do.  I should put a notebook by my bed though.

It was going well before my two week tour of Europe (task on my todo list to BlogAboutIt), achieving zero mail INBOXes at the end of the day.  And it only took me three days to catch up again after two weeks of only skimming them.  A great feeling to be able to go to bed with all your open loops captured.

God, I'm prodporning.

The only thing I'm trying to avoid really hard is rewriting this python-based GTD tool I'm using, and slapping a GUI on top of it.  Really, I don't need more tasks.

It feels good to get on top of my TODO list and take back control over my life one task at a time.  I finally got round to finding out...

One of my favourite free software-related ones is skipping through the freshmeat RSS feed.

"GNU Moe is a powerful, 8-bit clean text editor for ISO-8859 and ASCII character encodings."

Is there anyone left who even wants to use an editor that doesn't do UTF-8 ?

One of my favourite free software-related ones is skipping through the freshmeat RSS feed. "GNU Moe is a powerful, 8-bit clean text editor for ISO-8859 and ASCII character encodings." Is...

There are days in this city when the work is hard and the nights are easy.  I was planning to get to bed before twelve every day of the week and didn't manage a single time yet.

Tuesday we had a drink for our Office Manager going away, and we ended up at the Risolis tapas bar for excellent tapas and two bottles of wine.

Wednesday the plan was to go eat the excellent rabbit at Can Margarit but that plan fell through and I ended up at El Rey De La Gamba.  Some TODO dreams are of the kind where you cherish the idea of possibly doing something more than you would actually having done it.  Taking holiday off of work and go work at El Rey for a week just to get one of those awesomely awful T-shirts they have is one of those.

Thursday a birthday party at bar Centric.  Fun people all around, discussing work and life stuff, having home made tapas and some drinks.

And all the while at night the air feels pregnant and the temperature's tender.  It is just bearable in the sleeping department, much more so than last year.

There are days in this city when the work is hard and the nights are easy.  I was planning to get to bed before twelve every day of the week...