lievenlb – Page 206 – neverendingbooks

tracks

Published April 27, 2005 by lievenlb

Perhaps I
can surprise you by admitting that I’ve spend a lot of time lately
getting through Getting Things Done:
The Art of Stress-free Productivity, 250+ pages of management
babble. Probably you will even be shocked when I tell you that this book
is published in the same series as _Body Talk at Work_,
_Corporate Charisma_, _More Time Less Stress_, _Mrs
Moneypenny : Survival in the City_ and more of these. All in all, it
wasn’t so bad. It is a bit pompous at times, could be 50% condensed but
I wanted to find out first hand what all the GTD hype
was about (see this post for
some of the more interesting links).

I’m not looking for a miracle
method to become more productive or focussed (although I wouldn’t mind
either at the moment). No, my main motivation is simply : I want to be
able to sleep better!

This requires some explaining. The last
couple of months, I regularly wake up in the middle of the night and as
there are plenty of things on my mind, I start brooding on them and,
more often than not, loose a couple of hours sleep/night. And these
quickly add up! Now, the basis of the GTD-mantra is getting all the
_stuff_ out of your head to reach the _mind like water_
state whatever that means. And I can see some sense in putting all your
current projects and worries somewhere on paper or computer, setting up
a system that forces you to read through these lists at regular
intervals, plan _next actions_ and update the lists accordingly.
If you trust this system it just may free your mind from all the
stuff!

At a later stage I may end up setting up such a system
following the suggestions of the
DevonThink Forum or using
VoodooPad but at the moment all I want is to offload my mind as
quickly as possible to a GTD-able database.

Fortunately, But She’s a Girl has
compiled such a system : Tracks, a GTD Web
Application. At first I did the mistake following the generic
install instructions and quickly got lost in downloading packages from
SourceForge etc. until I found that there was an easy Mac OS X
Install Page. There is a Ruby and Rails .dmg
package but first you have to install Tcl/Tk Aqua. After these
easy steps, you have to follow the install man page which involves setting up a MySQL database and
filling it with the required tables (I have been using
phpmyadmin for this, but discovered in the process CocoaMySQL which makes all
this even simpler). Finally, you have to get to prompt-level and type
the magic commands

_cd Sites/tracks_

_ruby
script/server “”environment=production” port=3030_

(note
to self : make this a StartUp item as otherwise you have to redo this
step whenever you want to add material). Then,
_http://127.0.0.1:3030/login/signup_ gets you to a nice
webpage-interface and you can start to offload your mind of
_stuff_. I’ll report later whether it did have any effect at
all!.

TheLibrary

Published April 25, 2005 by lievenlb

Some
people objected to the set-up of TheLibrary because it was serving only one-page at a
time. They’d rather have a longer download-time if they can then
browse through the paper/book, download it and print if they decide to
do so.

Fine! Today I spend some hours refilling TheLibrary with
texts. As before you are able to search any document for specific words
(as explained in elsewhere )
and click on any section or page to view the wanted material in your
browser (assuming you have the proper plugin installed). This time I
used pdfscreen to make the notes more readable on your
screen.

If you prefer, you can download the text, safe it on
your hard-disk and browse at leasure. Whereas these versions are
intended to be read from screen, you can also print them if you have to
at 150dpi. In the next couple of weeks I hope to add some material :
older and undergraduate courses and I’ll add a _papers_ section
where I’ll put all my papers of which I can recover a TeX-file. For
starters, I included the revision of the Qurves and quivers
paper in the courses-folder.

markdown2use

Published April 19, 2005 by lievenlb

Here some
possible uses of Markdown and the
HumaneText Service.
As an example, let us take the
noncommutative geometry & algebra page maintained by Paul Smith.

If you copy the source of this page to BBEdit and use the
html2txt.py script in the #! menu (see
this post)
you get a nicely readable Markdown-file which strips the page of all its
layout and which is easy to modify, for example to include author and
URL at the start, remove some additional empty lines, make relative URLs
absolute and so on.

Applying the Markdown.pl
script to it one gets a nice RetroCool version
of the page. For starters, this gives a way to make your own collection
of websites you like in a uniform layout (of course, later on you can
add your own CSS to them).

More important is that the
Markdown-version (see here for
the text-file) is extremely readable and allows to _mine_ all
links easily (as you can see all links contained in the HTML-page are
referenced together at the end of the file). So, this is a quick way to
collect homepage- and email-links from link-pages.

Btw. there
are different ways to include links in a markdown text, for example I
like to write it immediately after the reference, so doing a Markdown.pl
followed by a html2txt.py doesn’t have to reproduce your original file
and fortunately you will always end up with a file having all links
referenced at the end. So, this procedure allows you to have uniformity
in a collection of markdown-files.

Equally important for me (for
later use in an intelligent database using DevonThink ) is that the Markdown file is the best way to safe the
HTML file in the database (as a RTF file) while maintaining readability
(which is important when DevonThink returns snippets of
information).

Author: lievenlb

tracks

TheLibrary

markdown2use