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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!.

markdown

Published April 17, 2005 by lievenlb

The nerd
implimentation of GTD is based on plain text-files, or more
precisely

– all lists in text files, kept in directory
“~/Documents/txt”
– all documents maintained in Markdown for easy
HTML conversion

I’ve been writing HTML-code since the times
that the best browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so I’ve never paid too much attention to
Markdown
before. Here is its main purpose

Markdown is a
text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to
write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then
convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or >HTML). Thus, Markdown is
two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool,
written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to
HTML.

An example of Markdown-code followed by its
HTML-output can be seen at the BlueCloth website and I have
to agree that the Markdown text is very legible. I’ve been playing
around with Markdown for a couple of days now (in fact this post is
written in Markdown as WordPress has a Markdown-plugin) and have found a
few uses for it (more on this another time). Essential sites to visit if
you want to learn some Markdown are : its basic
syntax and in the rare cases that this doesn’t do what you want to
do there is also a full
syntax page.

If you want to use Markdown to write your
HTML-pages you need to be able to convert Markdown to HTML (and
conversely although the uses for this are not immediately clear, but
there are plenty of good reasons!). That’s what the
Markdown.pl Perl-script does for you (one way) and the
Python-script html2text.py (to be found here) (the other
way).

To get them working using BBedit
all you have to do is to put them in the _BBEdit Support/Unix
Support/Unix Filters_ directory (to be found in the BBEdit-folder in
_/Applications_). Then, if you have written a Markdown-text, do a
_Select All_ go to the !# menu and look for
Markdown.pl under _Unix Filters_ and voila, you have valid XHTML
(the other direction is similar).

This is a bit of work and one
would like to do both operations in nearly all Applications using the
_Services Menu_ (in fact, until a few weeks ago I had no clue
that there was something as useful as this menu hidden under the
program-name-menu of any Cocoa-program!). This is best done using HumaneText.service. The
installation is really as siimple as they say on this page (although it
took me a couple of trials before it worked, and I use the Services-menu
rather than the keystroke-shortcuts).

HumaneText works perfectly with TextEdit,
SubEthaEdit and (probably more important to mathematicians) TeXShop and
iTeXMac (the two most common front-ends for (La)TeX under OS X). A
noteworthy exception is BBEdit (hence the above laborious work-around).
Sometimes there are problems with punctuation in the conversion but you
can get around this using SmartyPants.

GMD

Published April 14, 2005 by lievenlb

I’m always
extremely slow to pick up a trend (let alone a hype), in mathematics as
well as in real life. It took me over a year to know of the existence of
_blogs_ and to realize that they were a much easier way to
maintain a webpage than manually modifying HTML-pages. But, eventually I
sometimes get there, usually with the help of the mac-dev-center. So, once again,
I read their gettings things done with your mac article long after it was
posted and completely unaware of the Getting Things Done (or GTD) hype.

At first, it just
sounds as one of those boring managament-nonsense-peptalk things (and
probably that is precisely what it generically is). Or what do you think
about the following resume from Getting
started with ‘Getting things done’ :

identify all the
stuff in your life that isn√ït in the right place (close all open
loops)
get rid of the stuff that isn√ït yours or you don√ït
need right now
create a right place that you trust and that
supports your working style and values
put your stuff in the
right place, consistently
do your stuff in a way that honors
your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
iterate and refactor mercilessly

But in fact there is
also some interesting material around at the 43 folders website which bring this
management-talk closer to home such as the How does a
nerd hack GTD? post.

Also of interest are his findings after
a year working with the GTD setup. These are contained in three posts :
A Year
of Getting Things Done: Part 1, The Good Stuff, followed by A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 2, The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At to
end with A Year of
Getting Things Done: Part 3, The Future of GTD?. If these three
postings don’t get you intrigued, nothing else will.

So, is
there something like _GMD : Getting Mathematics Done_? Clearly, I
don’t mean getting theorems proved, that’s a thing of a few seconds of
inspiration and months to fill in the gaps. But, perhaps all this GTD
and the software mentioned can be of some help to manage the
everyday-workflow of mathematicians, such as checking the arXiv and the
web, maintaining an email-, pdf- and BiBTeX-database, drafting papers,
books and courses etc.

In the next few weeks I’ll try out some
of the tricks. Probably another way to state this is the question “which
Apps will survive Tiger?” Now that it is official that Tiger (that is, Mac
10.4 to non-apple eaters) will be released by the end of the month it is
time to rethink which of the tools I really like to keep and which is
just useless garbage I picked up along the road. For example, around
this time last year I had a Perl
phase and bought half a meter or so of O’Reilly Perl-books. And yes
I did write a few simple scripts, some useful such as my own arXiv RSS-feeds,
some not so useful as a web-spider I wrote to check on changes in the
list of hamepages of people working in non-commutative algebra and
geometry. A year later I realize I’ll never become a Perl Monk. So from now on I want to
make my computer-life as useful and easy as possible, relying on wizards
to provide me with cool software to use and help me enjoy mathematics
even more. I’ll keep you posted how my GMD-adventure goes.

Tag: mac

tracks

markdown

GMD