Sometimes progress on a project for me consists of a few short bursts of activity in between stretches of waiting for some long-running thing to complete so I can figure out what I need to do with it next.
Because I always have more than one project going, I don’t actually wait much. I just switch workspaces and try to make progress on the next thing. If I can’t make progress on anything immediate, I’ll end up checking email or looking up something for a side project.
This kind of multitasking is inefficient, but inevitable when I might have to wait for 20 minutes or more for a compute job or a compile to finish.
The problem with this approach is that the things I’m waiting for often finish while I’m off doing something else, and if I get too involved, the low-priority research or emails will eat up my day while the high-priority work sits waiting for me.
I’ve attacked this problem in the past when using OS X with growl, but I can’t call growlnotify from remote systems. However, I just found dzen for X Windows, a lightweight notification display utility that compiles easily on every system I’ve tried, and works remotely with ssh X forwarding.
I wrote a simple script called go, which just executes its arguments and runs dzen when it’s done. Now I type (for example) go make and I can switch over to something else, confident that I’ll see a big popup window letting me know when I can get back to working on my highest priority project.
Here’s basically the entire go script:
!/bin/ksh
echo $@
$@
echo $@ completed on hostname \
| dzen2 -p -h 64 -bg darkblue
It’s simple but it’s working great for me. I’ve tried some improvements like randomizing window placement to avoid overlapping notifications, but the simple version above really does all I need.
Finally, a couple of details. zsh always seems to want to spell-check ‘go’, so I really named it ‘~/bin/executeAndNotify.sh’ and just aliased ‘go’ to that.
Also, I’ve found it can mess with shell quoting as is, so sometimes I have to do 'somecommand ; go echo done'. If someone has a tip on getting the quoting right in the script, I’d love to hear it. The problem crops up when you try something like ‘go make CC=”cc -g”‘ – the quotes don’t make it through.
