Links for July 27th through July 30th

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My shared links for July 27th through July 30th:

  • 45 Days. - "fill the days with little things first and there won't be room for the big ones"

An hour a day = 45 days a year. The kind of thing you just need to keep re-hearing every so often.

So all these years later I'm trying to make a very odd movie indeed, about computer chess programmers circa 1980, and perhaps deep down it's my attempt to vicariously peek into the fantasy braniac life I ought to have pursued as a kid. It happens to be a fascinating era for the field. As computers were exploding into the public sphere, and regular folks were just getting used to seeing them in the workplace, or home, a group of geniuses at the vanguard of the technology were trying to teach it what seemed like an almost unimaginable skill--could these machines, these glorified calculators, ever conquer the human world champion in chess? Obviously a human being would have to be a genius to be the world chess champ, so if they could get a computer to do it, the computer would have to acquire a kind of genius, right?

Links for July 19th through July 22nd

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My shared links for July 19th through July 22nd:

After all, the web is just people.

Links for July 12th through July 15th

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My shared links for July 12th through July 15th:

Links for July 11th

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My shared links for July 11th:

Links for July 7th

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My shared links for July 7th:

The technology progressed, primarily at the Disney Studio, but it wasn't computational in nature -- it was mostly mechanical and optical -- until in 1989, when The Little Mermaid was released. And this was really a pivotal film in that just about the entire film was made with the traditional means but the last shot of the movie was computationally accelerated…"

Links for July 6th

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My shared links for July 6th:

I too have worked with large codebases from non-programmers. It can be difficult to tell a brilliant physicist that programming well is hard. After QED, nothing seems hard.

  • Attachments.me - A nice interface to searching your email, with a focus on attachments. But they're not a hosting provider , so it is not immediately clear what's stopping your email provider (say gmail) from adding this and wiping out the business?

  • waffle -> Perturbingly - Jesper reading the tea leaves on Growl dropping features to get into the mac app store.

VoodooPad, OmniFocus and Terminal Integration Wish List

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Here are some features I want but I'll never have time to write the scripts for VoodooPad to do.

I use VP mostly as a running log of notes, shell commands and todos. I also use OmniFocus for task tracking, but sometimes it's easier to just start typing in VP and work out the tasks later. So I often end up with VP pages that have a bunch of todos mixed in with project headers and miscellaneous notes.

I've been thinking some integration would be nice. I want an emacs org-mode (update: I meant notes-mode) style "new day" script that creates a new page for the day and does the following:

  • adds a link to the new page to the previous note page
  • moves any pending todos (I mark them as lines starting with a <# todo #> placeholder so I can jump to them) off yesterday's page and into OmniFocus
  • starts a new header (line starting with #, in bold) in the new page for every header that had leftover todos. These headers usually correspond to projects in OmniFocus.
  • adds new headers and todo lines for any tasks that are due today

I want to have VP autocomplete project names from OmniFocus when I start a header line. Then add a link next to the new header pointing to the last page containing that header.

I'd also like to have OmniFocus update the VP document when I check off a task in OF - I want to use VP as a log, so I can track down when I did something. Maybe projects should all have their own VP pages, that are kind of an auto-updated index of progress on the tasks.

It'd also be nice if when I edited a todo line in VP, it could update OF. I guess I want VP to be an supplemental synchronized view onto my OF tasks.

For the Terminal: I do a lot of copying and pasting shell commands into VP so I can remember things like important paths, or the exact configure settings I used to build something two years ago. This is really useful, but it'd be nice if it was easier to do without leaving the terminal. Ideally I could just prefix a command with something like '@' to add it to the current page in VP (or '@pagename#headername' to get fancy). You could get this with a script named '@' - on your local machine. But it also has to work when you're working remotely, so it will get a little more complicated.

Finally - this is something I wanted to try doing with an InputManager before that mechanism went away: I'd like CamelCase links in every text field on the system (probably with some exceptions) to automatically link to VP pages. But it sounds like the days of modifying system-wide behavior on Macs are history, so I'll probably never get this. Who knows, maybe it would've been a disaster.

I always thought the path to improvement in work computing was more and deeper integration between 3rd-party apps, as well as more system functionality that's usable by all those apps, but it looks to me* like in OS X we're only getting the latter.

* - since 10.7 is about to come out, it might be worth pointing out that I have no special advance developer info. I haven't even been a dev program member for a few years now.

Links for July 5th through July 6th

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My shared links for July 5th through July 6th:

One nit - I don't think it's obvious what happens to the red position bar (what to call that?) when you just press the arrows on the thumb instead of moving it around.