Spun

veryplaintxt is a very nice WordPress theme.

Silk icons is a gorgeous - and big! - library of free icons.

After reviewing about 17 dozen dynamic RSS reader homepages on Lifehacker (like Google’s Personalized Homepage and Netvibes and Protopage) - which are all basically the same - it warms my heart to see a tutorial on how to build your own.

Hopefully this means these “desktop” homepages have jumped the shark and everyone move their “WebOS” dev efforts onto something a bit more innovative (and useful!).

Awhile back I threw together a monster bash script, todo.sh, which reads and writes to a personal todo.txt file.

Using a bunch of sed and grep recipes for editing, adding, slicing and dicing by project, context and priority (ala Getting Things Done), this is the only todo manager I’ve ever stuck with for more than a month. Here’s a 3-minute or so screencast of how todo.sh works:

Note: I aliased todo.sh to t here to reduce typing strain.

The AIM bot I mentioned earlier executes todo.sh as well, so you can IM your todo.txt from the office or your phone. Imagine IM’ing your bot list @shopping to get your grocery shopping list on your phone from the aisle at Ralph’s.

Anyway, all the todo.txt script shenanigans I’ve been hacking together are now located at their very own domain, todotxt.com.

I’ve got a rant about the current state of organizational software and the wonderful experience of leading an open source project that’s garnered quite a few Lifehacker.com reader contributors, but that’ll be another post.

I’m not a Perl developer by any means (Python’s my poison) but I wanted to build a quick AIM bot, and Perl’s OSCAR.pm lets you do it in less than 20 lines of code. It’s insane how simple this is:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Net::OSCAR qw(:standard);
my $oscar;
$oscar = Net::OSCAR->new();
$oscar->set_callback_im_in(&im_in);
$oscar->signon($screenname, $password);
while(1)
{
$oscar->do_one_loop();
}
sub im_in {
my($oscar, $sender, $message, $is_away) = @_;
print "[AWAY] ” if $is_away;
print “$sender: $message\n”;
$response = “Hello”;
$oscar->send_im($sender, $response);
}

I wrote a bot which executes a shell script that reads and writes to your todo.txt (more on that in a minute.) Mark ran with the idea and we discussed keeping a bot that can run other scripts on your computer, like “open VNC port” instead of using port knocking or leaving your server port open at all times. The trick is the bot only runs commands from authorized AIM names. I’m not sure how secure that is, but it is a neat idea.

My, my, it’s been some time. While I was away (working on a bunch of small and not-so-small writing projects) comment spammers took over the joint and WordPress got upped a few versions.

For tonight, a mass comment spam deletion, an upgrade to the latest version of WP, and a new theme.

I’ve been doing a bit of development here and there I’ll tell you all about in the morning.