Spun

I got all fancy-pants with XUL and Firefox preferences in the latest release of About This Site, a Firefox add-on that hooks you up with all sorts of meta-services when you’re researching a web site (like Alexa graphs, del.icio.us bookmarks, a WhoIs query, etc.)

The new release is only a minor point upgrade but feature-wise it’s major: now you can configure whatever meta-lookups your heart desires in the menu all by yourself. (This will also head off all that email I get from folks requesting that I add their new webapp to the menu.)

Current About This Site users can upgrade just using the auto-update feature; go to your Add-ons in Firefox, right click on About This Site and hit “Find Update.”

What’s more, the fine folks at Lifehacker are funding some of my whimsical open source development efforts, so the extension and some more little utilities I’ve got in the works will be hosted there, under the new Lifehacker Code tag.

A girl cannot subsist on blogging alone. Meep.

Stone Soup was one of my favorite childhood stories, which makes a lot of sense. In essence it’s a metaphor for open source software: everyone offering whatever ingredient they have on hand to add to the soup that everyone can enjoy. The keys to delicious soup (and a successful OS project), of course, are the stone (idea), the cauldron (forum), the village square (visibility), and the cook (leader). Update: Here’s Wikipedia’s take, which also makes the copyleft association.

I’m the Wicked Witch of the West over on the todo.txt mailing list, smacking down feature request after feature request with “No” and “No” and “quite frankly, no.”

Today I said:

Software can only do so much. Ultimately you want a human at the wheel.

I should have worded it differently. Software can do everything. But you don’t want it to. Software should only do so much.

Being a yes-girl, it’s hard for me to say no to people’s earnest ideas, shared in the spirit of helping others. But Torvalds’ and other great open source developers’ genius was in their ability to pinpoint the good ideas and weed out the bad.

In short, good developers are good editors.

There’s no feeling quite as sweet as when you discover code you set a sail into the public domain ages ago was republished and improved upon by others. Thomas Upton took my del.icio.us Prettifier Greasemonkey user script and modified it to make del.icio.us even prettier. Nice work, Thomas.

Now that I’m running an open source project with a mailing list of developers much more skilled than I am, I’ve got folks emailing in code patches in the form of .diff files. Having never dealt with .diff’s before (I know, I know, Windows baby here) I dove into the GNU diffutils manual. This kind of stuff still scares the crap out of me, but:

$ patch todo.sh todocolour.diff

Applied the submitted file differences to the source code, and I was able to run my unit tests straightaway without hand-adding edited code line by line.

Patch added the changed lines to the original file (todo.sh) and created a todo.sh.orig file as well. If it fails on merging any file differences, it creates a todo.sh.rej file.

Simple, useful and handy.

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.