The GTD software I described a few weeks ago evolved quite significantly since then.
Fortunately my inbox is still empty:
$ inbox_size
Your inbox is empty.
It can be used in two modes - either single-shot report of inbox contents with
inbox_size, or continuous screening mode plus UI notification with
inbox_size_notify.
inbox_size.rb is a library (symlinked from
/home/taw/local/bin/inbox_size) which finds all items in all my inboxes. It also handles special items:
- Unread emails in Gmail inbox
- Uncommitted changes to one of the repositories
- Music log not committed to last.fm
- Passwords file chanced since last encrypted copy
- Last backup older than 3 days
- Any things I wanted to be informed about
The code
The main code is in
inbox_size.rb:
require 'time'
require 'magic_xml'
$offline = false
def inbox_ls
items_whitelist = %w[
/home/taw/Desktop
/home/taw/ebooks
/home/taw/everything
/home/taw/img
/home/taw/ipoddb
/home/taw/local
/home/taw/movies
/home/taw/music
/home/taw/ref
/home/taw/website
/home/taw/website_snapshot
]
files = (Dir["/home/taw/*"] +
Dir["/home/taw/Desktop/*"] +
Dir["/home/taw/movies/complete/*"] -
items_whitelist)
items = files.map{|x|x.sub(%r[\A/home/taw/],"")}
# Code for handling special inbox items goes here
# ...
return items.sort.map{|item| "* #{item}"}
end
if $0 == __FILE__
if ARGV[0] == '--offline'
ARGV.shift
$offline = true
end
items = inbox_ls
if items.empty?
puts "Your inbox is empty."
else
puts "#{items.size} items in your inbox:", *items
end
end
inbox_size_notify which scans the inbox continuouly and displays UI notifications if it's not empty is:
require 'inbox_size'
max_displayed = 30
big_timer = 5
old_items = []
while true
items = inbox_ls
next if items == []
if items == old_items
big_timer -= 1
sleep 60
next unless big_timer == 0
end
big_timer = 5
if items.size > max_displayed
displayed_items = items.sort_by{rand}[0, max_displayed].sort + ["* ..."]
else
displayed_items = items
end
system "notify", "Inbox is not processed", "#{items.size} items in your inbox:", *displayed_items
sleep 60
old_items = items
end
Script which displays KDE notifications is:
header = "Notification"
msg = ARGV.join("\n") # "All your base\nAre belong to us"
system 'dcop', 'knotify', 'Notify', 'notify', 'notify', header, msg, 'nosound', 'nofile', '16', '0'
Backup reminder
Since
my disk died I became more serious about backups. I indent to have at least regular rsync of my
SVK repository and some important files. Here's a script which rsyncs these files from
shanti (my main box) to
ishida (an old laptop).
t0 = Time.now
rv = system 'rsync -rL ~/.mirrorme/ taw@ishida:/home/taw/shanti_mirror/'
unless rv
STDERR.puts "Error trying to rsync"
exit 1
end
t1 = Time.now
File.open('/home/taw/.last_backup', 'w') {|fh|
fh.puts t1
}
puts "Started: #{t0}"
puts "Started: #{t1}"
puts "Time: #{t1-t0}s"
If backup was successful a time stamp is saved to
/home/taw/.last_backup.
inbox_size.rb reminds me if I didn't backup for more than 3 days:
# Time since last rsync
time_since_last_rsync = Time.now - Time.parse(File.read("/home/taw/.last_backup").chomp)
if time_since_last_rsync > 3 * 24 * 60 * 60
items << "Over 3 days since the last backup"
end
Tickler file
The "
tickler file" (
/home/taw/.tickler) contains all things I want to be reminded about. Appointments, deadlines, new episodes of The Colbert Report, whatever. Of course usually I want to be reminded before the deadline, not on the deadline, so the date must be some time before the event of interest. Entries in the tickler file look something like that:
Sat Jul 21 05:49:14 +0200 2007
15 days to Wikimedia Foundation validation deadline
It can be edited as a text file, but it's more convenient to add new entries with
add_tickler script:
$ add_tickler 24h "New TCR episode will be available"
unless ARGV.size == 2
STDERR.puts "Usage: #{$0} 'due' 'msg'"
exit 1
end
due = ARGV.shift
msg = ARGV.shift
due_sec = case due
when /\A(\d+)s\Z/
$1.to_i
when /\A(\d+)m\Z/
$1.to_i * 60
when /\A(\d+)h\Z/
$1.to_i * 60 * 60
when /\A(\d+)d\Z/
$1.to_i * 60 * 60 * 24
else
STDERR.puts <<EOF
Usage: #{$0} 'due' 'msg'
Due can be:
* 15s
* 15m
* 15h
* 15d
EOF
exit 1
end
due_time = Time.now + due_sec
File.open("/home/taw/.tickler", "a") {|fh|
fh.puts due_time
fh.puts msg
}
The tickler file is checked by the following code in
inbox_size.rb:
# Tickler items
tickler = File.readlines("/home/taw/.tickler")
while not tickler.empty?
deadline = Time.parse(tickler.shift.chomp)
msg = tickler.shift
if Time.now > deadline
items << msg
end
end
The passwords file
Pretty much every website requires an account nowadays. I don't want to reuse password on multiple website, so I generate them randomly (
cat /dev/urandom | perl -ple 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]//g' | head) and keep them in unencrypted file
/home/taw/.passwords which I simply grep if I want to login to some weird website again (normally Firefox remembers these passwords anyway, but sometimes it's necessary).
As it would suck to lose all accounts, I AES-256-CBC encrypt this file and keep encrypted copies in
/home/taw/ref/skrt/, which is mirrored to multiple servers. As I need to enter my password to encrypt the file, it cannot be done automatically. The most
inbox_size.rb can do is reminding me if there's no up-to-date
skrt file:
# skrt up to date ?
pwtm = File.mtime("/home/taw/.passwords")
last_skrt_tm = Dir["/home/taw/ref/skrt/*"].map{|fn| File.mtime(fn)}.max
if pwtm > last_skrt_tm
items << "No up-to-date skrt available"
end
In which case I run the following
skrt_new script:
t = Time.now
fn = sprintf "skrt-%04d-%02d-%02d", t.year, t.month, t.day
system "openssl aes-256-cbc /home/taw/ref/skrt/#{fn}
Music log
The
iPod-last.fm bridge consists of two parts - one which extracts the log from an iPod, and one which submits the data to last.fm. They communicate using very simple format, with lines like that (time is local):
Sumptuastic ; Cisza (Radio Edit) ; Cisza (Single) ; 185 ; 2007-07-11 17:51:27
Nothing in the format is iPod-specific, so I wrote a wrapper around mplayer which logs music it plays to
/home/taw/.music_log. It can also randomize songs and search for them recursively in directories. It uses a few extra programs -
id3v2 to get song title, artist and album (from either ID3v2 or ID3v1 tags), and
mp3info to get playing time.
def mp3_get_metadata(file_name)
song_info = `id3v2 -l "#{file_name}"`
artist = nil
title = nil
album = nil
if song_info =~ /^TPE1 \(Lead performer\(s\)\/Soloist\(s\)\): (.*)$/
artist = $1
elsif song_info =~ /^Title : .{31} Artist: (.*?)\s*$/
artist = $1
end
if song_info =~ /^TIT2 \(Title\/songname\/content description\): (.*)$/
title = $1
elsif song_info =~ /^Title : (.{0,31}?)\s+ Artist: .*$/
title = $1
end
if song_info =~ /^TALB \(Album\/Movie\/Show title\): (.*)$/
album = $1
elsif song_info =~ /^Album : (.{0,31}?)\s+ Year:/
album = $1
end
return [artist, title, album]
end
def mp3_get_length(file_name)
`mp3info -F -p "%S" "#{file_name}"`.to_i
end
def with_timer
time_start = Time.now
yield
return [time_start, Time.now - time_start]
end
randomize = true
if ARGV[0] == "-s" # --sequential
randomize = false
ARGV.shift
end
songs = ARGV.map{|fn| if File.directory?(fn) then Dir["#{fn}/**/*.mp3"] else fn end}.flatten
songs = songs.sort_by{rand} if randomize
songs.each{|song|
time_start, time_elapsed = with_timer do
rv = system "mplayer", song
exit unless rv
end
artist, title, album = *mp3_get_metadata(song)
length = mp3_get_length(song)
next unless length >= 90 and (time_elapsed >= 240 or time_elapsed >= 0.5 * length)
date = time_start.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
File.open("/home/taw/.music_log", "a") {|fh|
fh.puts "#{artist} ; #{title} ; #{album} ; #{length} ; #{date}"
}
}
It's a good idea to commit the log to last.fm often, but I'm not doing it automatically yet, as network problems with last.fm are too frequent. Instead
inbox_size.rb reminds me if there are old uncommitted entries in the log:
# .music_log not empty and older than one hour
if File.size("/home/taw/.music_log") > 0 and File.mtime("/home/taw/.music_log") < Time.now - 60*60
items << "Music log not clean"
end
Uncommitted stuff in repositories
I sometimes get distracted by some interruption and forget to commit things to repositories.
I wrote
uncommitted_changes script which checks local checkouts of all repositories I use (currently 1 SVK and 2 SVN repositories) if there are any uncommitted changes. I use
svn/svk diff instead of
svn/svk status as the latter finds all kinds of temporary files, and I always
svn/svk add all new files when I start coding anyway.
Dir.chdir("/home/taw/everything/") { system "svk diff" }
Dir.chdir("/home/taw/everything/rf-rlisp/") { system "svn diff" }
Dir.chdir("/home/taw/everything/gna_tawbot/") { system "svn diff" }inbox_size.rb simply checks that output of this script is empty:
# Uncommitted changes
uc = `uncommitted_changes`
unless uc == ""
items << "There are uncommitted changes in the repository"
end
Unread Gmail emails
The last kind of inbox items tracked by
inbox_size.rb are email inbox items. Google APIs are almost invariably ugly Java-centric blobs of suckiness, so instead of using Gmail API I simply get the list from RSS, parsed using
magic/xml.
# Unread Gmail messages
unless $offline
gmail_passwd = File.read("/home/taw/.gmail_passwd").chomp
url = "https://Tomasz.Wegrzanowski:#{gmail_passwd}@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom"
XML.load(url).children(:entry, :title).each{|title|
items << "Email: #{title.text}"
}
end
