Rui CarmoBesides hacking away at newspipe's web front-end (which is getting access control lists and built-in authentication to get around some PDA browser bugs), I've been contemplating doing a couple more things:
Wikis and Stuff:
- Adding Markdown support to CVSTrac - tricky, since it involves coding a lot of string manipulation in hard C, and piping through markdown.pl would defeat the entire purpose of using CVSTrac as a standalone tool.
- Adding Markdown support to PhpWiki - less tricky (since there are oodles of ways to do it), but I'd prefer to do it the right way(TM) and use the internal XML classes (besides stripping out the guts of the current block parser). Lenghty, convoluted coding that I might get around to do one day.
- Rolling my own Wiki. Tough. Got a lot of notes on that.
- Redesigning this one. The current design works, renders well across pretty much everything I've tried and fits my "clean, simple, readable" motto, but Kubrick is cleaner and simpler, so I've been thinking of adopting portions of its "visual language". One of the problems: Wikis are chaotic and tend to require more navigation elements than plain weblogs, which means smudging the cleanliness of the design.
Getting Things Done (which is, to me, My Quest "Reloaded"):
- I've given up on getting iCal integrated with Exchange (which is something I hope Apple gets right in Tiger) and do all my calendaring via Entourage. It gets wirelessly synced to my Blackberry, so it works for what I need it for (scheduling meetings, long-term planning and birthdays).
- The only real issue with Entourage is its lack of task support (in an amazing bout of stupidity, it does not use the Exchange Tasks folder), so I'm left with the problem of syncing a ToDo list across all my devices (my Toshiba/M100, my iMac, my iBook, my Blackberry, my V800 and whatever else gets dumped on my desk next week). SyncML might be a way to go, but using WebDAV to get at my Tasks folder seems doable (if a bit convoluted).
- To spare me the time to wade through oodles of RSS items, I badly need to finish adding Bayesian classification to newspipe. Davi's Unicode patch also added threading (which is one of the things I always wanted to do with newspipe and a great timesaver), but I need smarter, more personalised grouping of items.
Monitoring and Administration
- I've recently added a management user to all my boxes, using Pdmenu and sudo as a restricted shell to quickly and easily restart Apache, tail logs and monitor usage through SSH and a couple of keypresses. Although watching top via MidpSSH is somewhat on the far side of geekness, clicking through a couple of menus to look at a log saves a lot of time. A dynamic menu to add Spam Referrers to my banning queue is in the works, too.
- I've been wanting to do a "drill-down" RRDTool viewer for ages now - the concept is that you pick a graph, slide a "highlight" window over it, click, and that time period expands to fill the screen width. Using straight-up GIFs and some DHTML should work, but Flash would have that extra smoothness, so I'm looking at rendering RRDTool data through Flash - as usual, none of the stuff I can find can handle, say... thirty thousand data points, so it's an uphill struggle.
- My Rendezvous notifier hack has evolved a fair bit, but it's nowhere near usable yet (and I've managed to mess up its CVS, so I can only work on it on one machine).