Console based GTD tool: gtdshell

There is a loud buzz about GTD, a productivity method by David Allen, so I guess everyone interested in productivity improvement is already heard about it. What he says is the best tool for gtd is paper and pen, however there are many software out there both free and for sale. You can use one of them instead. But probably the worst thing you would prefer to do is to design your own gtd software and, yes, that's what I did. Here I present gtdshell.

Why I need it? Simply, I didn't like the other tools. Most of them are online and I am not 100% connected to the internet and I don't want every detail of my personal life to be somewhere on the web. Well, maybe except gmail. Most of these tools are not flexible enough, I can't use vi to edit them, someday I want to be able to access it with my openmoko, etc. So I decided to store my next actions in text files and started to develop an application which I can somewhat easily process it.

Finally, I think it is at a usable point, though you still need a text editor sometimes, here goes the first published revision. You can download the tarball from the gtdshell web page or check out from the subversion for the bleeding edge. Feedbacks are appreciated.

Have fun.

subversion behind proxy

For the people who needs subversion access behind a corporate proxy, all you need to do is to append the lines below at the end of ~/.subversion/servers file. Unfortunately, this only works for subversion http access.

http-proxy-host = your.proxy.host.ip
http-proxy-port = port-number
http-proxy-username = your-user-name
http-proxy-password = your-password
http-proxy-exceptions = comma-seperated-list-of-internal-subversion-hosts

Have fun.

e-mail @ console

There are times I want to send a file, write a couple of lines to someone or simply send a reminder to my own mailbox by e-mail directly from terminal. This is where the plain old mail tool comes to the scene. It's manual page and all kinds of tutorials on how to use it is available on the web. However it took a little time to configure it to send mail via the corporate SMPT server. Finally, I could find something on the web and after modifying it a little bit it works. Install the gnu mailutils package, put the lines below to the ~/.mailrc and voilà.

set sendmail="/usr/lib/mailutils/mail.remote \
           --mailer smtp://mail.server.address \
           -f you@your.mail.address"