Normocephalic/Atraumatic

Todo.awk: My GTD-Compliant, Text-Based Todo Manager

Akshay — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:23:41 +0000

Todo.awk in action; colors and fonts are my system default.

There are a lot of programs and systems out there to manage a GTD-style todo list, but none of them have really worked for me. I’ve tried everything - web-based solutions like Remember the Milk and Todoist (and many, many others), ThinkingRock, OmniFocus, Things, MonkeyGTD, and Todo.txt. Some were very close to what I wanted, but most just required way too much clicking around to let me do what needed to be done; when a todo list starts asking me to import contacts and GPS-tag my todos, things have gone very wrong. I need a computer-based system that does a few simple things:

Keeps all my todos in plain text files (the kind that often end in .txt and open in Windows Notepad), because plain text is the most portable, future-proof format around;
Updates my todo list, makes backups, and keeps records of completed tasks without ever requiring me to edit the raw data by hand;
Runs instantaneously, even on my underpowered EeePC;
Facilitates my weekly review process; and
Incorporates itself well into my workflow, which generally revolves around the command line and Firefox.

Todo.txt came the closest to this ideal (Shawkle was pretty good, too), but todo.txt didn’t facilitate my weekly review process well enough. Most frustratingly, it wasn’t able to print a list of my active projects so I knew what to review. In short, managing my todos had turned into a simple problem that demanded a customized solution.

To remedy these problems, I wrote todo.awk, a short program for managing todo lists at the command line. Todo.awk is (surprise!) written in GNU awk, a scripting language that’s usually preinstalled on Linux systems (and can be installed gratis on any computer in ten minutes). [Edit: Properly speaking, it's a Bourne shell script wrapped around little pieces of awk.] It runs instantaneously, even on my underpowered netbook, and supports displaying todos by context or project. It manages lists of deferred projects and supports an easy-to-use tiered priority system. Most importantly, the program is very short and easy to extend.

To install todo.awk, right click and save the file as “todo.awk”. Put todo.awk in your $PATH and make it executable, define $TODOFILE, $TODOBACKUPFILE, and $TODOARCHIVEFILE as environment variables, and you’re ready to go! If that was confusing, leave a comment and I’ll happily guide you through installation in more detail. And if you find any bugs, please leave a comment so I can squash them!

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Linux: The Dabbler’s Dream

Akshay — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:07:41 +0000

After two years of running Mac OS X exclusively, I’m giving up and moving back to Linux. For the most part, I’m surprised at how generally not-awful OS X was; everyday things were pretty easy, and a lot of fairly complicated things worked exceptionally well. Especially when I confined myself to the stock Apple applications (Address Book, Mail, Safari, iCal, etc.), I was amazed at how easy it was to integrate data from a variety of sources. And the iPhone’s seamless integration into this environment was just the icing on the cake. But I really, really missed some features I’d grown accustomed to in Unix-like operating systems.

I missed having scads of good free (as in $0) software available for every imaginable purpose. I’m at least theoretically willing to pay for quality applications that I use often, like browsers, mail readers, text editors, and presentation software. But I’m also a person who enjoys dabbling in a wide variety of computer and art-related fields. I’m reluctant to pay $100 for well-designed but very limited software (like the most basic versions of Photoshop), and I flatly refuse to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the most advanced software on the market (Final Cut Pro or Adobe Creative Suite). Linux makes things easy by offering a variety of feature-rich but zero-cost applications for every task. Now I can be an amateur director, DJ, and graphic artist without spending a dime.
I missed being able to do all my everyday tasks in a good text editor. Since most of my computer time involves reading, writing, and pushing around text, it’s a pain to use ten different programs which all have different keyboard shortcuts and options and lack the power of emacs or vim. Plus, plain text is universally readable, easy to back up and share, and completely future-proof. As an extra-special bonus, it works well with version control systems (which are unbelievably useful for often-edited documents like resumes and todo lists, but that’s another story). Of course, I could have installed a batch of Unix applications and text editors - but then why use OS X at all?
And most of all, I missed central software repositories. It’s just…well, it’s just painful to do things any other way. In most popular Linux distributions, more than ten thousand programs are available to browse, search, install, and uninstall with less than five words at the command line or a few clicks of the mouse. No Google. No spyware. No manual hunts through your hard drive for configuration files left behind after uninstalling something. Compared to that, even something as simple as finding and installing a decent, mid-range audio editing program for the Mac was long and frustrating.
I would have been able to tolerate all this, except that my computer was also running more and more slowly. The spinning beach ball of doom was a constant companion, even though my laptop is only two years old. I’d have loved to disable all the widgets and graphical effects that were bogging things down, but that isn’t possible in OS X. On Linux, I have the option to run a bare-bones environment that doesn’t do much automatically, but also runs lightning-fast. I’m an impatient person, so I’m much happier now.

To my amazement, Linux (or at least the particular flavor of Linux I’m using at the moment) has made enormous strides in usability. Nearly everything worked immediately, without the endless configuration struggles I’d had in the past. If you spend most of your day using vanilla office applications and enjoy dabbling in other areas, you owe it to yourself to try Linux.

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Awesomely Geeky TV?

Akshay — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:50:42 +0000

I can’t say that I really know that much about it, but the theme song for CBS’s The Big Bang Theory is the most amazingly geeky thing I’ve seen in a long time. I love it.

Update: after poking through the clips available online, I’ve concluded that the show itself is mediocre at best. Nevertheless, someone deserves a prize for that animated intro bit.

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Med Student Burnout

Akshay — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:14:58 +0000

A study recently published in Annals of Internal Medicine explored the relationship between student burnout, quality of life, and thoughts of suicide at several US medical schools. Not surprisingly, their results were not encouraging: half the students reported burnout, and a little more than 5% had considered suicide within the past year. The investigators’ analysis showed that burnout and poor quality of life were independent predictors of suicidal ideation. What’s even worse is that this study is only the latest in a series of alarming reports of poor mental health and quality of life among medical students and residents.

Is this problem intrinsic to medical education, or is it a consequence of poor educational methodology? It’s certainly possible that the American system of educating physicians - first requiring an undergraduate degree, then medical school - exacerbates student burnout by increasing the number of years spent in school, increasing average debt, and increasing the number of exams and application cycles. And the traditional medical school curriculum is, without a doubt, demanding and dry. But what is the alternative? Should we be content with physicians educated less stringently, with less grounding in the basic science underlying clinical decision-making? I don’t have a complete solution, but I don’t think that’s the best approach. Rather than making medical school less demanding, the process of arriving at medical school should be less stressful - beginning with increasing the number of US medical schools and relaxing application standards. We need more physicians, especially primary care physicians, and we need to make the years of education preceding medical school tolerable enough that our best and brightest don’t begin their medical training already on the verge of burnout.

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Inbred Kids, Bad Sex, and the Pill

Akshay — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:15:48 +0000

Not surprisingly, this story has gotten enough press that even the local hip-hop DJs are talking about it. A new study from the UK suggests that oral contraceptives alter women’s perception of pheromones, leading them to prefer (in the Biblical sense) men with genes similar to their own. This is the opposite of the usual situation, in which women are drawn to the scent of men with different genes, especially at the loci controlling MHC expression (remember the classic sweaty-shirt experiment?). Of course, this makes sense (in a hand-waving sort of way): women prefer mates whose genes will give their children the widest arsenal of immune responses. But the catch is that pregnant women prefer the pheromones of closely-related men, possibly because we’re hard-wired to seek the protection of family in vulnerable times. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the pill, which roughly mimics pregnancy hormonally, also switches pheromone preference.

What does this mean? Has a generation of sexually liberated women consigned itself to relationships with the (genetically speaking, at least) wrong men? Do women who get married and then stop taking the pill have a higher divorce rate? Maybe. But there’s something critical being lost here: I think most women would much rather have wonky MHC radar than end up with an unplanned pregnancy. I mean, ending up attracted to, and possibly married to or in a relationship with, a man whom you can’t stand when you’re off the pill is certainly bad. But having four children before your peers are done with college is way, way worse. Get a grip, people.

As a side note, I’m interested to see which oral contraceptives the researchers decided to use. I wouldn’t be surprised if the newer low-dose or progesterone-only OCPs have less of an effect on pheromone perception.

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