Yesterday my external Western Digital disk (which I use for Time Machine, among other things) stopped mounting automatically when I plug it in. This may *cough*definitely*cough*have something to do with me unmounting it forcefully while it was doing a backup, since I was in a hurry.

One thing I missed since I moved from a Mac (using The Hit List for GTD) to Outlook (using Jello Dashboard for GTD) was the availability of a global hot key that I could use to bring up a text entry box which I could use to quickly add things into my electronic Inbox, for later processing.

I have found a way to achieve this, and here is the setup I am using now:

The first component is this PowerShell script written by Lee Holmes, which takes as arguments the title of the task to add, and adds it to Outlook. I saved it as Documents/Add-OutlookTask.ps1 in my home directory.

The second component is the ever-useful and amazing AutoHotkey. I added the following lines to my Documents/AutoHotKey.ahk file:

This snippet assigns Win-space to open an input box, and uses whatever is typed in it as the task title to the Add-OutlookTask script. The task will be placed without any categories in the task list, so it appears automatically the next time I open my Jello Dashboard inbox. Here it is in action:

I find this extremely useful, since I can press Win-space to add new tasks from any application, without having to switch to Outlook first. At some point I would like to explore the idea of making it smarter, like the quick-add keys in Things or THL for the Mac. This would include, for example, using some information from the currently-active application to prefill the task information. Examples would include using the subject line if an Outlook email is selected or the title of the current web page if a browser is open. Also nice would be to include any selected text automatically in the notes for the task, and maybe a link to the original item.

I have been using a low-tech tool for organizing these things: ziploc bags. I now carry two large ziploc bags in my backpack, labeled "frequent use" and "infrequent use". The first one has the things that I would most likely need to use every time I sit down to work: my iPhone USB cable, my laptop power adapter, etc. The other one includes all other things that I need every once in a while so I want to have them handy, but I don't need them every day. This includes a USB cable for my camera, a two-to-three prong adapter for when I find myself in old buildings that don't have grounded outlets, a couple of USB sticks, etc.

I find that this simple tip helps me keep the physical clutter under control, and makes it easy to review things periodically to check if I still need everything I'm carrying around.

Today I ran into the problem that symlinks created under cygwin using "ln -s" are not understood by Windows, and of course Windows shortcuts are seen by cygwin as regular files. Happily, this is a (semi-)solved problem. For reference, this is what needs to be done:

1. Add "winsymlinks" to your CYGWIN environment variable. For example, in my .bashrc I have the following:

   export CYGWIN="nodosfilewarning winsymlinks"
   
   This makes cygwin create symlinks differently, in a form that is understood both by it and by Windows.
   This is the main step, and the only one if you just need access from the shell and from the Windows explorer. However, emacs still sees those symlinks as regular .lnk files. To fix this, follow the next step.

2. Install the w32-symlinks.el package, and add the following to your .emacs file:

   (require 'w32-symlinks)

3. Run M-x customize-option and enter w32-symlinks-handle-shortcuts as the variable to customize. Turn it on, save it for future sessions, and you are all set. The new symlinks should be properly understood by the cygwin shell, Windows explorer, and emacs. Of course, you will have to re-create any symlinks or shortcuts that you created prior to setting the winsymlinks option, for them to be created in the new format.

   Update: so this doesn't quite work on my system. I am using Emacs 23.1, and apparently w32-symlinks does not work properly in this version. If you have an older version (I hear Emacs 21 works well), then this might work for you. 

I recently posted a snippet to perform hierarchical copying in cfengine3. As I was attempting to integrate this mechanism into my copy of cfengine's COPBL, I realized that no additional functions or body components are needed. Thanks to cfengine3's list expansion, all you need to do is include in the existing copy promise the list containing the desired list of suffixes to try. For example:

Becomes:

While this looks at first sight even longer than the original (and of course, in this case you could just specify ${sys.flavour} directly in the copy_from statement), it is much more flexible. Instead of defining different sections for each class that you want to handle (e.g. suse_9, redhat_5, etc.), the same code is able to copy the corresponding binary directory for any operating system, you just have to put the corresponding bin.* directory in your repository.

Furthermore, without modifying the code, you can provide different binaries for specific hosts, for different domains, or for any other classification you want to impose. Just modify the @suffixes variable, ordering them from the most specific to the most general one:

You can do this without any additional functions, just adding ${suffixes} in the appropriate place in the copy arguments. The advantage of using a different function as in my previous post (or even better, modifying your existing copy function), is that you can add hierarchical copying without having to modify all copy promises in your policy.