<travisbhartwell> Sacha!
<sachac> Hi! =D
<sachac> There you are!
<travisbhartwell> Heh.  I just saw your ping on IRC
<sachac> Your note about the Linux Journal inspired me to think about it a lot.
<travisbhartwell> Cool!  What are your thoughts, beyond your e-mail?
<sachac> <grin> I think it's a cool idea. In fact, I'm really, really,
         really tempted to co-write or write something about growing
         the community around Planner, if you don't mind. <laugh>
<travisbhartwell> No, I'd love to collaborate on something
<sachac> We're sitting on something cool here. We're sitting on a
         software project crazy enough to interest people who
         ordinarily wouldn't consider Emacs.
<sachac> Heck, we're even getting non-programmers into Lisp.
<travisbhartwell> Both very good things!'
<travisbhartwell> So what specifically would you want to discuss?
<sachac> I want to look at how we built this community around Planner.
<sachac> (/emacs-wiki/muse/remember/assorted stuff).
<travisbhartwell> Kind of like a cathedral and the bazaar type essay?
<sachac> Here are some interesting things going on in the Planner community:
<sachac> - We don't hide the Lisp code. It's there. Newbies get
         exposed to it. The way we deal with it, though, is by asking
         people to describe--in English--what they want to do--their
         dream PIM--and more experienced people would give them
         snippets of code and tips for making it happen.
<travisbhartwell> *nods*
<sachac> - Because we talk about these improvements on the list, the
         mailing list is also a great source for productivity ideas.
         That way, instead of just tweaking our PIMs every day
         (wasting a lot of time coding things in and whatnot), we pick
         up other people's good ideas.
<travisbhartwell> Kind of like the 43 folders website/wiki, except for
         Emacs and all platforms it supports, not just Mac
<sachac> - People actually say they're addicted to it. They get other
         people hooked. Heck, it seems I passively infect people
         through my blog, which doesn't actually say much and is
         actually just a rather impressive display of
         procrastination... <laugh>
<travisbhartwell> Heh!
<sachac> - ... and I _love_ getting people even more into it. Planner
         makes it easy to modify behavior, tweak things to fit your
         personal quirks, even implement what might be a joke
         feature...
<sachac> It's all in your config, so it's not really software bloat. ;)
<sachac> Like my taglines / fortunes!
<travisbhartwell> *nods*
<sachac> (My daily pages now have random content. Nifty, huh? See,
         Clair Ching and I were having fun with Emacs, and while I was
         showing her how to use Emacs to learn Japanese, she was
         like... "I want this in Planner!" I said, "Hey, you know,
         that's an excellent idea!" 10 minutes later, it was there.)
<sachac> SO.
<sachac> Maybe other free software developers might want to know how
         to grow this kind of user community.
<travisbhartwell> Yes.  But was this growth conscious?
<travisbhartwell> Or was it a natural out-growth of the flexibility planner and emacs offer?
<sachac> <grin> I'm crazily user-oriented. That's probably had a _little_ bit to do with it.
<travisbhartwell> Slightly
<sachac> It's not just that planner is flexible.
<sachac> (although yes, that's a big part of it.)
<travisbhartwell> Well, how do you want to go about this? From what
                 I've read on the LJ site, we need to send a query
                 letter, indicating what we intend to write about
<sachac> I think that a large part of it is that we encourage people
         to help each other tweak planner to fit them. It's not just
         "You can hack it to fit you if you want". We help newbies
         actually get the kind of behavior they want, and encourage
         them to share their ideas.
<sachac> We encourage people to share their funky hacks, too. Hmmm. I
         think tla has helped us a lot there, too; instead of having
         one canonical tree and then branches that would require some
         magic to merge, anyone can just set up a fork and share
         patches...
<travisbhartwell> And given the recent furor over Gnome not listening
                 to its users (which is something to be debated, but
                 the question remains), it would be nice to show how a
                 community (arguably much much smaller, but still) can
                 help users
<travisbhartwell> Man, there is a wealth of material!
<sachac> So basically, we want to show people the value of creating a
         fantastic user community.
<sachac> You guys are making all the coolest features. =)
<travisbhartwell> At the same time show-casing a really cool project
<sachac> We don't even have a core developers group, although yeah,
         some people have their fingerprints on quite a number of files.
<travisbhartwell> Yup.
<sachac> (Even people who would never have thought of themselves as
         free software developers! =) )
<travisbhartwell> Okay, we should read this:
                 http://www.poewar.com/archives/2004/10/24/how-to-write-a-query-letter/
                 and this
                 http://www.linuxjournal.com/xstatic/author/authguide
<sachac> Yup, I'm reading those now.
<sachac> So here's where our roles might come in. I've been
         maintaining this (would you believe it used to be just one
         really long planner.el?) and intentionally setting forth to
         create this kind of a community (I read blogs like "Creating
         Passionate Users", too! =) ). You--hey, I remember you asked
         about a task overview before, and we hacked that in. Proved
         to be useful for other people too. Funky cool! <laugh>
<travisbhartwell> Sorry if I'm a bit slow to respond this morning; I'm
                  eating my breakfast while doing this. :)
<sachac> <laugh> No problem.
<sachac> Hmm. Maybe there's room for two articles: one on how to use
         Planner, and one on the community behind it.
<sachac> 'cause with all this talk, I'm sure we'll get people curious
         about it! <laugh>
<travisbhartwell> Yeah, I think that sounds about right
<travisbhartwell> We could collaborate on both, me being the primary
                  author of the first and you the second. :)
<sachac> If so, then you can adapt something along the lines of
         PlannerModeQuickStart, but make it _far_ more interesting.
<sachac> (Not hard, considering I wrote it in a pretty straight-forward manner...)
<travisbhartwell> Yeah.
<sachac> Like, construct a scenario. Get inside someone's head; someone
         who needs to keep track of things.
<travisbhartwell> - Here's the elisp
<travisbhartwell> - Here's a screenshot of what it _could_ look like
<travisbhartwell> etc
<sachac> =)
<sachac> Right. Screenshot of a planner page kitted out the way you like,
         a couple of the things that struck you the most as a Planner
         user...
<sachac> (For example, I _really_ like making hyperlinked tasks to my e-mail.)
<travisbhartwell> Yes, the hyperlinks to all sorts of things are so useful
<travisbhartwell> That will definitely beat the "how is this better than a text
                  file in notepad" argument
<sachac> It's kinda funny, though, because a lot of people don't live in Emacs...
         so what's their killer feature? =)
<travisbhartwell> I dunno.
<travisbhartwell> And I guess this comes down to some of the issues I keep
                  blogging about
<travisbhartwell> Er, wanting to blog about
<travisbhartwell> For me, at least, Emacs doesn't fit everything.  I wish it
                  were somehow more able to integrate with Gnome.  I wish it
                  could be prettier, etc etc etc
<sachac> http://www.travishartwell.net/blog.html is a 404! What a cheat.
<travisbhartwell> Heh. :)
<travisbhartwell> My website sucks
<travisbhartwell> I need to fix it
<sachac> Make it prettier. It would be nice to have better integration with... well... everything.
<sachac> Someone hacked together an Applescript to make it pick up URLs on the Mac.
<sachac> Alex White has another hack to get PDA semi-sync...
<sachac> but yeah, just a lot of adhoc stuff at the moment.
<sachac> There's tomboy, but it's not as run-time hackable, I think. =)
<travisbhartwell> Yeah.
<travisbhartwell> That's what is frustrating.
<travisbhartwell> But Planner and Emacs and Gnus work great for me now until I
                  have incentive to move to (or create) something better
<sachac> Maybe we can get the attention of a GNOME hacker who will then work
         on a backend. <laugh>
<sachac> <grin> See, I don't mind if people move to other personal information
         managers. In fact, I frequently recommend other stuff like org.el if
         that fits the person's mental model better. I'm really, really,
         really interested in _planning._ =)
<travisbhartwell> That rocks
<travisbhartwell> Well, I need to probably start focusing on work. Let's think
                  some more about this and jot down some notes and then talk
                  again in a day or two about our query letter
<sachac> What I'm really curious about is this: if people could keep tweaking
         their PIM a little bit at a time, evolving it to fit their way of
         planning--which changes, of course, as they learn new things and as
         new ways become a little bit easier--what kind of PIMs would people
         evolve? What would those differences say about us, and will we come
         across things that simply couldn't be imagined in commercial
         cookie-cutter PIMs?
<travisbhartwell> Wow.  That's an interesting line of questions
<sachac> Right. Can I post these notes on the Net, or should I just file it
         in some directory in my notebook?
<travisbhartwell> I'm okay with whatever
<sachac> I'm curious because my way of planning now is nothing at all like
         the way I planned my day when I started, and I really do think
         about my experiments. New code posted to the list or written in a
         burst of inspiration often get me to slowly modify the way I plan
         my day. It's not perfect (I still procrastinate more than I should),
         but I feel in control. =)
<sachac> So think about that sometime. Has your way of planning changed? <grin>
<travisbhartwell> Good.  I need to get back to that.  I admit -- which is
                  ironic considering our topic of conversation -- I have fallen out
                  of practice of using Planner
<travisbhartwell> Time to get back to it
<sachac> <smile> I'm looking forward to fitting it even closer to you so that
         what you want to do is too easy for you to not do it. ;)
<travisbhartwell> Yes.  Good plan. :)
<sachac> (Err, not that it will be easy to avoid, but rather that you'll find
         it easier to just do it... <laugh>)
<sachac> Have fun at work! =)
<travisbhartwell> I will.  Thanks for being excited about this!
<sachac> Could I be anything but excited? <laugh>
<travisbhartwell> Heh.
<sachac> As for me--I should be off to bed now. Good night!

Chat with travisbhartwell on testing.bitlbee.org

猫が私の手につめを立てた。 The cat dug its claws into my hand.

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Told you we play with fire.

猫の目は非常に光を感じやすい。 Cats' eyes are very sensitive to light.

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The network tester I bought yesterday was very useful. Celine and Yaya suddenly lost network connection, and the tester quickly showed me that both cables going to the first floor had been significantly damaged. I showed Jun how the network tester tests individual wires. We think rats might have chewed on the wires. Jun will rewire the connection going downstairs. I gave him the wall mounts, networking jacks, cable reel, and network tester: he's all set to do some major networking stuff.

Celine didn't receive some mail Mom sent her, so I confirmed that the server had plenty of free space and I sent another test message. However, my mom's default settings with Globelines didn't work.

To prevent its mail servers from being used for spam, Globelines requires users to check their Globelines account before allowing them to send mail through its servers (POP before SMTP). I didn't want to save my mom's Globelines password on all the computers that needed to send mail. On 2005.03.03, I installed another network card in our IntranetServer and configured it to check my mom's Globelines account regularly. This worked without a hitch because I had assigned addresses to keep the two networks separate.

When they plugged the wireless router in, though, the factory defaults conflicted with my addressing scheme. I suppose she had luckily managed to avoid those problems for a while. Still, fixing it was just a matter of sitting down and configuring the router properly. I set the router password and the wireless security settings as well.

We're still not done arranging for Mom's flight to Canada. Argh. The printer's annoying, the website's somewhat frustrating... Mrph.

彼らは熱烈にいがみ合っている。 They fight like cat and dog.

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