I've updatedthe Emacs Blosxom support that I wrote to add support for publishing entries to multiple destinations.

For example, you can do:

(setq dme:blog-destinations
      '(("~/var/blog" nil nil t)
	;; entries in category `sun' don't get published to tiramisu
	("~/local/blog" "tiramisu.dme.org" nil
	 (lambda ()
	   (not (string-match "^sun" dme:blog-category))))
	("~/local/blog" "kriek.uk.sun.com" nil t)))

In this case, all entries will be saved to ~/var/blog and kriek.uk.sun.com:~/local/blog, whereas only entries not in a category beginning with sun will be published to tiramisu.dme.org:~/local/blog.

This allows me to write entries which are work related and have them saved locally and on a machine at the office, not on the publically accessible host.

NetNewsWire Lite on MacOS X is cute, but finding a similarly useful equivalent under Linux seems to be a challenge. As a result I dug out Aaron Swartz' rss2email script and persuaded it to dump a load of feeds into folders on my IMAP server.

The lack of support for inline images could be annoying, but mostly it works a treat.

I tried pushing RSS into a news server before (mostly because I could rely on the news server to ensure that the articles were unique), but the requirement for client state in news readers was annoying (more about that later I think).

To make life easier, I threw together some emacs lisp to help create Blosxom blog entries in emacs. Look here.

From slashdot:

Scott Sheppard writes “GTK+OSX has released a native Macintosh Aqua port of the Linux-based GTK+ open source graphical user interface library. GTK+ (GIMP ...”

This is good. Now a native version of xchatfor Aqua should be just around the corner...

Trying to determine if the ATI Radeon 7500 is supported by XFree86 is proving to be a real challenge. There are notes in various places about support for the 'radeon' and discussion on a variety of mailing lists about problems with non-ATI cards using the chipset, but nothing definitive ! The XFree86 release notes for 4.2.0 don't seem very clear, to me at least.

Obviously there are other vendors (Matrox G550 looks good), but the 7500 has DVI out and can be bought for less than 50ukp, which makes it seem like a good deal.

The disk in my Powerbook G4 is still non-functional, and Applehaven't sent the courier round yet.

Browsing the web using Linux or Solarisjust isn't the same. The font's don't work, there doesn't appear to be a decent RSS aggregator, ...

At least emacsis (mostly) the same everywhere.

RSS aggregators are very fashionable right now. Having toyed with AmphetaDesk, RadioUserland and NetNewsWireLite, I'm struck by problems with them all:

Installing the wiki formatter for MovableType was straightforward. A quick change to the master index template, and it should all work now ! I have to get out of the habit of writing HTML and produce Wiki TextFormatting instead.

Despite the lack of success, you can stillread in the press about how small robots are going to move into our homes to assist with chores REAL SOON NOW!

That said, after reading some more on 0xdecafbad's site, I installed TWiki. It's great ! No more do I have to laboriously type up small pages of HTML just to provide details of some small snippet of code - just type in the text, link to it from the main page and it's done.

The obvious next step is to use the wiki formatting plugin, then it will be easy to link from this log into the wiki. That can wait for another day.

Time Management - The Pickle Jar Theoryis interesting. I've spent quite a lot of time lately thinking about "planning".

By "planning", I don't really mean project planning, gantt charts, etc. - more "how to get the right things done today". Well, and some thoughts about determining what the right things are.

In my last jobthere was a lady who spent the first thirty minutes of every day organising her plan for that day. She did this on paper, copying incomplete items from the previous day and prioritising as she went. Once the prioritised list was completed, she allocated time against each of the items. Then, she started working down the list.

This always seemed very attractive to me, in a similar fashion to how I admire people who find significant comfort in religion. In both cases, you might not want to live your life that way, but it's clear that the people who do get some comfort from it (and in the case of the lady with whom I worked, she was widely admired for her professionalism and approach).

Anyway, I've always been verygood at making lists of things to do. Similarly, I'm good at making entries in diaries (paper or electronic) about things that need to be done on a certain date. The problem has been doingthings on the list or remembering to look at the diary to see what should be done today.

It often seems that there should be some type of technological answer to my problems, but it never turns out that way. I've tried many PDA's, various email, todo and calendaring programs. In the end, if you aren't disciplined, these things will just help you to build up a vast bulk of data that you never actually use.

These days I manage with the emacs diary/calendar for my meetings and appointments. Whilst the package is simple, that's okay, as most of the meetings I have are regular and straightforward. For a list of things todo I have a slightly customised version of emacs outline mode. With a few default first level headings, code to move entries around, add timestamps and some gnusintegration I'm all set.

But I still get tempted. I readabout how Morbus Iff uses Omni Outlinerto manage his todo list. Before you know it I've started the browser and I'm reading the specs...