Where is Ploum ?

Afin de gérer le stress et éviter la procrastination, j'ai dévelopé la méthode GARI (Glande Appliquée - Rangement Interdit). Vous vous souvenez ? Le monsieur au fond se souvient et il dit même que j'avais tout pompé sur GTD, ce qui est en partie vrai. Mais il nous restait à trouver un bon moyen pour gérer ma liste de choses à faire.

Quand on y pense, tout n'est jamais qu'une série de tâches. Déplacer une montagne paraît bien plus facile lorsqu'on le fait un caillou à la fois. Même si ça fait un peu tâche… (hihi, tâche, vous comprenez ? Jeu de mot subtil et raffiné).

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Short version : GTG! 0.2 is out

Last year, I met several times with my friend Bertrand to discuss how we imagine a good GTD tasks manager. On October 17 2008, Bertrand told me that he had a funny idea for a name and I immediately created the project and commited my first try with a GTK TextView widget.

2 months later (exactly one year ago), what we had was a kind of buggy monstrous experiment.

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He wanted to be a GNOME rock star, he didn't know the price to pay.

He heard that sleeping with big guys was the only way to succeed, he didn't believe it.

The fact that there was no more twin beds room in the hotel was unexpected…

Introducing the innocent Ploum and the Nasty Desrt in a new Mountain View based horror comedy :

Soon in the theater : In bed with Ryan Lortie II, featuring not-so-innocent Vuntz and still-naughty Desrt in Dallas.

Gpager is a GPLv2 libwnck pager that just float on your desktop, allowing you to do anything you were doing with you panel pager but bigger and stronger.

Back in 2005-2006, my good friend Patrick Rácz developed a small pager for the GNOME desktop. Since then, I've been an happy user of this little application, recompiling it with every Ubuntu release. In fact, I just cannot live without it anymore.

We thought that it might be helpful to other and, for years, we said : "we should publish it". Today, after fixing some small bugs, I'm proud to announce the release of Gpager 0.3 "Scenes From a Memory - Finally Free". I created a Launchpad project and even an Ohloh page.

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Each year, Google is sponsoring a Summer of Code (SoC). During three months, Google pay students to work on various opensource projects. Each student should be followed by a "mentor" from the original project but the mentor is not paid, he receives a tshirt.

3 years ago, I was a SoC student and developed the now abandoned Conseil but I learned a lot from that experience.

This year, one of the GNOME SoC projects was related to Getting Things GNOME!, the software I started with Bertrand. The project was to add the concept of geolocalization to your tasks list so you would be able to see where you can do tasks. The candidate, Paulo Cabido, seemed bright and skilled. I was the mentor. Strange to be on the other side of the fence.

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Part 1 : Introduction
Part 2 : Home is Desktop
Part 3 : There's no tray icon in GNOME !

Repeat after me one more time : there's no such thing as a "tray icon" in GNOME. GNOME has a notification area which has nothing to do with the Windows-ish obscenity called "systray", this little space where any application can put a little icon.

I mean, seriously, have you ever think about how completely stupid is the idea of a "tray icon"? Can you imagine how black magic it should be for a new computer user?

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As I previously pointed out, there's a huge need to have a clear distinction between the user preferences and the user data. This is already covered by the FreeDesktop XDG folders specification.

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Bertrand and I are very proud to announce you the first release of Getting Thing Gnome!, a personal organizer and todo list manager for the GNOME desktop.

GTG allows you to add and edit tasks with nearly no fields at all. It support subtasks and tags that you can use the way you want. It aims for flexibility. Getting Things Gnome! goal is to adapt itself to your workflow, not the opposite. GTG also brings the concept of "workview", a display of tasks that can be done right now, right here.

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Disclaimer : if you don't program in python and don't know what a thread is, you probably want to skip this post as this is highly technically geekish loghorea which is not funny or even understandable in a remotely perverse way. Knowing some Flying Circus episodes might also help.

Say that you have two thread in your python application. One is "TV_speaker" and the other is "knight". Those two threads live in parallel their own live and all is good. But sometimes you want the "TV_speaker" to stop. In order to do that, you will ask the knight to throw a chicken at him. And the first thing that comes to mind is using a "signal".

You cant to call knight.send("chicken") and that, on the other side, tv_speaker.connect("chicken") handles things correctly.

Problem : using google, you find that, since 2.6, the python documentation is barely readable and unusable.

Hopefully, you find your way back to the good old and well organized 2.5 documentation only to discover that those signals are UNIX signals and have nothing in common with signals you can use in a GTK application.

Worse : those signals don't work with threads !

You seat down, cry and wait that a giant foot quickly stops your pain.

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Part 1 : Introduction
Part 2 : Home is Desktop
Part 3 : There's no tray icon in GNOME!


After I installed Ubuntu for Marie, she quickly grasped a lot of things and I discovered that she was really bright. She quickly organized a lot of folders for all of her project, downloading a lot of file and putting them in a lot of place. On the opposite, Jean had a lot of difficulties to understand the file concept. Well, in fact, he understood the document concept he was not seeing where those documents were.


How can I make things easier ?

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