Productivity improvement weekend

This weekend I’m going to try my best to improve my own productivity. Why do I say that? Well there are quite a few reasons for it. The first is that I spent the last week working full time on feng, rewriting the older code to replace it with simpler, more tested and especially well documented code. This is not an easy task especially because you often end up rewriting other parts to play nicely with the new parts; indeed to replace bufferpool, between me and Luca we rewrote almost entirely the networking code.

Then there is the fact that I finally got a possible price to replace the logic board of my MacBook Pro that broke a couple of weeks ago: €1K! That’s almost as much as a new laptop; sure not the same class, but still. In the mean time I bought an iMac; I needed access to QuickTime, even more than I knew before, because we currently don’t have a proper RTSP client; MPlayer does not support seeking, FFplay is broken for a few problems, and VLC also does not behave in a very standard compliant way. QuickTime is, instead, quite well mannered. But this means I have spent money to go on with the job, which is, well, not exactly the nicest thing you can do if you need to pay some older debts too.

So it means I have to work more; not only I have to continue my work on lscube at full time, but I’m going to have to get more jobs to the side; I got asked for a few projects already, but most seem to require me to learn new frameworks or even new programming languages, which means they require a quite big effort. I need the money so I’ll probably pick them but it’s far from optimal. I’ve also put on nearly-permanent hold the idea of writing an autotools guide, either as an open book or a real book; the former has shown no interest among readers of my blog, the latter has shown no interest among publisher. I start to feel like an endangered species regarding autotools, alas.

But since at least for lscube I need to have access to the FFmpeg mailing list, and I need access to the PulseAudio mailing list for another project and so on so forth, I need to solve one problem I already wrote about, purging GMail labels out of older messages. I really have a need for this to be solved, but I’m still not totally in luck. Thanks to identi.ca, I was able to get the name of a script that is designed to solve the same problem: imap-purge . Unfortunately there is a problem with one GMail quirk: deleting a message from a “folder” (actually a GMail label) does not delete the message from the server, it only detach the label from that message; to delete a message from the server you’ve got to move it to the Trash folder (and either empty it or wait for 30 days so that it gets deleted). I tried modifying imap-purge to do that, but my Perl is nearly non-existent and I couldn’t even grok the documentation of Mail-IMAPClient regarding the move function.

So this weekend either I find someone to patch imap-purge for me or I’ll have to write my own script based on its ideas in Ruby or something like that. Waste of time from one side, but should allow me to save time further on.

I also need to get synergy up to speed in Gentoo, there have been a few bugs opened regarding crashes and other problems and requests for startup scripts and SVN snapshots; I’ll do my best to work on that so that I can actually use a single keyboard and mouse pair between Yamato and the iMac (which I called, with a little pun, USS Merrimac (okay I’m a geek). Last time I tried this, I had sme problems with synergy deciding to map/unmap keys to compensate the keyboard difference between X11 and OSX; I hope I can get this solved this time because one thing I hate is having different key layout between the two.

I also have to find a decent way to have my documents available on both OS X and Linux at the same time, either by rsyncing them in the background or sharing them on NFS. It’s easier if I got them available everywhere at once.

The tinderbox is currently not running, because I wouldn’t have time to review the build logs, in the past eight days I turned on the PlayStation 3 exactly twice, one earlier today to try relaxing with Street Fighter IV (I wasn’t able to), and the other time just to try one thing about UPnP and HD content. I was barely able to watch last week’s Bill Maher episode, and not much more. I seriously lack the precious resource that time is. And this is after I show the thing called “real life” almost entirely out of the door.

I sincerely feel absolutely energy-deprived; I guess it’s also because I didn’t have my after-lunch coffee, but there are currently two salesman boring my mother with some vacuum cleaner downstairs and I’d rather not go meet them. Sigh. I wish life were easy, at least once an year.