25 August 2008 17:46 - Since a few weeks I use the jnitodo todo list manager for managing my todo list. jnitodo was written by myself, so it matches my requirements quite well and it might match yours!

jnitodo has some nice features. First of all it is console based and written in perl. I tested it on Mac OSX and FreeBSD. Secondly it has support for GTD like contexts. Using contexts is in fact obligatory. It should be noted that wait is a special context which will ask for who or what you are waiting.

The feature I am most proud of however is its queueing support. Forget about manually adding all tasks. Think procmail. Think cron. Think atd. Think nagios. Think bluetooth. Think sftp. The sky is the limit.

How does the queue support work? In the config file of jnitodo you must define a queue directory. In this directory you can place files with lines in one of the following formats:
context:todo
wait:who:waitingfor
i.e. a line in a queue file could be:
train:write blog post about jnitodo
wait:Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen:release of a new jnitodo version
Note that the queue function will not add duplicate entries to your existing todo list.

The usage of jnitodo is quite simple. You need to create a config file with lines like:
todofile=/Users/jnieuwen/files/t/todos/todo.txt
queuedir=/Users/jnieuwen/queue/jnitodo
Of course you need to adjust the paths to match your situation. Then you have to make sure you have an empty todofile. So create it with touch /Users/jnieuwen/files/t/todos/todo.txt where of course you need to substitute /Users/jnieuwen/files/t/todos/todo.txt for your value of the todofile parameter in the config file.

Now you can run jnitodo with the command:
jnitodo.pl /path/to/config_file
For usage information you can press the ? key to get the help.

jnitodo can be downloaded here. It should be noted that there is room for improvement in jnitodo.

Questions? Ideas? Send an email or drop them in the comments.

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13 August 2008 12:51 - Yesterday I ran into a bug in my Samsung S1060 digital camera. If you press the view photos button while the red-eye flash pictogram is flashing white and red it hangs and becomes unresponsive.

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11 August 2008 12:59 - While migrating my account to another machine which uses openldap authentication I ran into the problem that cron were not working on the new machine. A quick look in the logs revealed the following error:

Aug 11 08:52:00 shell /usr/sbin/cron[82693]: (jnieuwen) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)

Some googling did not give any usefull results, but was quite clear to me that it had to do with a openldap or pam configuration issue. Taking a quick look at my /etc/pam.d/cron I noticed that no openldap config was in that file. Hence I added

account sufficient /usr/local/lib/pam_ldap.so

And after a restart of the cron daemon everything was working again.

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