We've Moved

Dear Visitor,

Desi Penguin’s blog has moved to its own domain.

All the existing posts will still be available here for at least some time. Eventually I plan to delete this blog.

The new posts will be available only at http://desipenguin.com/techblog

Please Update your Bookmarks !!

-Desi Penguin

Ingredients

• todo.sh – This is a command line shell scripts which allows to manage your TO DO list
• DropBox Account : Free, Syncs various computers, Cross Platform (at least works on Windows as well as Linux)

Recipe

• Make Sure you have installed Dropbox clients on all of your machines (Mainly Work and Home)
• Download and install todo.sh in your Dropbox folder. This is main trick to make your TODO list portable.
• You need to modify the .todo file (or todo.py script itself) to set the TODO_DIR variable. I’ve created a folder called “tododir” in my Dropbox folder, and set the TODO_DIR variable as “tododir”. This helps avoiding path problems on various machines.
• (Optional) Read the tutorial available at LifeHacker
• Open command Prompt, and take charge of your TODO lists.

Why This Idea Rocks

• Since the todo list is maintained as simple text file, any machine/platform allows you to directly view and edit your todo list.
• While one would install Dropbox clients on all of their regularly used machines, You can always view and edit your todo.txt even from a cyber cafe, using Dropbox’s web interface.

Are you on Windows ?

• If you are on Windows, you will require cygwin which provides unix utilities on windows. (I was unable to get todo.sh working with mSys, which I got as part of mSys Git (More about it later, in another post))
• There is a variation of todo.sh written in Python (which is what I’m using these days). If which case, you need Python instead of Cygwin. Python version supports color coding of the items based on priority even on Windows.

Can I not just use USB Drive instead ?

• Sure you can.  But some employers do not allow the employees to connect their personal USB devices to office computers. (Security, Virus threats) in which case Dropbox is better alternative.
• Even Cyber cafe won’t allow to plug in your USB drive, but you sure can access your files from Web Front end of Dropbox.

I used the subprocess module of python to invoke the external program. It was easy to capture the output sent on stdout. In order to send ‘y‘ on stdin for each iteration,  I tried sending ‘y‘ on stdin, but that would not work.  The script would hang. After discussing this, with more experienced python programmer, it was suggested that one possible reason why the script hangs is may be because the stdin buffer wasn’t flushed.  Both of us were not sure how to do that. Then it was discussed that when we run the external program from command line, we not only type ‘y‘ as response, but we also hit Enter there after, which results in flushing the stdin buffer. So may be that is what I ought to try.

To my surprise, it worked. So the solution was to pass ‘y/n‘ instead of single ‘y‘

Here is how my code looked like :

import subprocess
cmd = "...." # The command you wish to execute
proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd,
                       stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
                       stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
print proc.communicate('Y\n')[0]


1. Apart from the mini phone list, I also have my Plan of the Week, as another HTML on my Desktop. At the end of each week, I create the plan of next week (Friday 4-6PM). Again, it is very easy to convert any piece of text into an HTML.
2. Use a web page as Sticky Note to yourself. No Coding needed. Check this out.
3. You can put your Google Calendar on your Desktop.

Please share your ideas in the comments

I recently joined a smaller organization. Although there are over 50+ employees, I need to interact with about 5-6 people of regular basis, and another 4-5 on not so regular basis.  So although they have an Excel document containing a big list, I don’t want to refer to that document every time I need to make a call, so I created a short .html file containing the compressed extension list. Here is how you can do it too.

Create a phone list

1. Create a simple spreadsheet containing the name and extension. You can get creative and add their cell numbers as well, if you want.
2. Save this as HTML file. This option is available in OpenOffice.org (3.x) and I think even in MS Office as well
3. OR You can create your phone list as csv file, and use this script to convert it to HTML
4. If you like to have more control of how your HTML looks,  you can hand-code HTML code using simple HTML table. I used gvim to edit the file, but you can use your favorite editor.

Use it on your Desktop

1. Right Click on your Windows Desktop, Click on Properties Menu option.  You will be presented with Display Properties page
2. Click on the tab named Desktop
3. Click on Customize Desktop button located at the bottom of the tab.
4. Click on the tab named Web
5. Click on New, and point (using Browse button provided by the wizard, if needed) to the newly created HTML Page.
6. Make sure that your newly added page shows up in the list, and that the checkbox  is selected.
7. Click OK, to close the Desktop Items dialog. Also close the Display Properties dialog by clicking OK
8. Now you should see your Phone list on your Windows Desktop.

Now, whenever you need to refer to the phone list, all you need to do is press Windows+D to have a look at your desktop.

Note : I’ve tested this only on Windows XP, instructions might differ for Vista.