I've released a new version of the addon, with several major improvements over the previous v0.9 version.

The addon now features the following major functions:

• Create tasks using shortcuts
• Displaying the tasks
• Editing the tasks

A new separate function was added for shorthand parsing (Alt-h) This will parse the shorthand nodes without opening the action list. The function can be used to add new attributes to already existing nodes using the shorthand as well.

The action window is completely rewritten to use more effective Groovy specific API-s. The lists are initially positioned on the first item. The clipboard code is fully rewritten, now it supports structured data output as well as comprehensible plain text output.

An exciting new feature is, that you can now specify context icons, that will automatically convert from icon to context attribute and back.

There is a new action editor window. This can be used for those who like GUI forms over text based shorthands. It's accessible using F4 on any action node.

The release is available on the release site

The new release can be downloaded here

I'm close to release the final 1.0 version of the add-on. This beta contains several improvements over the previous 0.9 release.

Map view

• Action to parse shorthands
  • Shorthands can be converted into actions using a menu item. The default hotkey assigned to this is Alt-h
  • Safeguards are built in so the decoration items are not multiplied
  • If a node already contains action markers, it's body will be parsed. The attributes will be added from the shorthand notation. Existing attributes will be overwritten.
• Shorthand parser option to convert ? to corresponding marker
  • As a convenience function shorthands starting with ? will always be converted to ? icon
• Marker to scope Icons can be defined to be used as scope markers. These icons will always be converted to the scope defined in the configuration.
  
  • Use "Icon: @ScopeName" in any node body, along with an icon on this node, to define a marker for the given scope.
  • Any nodes containing this icon will have the corresponding scope attribute set, when either the shorthands are parsed, or the action list is shown.
  • Any tasks in this scope will receive this icon.
• Editor form for  modifying actions

Action view

• Multi-level projects
  • The projects are presented and grouped by all their top projects shown on the path.
• New preference settings
  • In the addon preferences you can set which pane is to be shown by default on the action list.
  • You can set weather to show the completed items per default
• Behavior changes
  • The action list will be closed when an action item is selected and the item will be focused on the map.
  • The tabs will be scrolled to the top by default
• Clipboard update
  • The copy to clipboard function is reworked to support both TXT/HTML exports

Under the hood

• Rework ui to use groovy's SwingBuilder
  
  • The entire user interface was reworked to use Groovy like constructs

The preview can be downloaded from the release site or using this direct link.

I've repackaged the Freeplane GTD+ add-on, adding a couple of interesting new features.

The code was heavily refactored, with more to come.

• Added global preference to filter completed tasks
• Added Hungarian translation
• Allow to re-parse items by placing an * in the front
  
  • Don't allow multiple instances of decoration icons to come from shorthand
  • The shorthand parsing can be redone on a node, by adding a * in the begining of the line.
  • This is useful to add/update attributes when needed.
  • The parsing should NOT erase the already existing attributes, but update them instead.
• Re-parse for changed task attributes for nodes with the Next action marker
  
  • The same as above, except considering all items that have the action marker
• Added new support for converting ? to corresponding ? marker
  
  • I like to use this marker to disambiguate questionable items from final markers. This feature can be used to precede the * in the shorthand
• Add preference to select default view
  
  • Find it in global preferences
• Add preference to show/hide done items per default
• Multi-level projects
  
  • Allow collecting the project hierarchy for the actions, and display them accordingly.
  • eg. The done tasks in this file should be displayed for project "Previous releases/v0.9" instead of 'v0.9'
• Close window when selecting an item from the list

For the curious the package is available under the github sources and can be downloaded from here.

Please see the project page for usage and details.

Download

The addon is available for download here.

Features

This is the initial addon release after forking FreePlaneGTD.

• Added default shortcut (Ctrl+H)
• Added keyboard shortcut to close window with ESC
• Added completed action handling
  
  • configurable icon
  • done actions displayed with overstrike on overview
  • done actions can be filtered
• Added date parsing to unify date formats
• Renamed "Where" tab to "Context" to be more GTD compliant

Almost a year passed since my experimental "honeypot" post on the spam received on my blog. As I then decided, I let all spam comments through, that were not captured by the Spam Karma. I did this about 3-4 times in the passed months, as I don't spend much time on the administration interface. Based on an emerging pattern I observed I then started to do this more frequently in the recent weeks.

Currently I'm working on a major technical upgrade, that involves the upgrade of several infrastructure components including WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal Server and JBoss EAP. This requires all a "fresh" installation of all the applications that reside on these components. All JEE containers currently in the system are being upgraded, so it opens a window of opportunity to get a huge overhaul of the system.

(NB. As I have to rebuild the entire application stack multiple times a day, I've been referenced as Lord Builder or Darth Builder by my highly esteemed colleagues)

I keep this blog mostly for my personal journal, so I won't forget what I worked on, and to keep my writing skills up. I never thought anyone would seriously be interested in what I wrote, so I've paid little attention to the comments I received for my posts. To keep the steady flow of spam at minimum, I've set up Spam Karma 2, and didn't worry too much about it anymore.

Just now when I entered the admin area for routine upgrade, I've noticed that beside the 2500 spam comments I also have about 30 not marked as spam, and I became curious. Are these real comments, or have they bypassed the spam filter?

This post is for summarizing the information about the time-lapse movie I mentioned in my earlier posts titled Using a standard web camera to capture a time-lapse on Linux and Compiling UVC driver for Linux with still image support.

As it turns out this topic is one that was actually read by someone out there (based on two feedbacks I received), I decided to publish my findings.

To support my web camera project and enable it to use higher resolutions I need to patch the UVC driver in the kernel with still image support found on https://github.com/yangh/uvcvideo.

First the chages made in that project to the standard UVC driver were merged with the driver in 3.0.4 kernel I'm running now.

The newly compiled driver seems to work ok, however the capture utility (also found there) doesn't seem to produce output. I got as far as identifying the way it should be parametrized, unfortunately I always recieve a memory allocation exception. Based on the logs it seems that it's trying to allocate 0 bytes as an output buffer.

To trace that, I need to revive my long-extinct C(++) skills and maybe some gdb knowledge as well.

It's still a mystery to me why it doesn't work in the first place.

If I'm done with that I'll try to include this capture method in the http://www.firestorm.cx/fswebcam/ project and maybe replace the entire current capture with that.

It's been a long planned project, promised to my spouse, to capture the garden's growth and continous change on a time-lapse movie. I wanted to do it for over a year, but it took quite a while to set the system up and running. The stages I went through to get it done are to be documented in this article. The current version of the camera is available here