I added line wrapping and indenting so users don’t have to manually put in line-breaks to get nicer looking outputs, but there is the drawback that it makes the output harder to grep. Perhaps I should add an option to disable the line wrapping.

Here is a longer example with some simple option parsing (apologies for using getopt; I’m currently looking for a better solution).

Once I figured out how to set it up (not too hard, but more work than usual), it’s been my favorite application for playing music. While GUI clients exist, I’ve been enjoying the command-line client MPC, as I can do things like this:

…which greps my whole music library for files with “Sigur” in the title, then adds them to the current playlist.

I also wanted to set up some key combos, so I didn’t have to execute commands in a terminal all the time. I used XBindKeys to bind some keys to mpc commands. For instance, the following commands toggles play/pause status (with Ctrl + the multimedia play button), skips to the next song (with Ctrl + multimedia next button), stops playback (with Ctrl + Alt + multimedia play button), and shows the currently playing song in a notification window (with Super + multimedia play button):

And what about memory usage? It’s currently playing a song and only using 8Mb. For comparison, I just fired up Rhythmbox and while idle it uses 47Mb.

Note-sharing is not a new idea, but it seems to have not been implemented yet. The basic ideas are that users of Tomboy should be able to get notes from others, give others their own notes, possibly sync them, resolve conflicts (as with synchronization), and be able to limit what notes are shared. Nobody seems to have mentioned real-time collaborative editing, but I don’t think it’s a good idea at this point, either.

I think there is not all that much that needs to be changed to allow sharing. Essentially, one must be able to synchronize subsets of notes, rather than all notes, and synchronize them in different locations (perhaps multiple). notebooks have been implemented, and they do a decent job of grouping notes, but they don’t add all that much functionally. I think users should be able to sync single notes, notebooks, or all notes with various locations. By doing so, I could keep all of my notes synchronized with my Ubuntu One account, and also sync my notebook for course notes to another server. My classmates can have an account with this other server, and by syncing with it we are sharing notes. If there’s a conflict, Tomboy should solve it in the simplest way possible (maybe prefix the conflicting lines with the username of the author?), or allow a user to launch an external diffing tool, such as Meld or WinDiff.

I’m sure there are issues I haven’t thought about too hard, such as how to deal with links to notes that don’t exist (e.g. outside of a shared notebook), what happens when users change, say, notebook names, Tomboy version or plugin mismatches, etc. But on the surface it seems that expanding synchronization to allow for syncing subsets of notes will allow for simple sharing.

I also recently found a blog post about embedding python in LaTeX files [UPDATE: post appears to have gone offline. Here is a backup copy of python.sty, thanks to Steve Checkley]. Using this with CairoPlot, it is easy to put the chart-producing code directly in my .tex files and compile. This reduces the extra step of making separate python scripts to produce these charts. Here is some sample code from a paper I’m currently writing:

I do have some gripes about python.sty, though. I have to remember to use the latex command with the “–shell-escape” option. Also, it produces files for the python code, stderr and stdout output, and I don’t particularly care for the directory getting cluttered up with temporary files. Because of these annoyances, I might forgo the python.sty method and just keep a python script that generates all the charts.