The mini-post Bill Gates’ favourite prime number, encrypted below, can only be read on a friday. Here’s why.

[BEGIN URLCRYPT decode at lce.xamai.ca/urlcrypt.php]

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[END URLCRYPT]

Geeky Mom : Why am I blogging?. Been there before. Sooner or later all non-pseudonomenous bloggers are faced with the same dilemmas. There’s really no answer or advice to give except : blog when you feel like it, if not do something different, after all its just one of those billion of blogs around.

Texmaker : another LaTeX-frontend, possibly having a few extras such as : a structure-pane including labels you gave to formulas, theorems etc. (click on them brings you to them). Intend to use it now as I’m in another rewrite of the never-ending-book..

Microformats : “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” May have another look.

Quicksilver : a recurring link. At times when I feel learning key-strokes may save me a lot of time I have (another) go at Quicksilver. Last week, Ive reinstalled this blog more or less post by post and used keystrokes to send a line in the SQL-file of the database dump of NEB as a clipping to Scrivener to MultiMarkdown it further. I used the app Service Scrubber to define my own key-strokes. Must have another go at Quicksilver soon. Im sure it distinguishes ‚”power mac users” from the rest of us.

List of GTDTools : a good list of GTD-software. I’m probably just too chaotic for GTD to improve my workflow but somehow I cannot resist trying some of these things out.

LifeDEV : One of those sites that tells me I should take GTD more seriously

DoIt : One of these GTD-tools. It is said to go well with Quicksilver, so maybe, one day.

Think : Here a little seemingly completely useless tool which works well (at least for me). No, it does not make you think, but at least it helps you while you are thinking (or doing anything a bit focussed). Install it and enjoy! The principle is that it just blocks out all other open windows (and there are keystrokes (yes, again) to get you quickly in and out.) Besides, it looks great. It’s in my dock and this says it all

Thinkature : a brainstorming tool. Dont know why I did bookmark this. Perhaps one day, a few years from now

Stafford Talk : a talk by Toby Stafford I came across by accident. Maybe there are other interesting talks on the site?

Science Scouts : a great idea! Give yourself badges for how well you do science (or talk/write about science). Have to collect my badges soon. I’m sure this only works for people with a scouting-history, but who knows?

MacResearch : Here’s a site that may become useful. MacResearch.org is an open and independent community for scientists using Mac OS X and related hardware in their research. It is the mission of this site to cultivate a knowledgeable and vibrant community of researchers to exchange ideas and information, and collectively escalate the prominence of Apple technologies in the scientific research community. They have some interesting articles and tutorials on e.g. DevonThink and BibDesk etc. Worth to revisit.

Jennifer in love : well‚ should I say something about this? probably best not.

Breakthrough CLI : another pamphlet in favor of the Command Line! A must read for those who perfer GUIs to CLIs.

CLI - the site : Rod is working hard on CLI-20. Whenever he releases version 2.0, neverendingbooks will be among the first sites to run it. I still love the idea.

Why do I bother? : an n-category post I got briefly interested in, but was somehow flooded by professional math-philosophers

Newton Legacy Reviewed : just that, a first review on the next bookmark.

the Newton Legacy : a free online book, a murder mystery with a physics touch. Perhaps this is the best investment of time/energy : write a popular science book rather than another paper. Read half way through it (sorry but not the best prose Ive read so far), may continue but was held up reading a (real) murder mystery Equinox featuring also Newton and alchemy (must be in the air somehow), also not the best mystery read so far

Stalking with Googleearth : no comment

(to be continued)

Can software help mathematicians to keep up with the neverending (sic) flood of new research material? In the past I touched this already… Recently, there is a new fairly active Google group the efficient academic which describes its interests as

Professors, Instructors, and Graduate Students interested in getting things done more easily and quickly. We discuss organization, task management, and tools that helps us to be more productive and not procrastinate. We tend to discuss David Allen’s GTD system but not exclusively. (278 members)

Personally, I think GTD is far too management-driven to be useful in research, but I’m equally convinced that there are nice programs around that I have to delve deeper into, in particular DevonThinkPro.
Fortunately, Serkan Cabi has written two interesting posts on applications of DevonThink to physics-research :

• DEVONthink for Scientists: Part I
• DEVONthink for Scientists: Part II

which can help me a bit. In the second post appears another useful resource for the average desperate present-day ringtheorist. Joanna Karczmarek can help you to put the Hep-th on Your Harddrive. A mere 8Gb containing all material published on hep-th over the years, just waiting to be put in a database-tool like DevonThink or, if you still need an excuse to buy one, on your iPod to read on your daily commute…

I just started putting my mind on tracks but it will take me a couple of days to offload most of the crap that keeps me awake at night. There are three main components to Tracks: Next actions, Contexts and Projects.

“Contexts are very flexible, and can be places, states of mind or modes of working in which actions can be taken. Next actions can be assigned to and sorted by context so that you know when you are able to make progress with items. e.g. “Library”, “Shops” or “Tired”.” So far I added only 10 contexts : @inbox, @books, @email, @home, @neverending, @courses, @other, @papers, @computer and @personal. Probably I’ll have to add others such as @refereeing etc.

“Projects : any goal which requires more than one next action to take it to completion is a Project. In Tracks, you can view your next actions by Project.” So far I added the first few things that came to mind ranging from small-easy things such as Learn VoodooPad over Paper with Jan to neverending-things like Write nag@n !

“Next actions : These are the heart of GTD. They are the very next physical action that can be taken on something. It’s best to phrase these in an active way e.g. “Call Bob about the committee meeting” or “Search for a reputable garage”.” Up to now I merely added the next foreseeable action in each project together with a few urgent persoanl matters. It is a good idea to give each of these a deadline so they appear on the screen with a color-code giving the date and red (urgent), orange (coming up) to green (some day). I realize I’ve been rather relaxed about my projects so far!

More information on tracks can be found here. Try it out!

Perhaps I can surprise you by admitting that I’ve spend a lot of time lately getting through Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, 250+ pages of management babble. Probably you will even be shocked when I tell you that this book is published in the same series as Body Talk at Work, Corporate Charisma, More Time Less Stress, Mrs Moneypenny : Survival in the City and more of these. All in all, it wasn’t so bad. It is a bit pompous at times, could be 50% condensed but I wanted to find out first hand what all the GTD hype was about (see this post for some of the more interesting links).

I’m not looking for a miracle method to become more productive or focussed (although I wouldn’t mind either at the moment). No, my main motivation is simply : I want to be able to sleep better!

This requires some explaining. The last couple of months, I regularly wake up in the middle of the night and as there are plenty of things on my mind, I start brooding on them and, more often than not, loose a couple of hours sleep/night. And these quickly add up! Now, the basis of the GTD-mantra is getting all the stuff out of your head to reach the mind like water state whatever that means. And I can see some sense in putting all your current projects and worries somewhere on paper or computer, setting up a system that forces you to read through these lists at regular intervals, plan next actions and update the lists accordingly. If you trust this system it just may free your mind from all the stuff!

At a later stage I may end up setting up such a system following the suggestions of the DevonThink Forum or using VoodooPad but at the moment all I want is to offload my mind as quickly as possible to a GTD-able database.

Fortunately, But She’s a Girl has compiled such a system : Tracks, a GTD Web Application. At first I did the mistake following the generic install instructions and quickly got lost in downloading packages from SourceForge etc. until I found that there was an easy Mac OS X Install Page. There is a Ruby and Rails .dmg package but first you have to install Tcl/Tk Aqua. After these easy steps, you have to follow the install man page which involves setting up a MySQL database and filling it with the required tables (I have been using phpmyadmin for this, but discovered in the process CocoaMySQL which makes all this even simpler). Finally, you have to get to prompt-level and type the magic commands

cd Sites/tracks

ruby script/server “”environment=production” port=3030

(note to self : make this a StartUp item as otherwise you have to redo this step whenever you want to add material). Then, http://127.0.0.1:3030/login/signup gets you to a nice webpage-interface and you can start to offload your mind of stuff. I’ll report later whether it did have any effect at all!.