Roundup, April 2017 - A hole new perspective on falling into bottomless pits

Today, I'm doing something a little bit different: I've created a video for this update!

Additional Comments

It has been a while since I last posted any videos, and this is my first attempt at making something more detailed than a simple playthrough. In my opinion, the result is ok. I think it was a pretty good decision, given that I mostly worked on graphical stuff this month.

The video contains an overview of the update, but I wanted to add a couple of details that didn't make it in:

1. Axis inputs received a few changes that I didn't mention. First of all, they are no longer 2d. Each axis is independent. They're also missing the "joystick emulation" input smoothing at the moment. I'll be adding that back at a later point.
2. I've made a ton of bugfixes this month. There were a lot of things (especially in the core module) that didn't quite work, but testing them didn't seem worth doing until I had an actual use for them. Now that I'm building demos, I'm running into the issues and fixing them naturally.
3. Lastly, I've written a bunch of macros for printing out certain structs to logs. This makes debugging much easier, because I can quickly print out the value of a matrix/vector/quat with little effort.

Goals

Let's start with the current state of the project:

• Time left: about 3 1/2 months
• Application Module: Done 
• Audio Module: Not Started
• Core Module: Done
• Editor Module: Not Started
• Gameplay Module: 80%
• Missing joystick emulation for input
• Graphics Module: 40%
• Missing sprites
• Missing text
• Missing framebuffers
• Missing particles
• Math Module: Done
• Resource Module: Not started

I'm making pretty good time right now. My goal for May is to knock out the Audio and Resource modules, which will leave me a couple months to reimplement the more advanced graphical features and make API easier to use. I've decided not to bother with the editor module for now, because it won't be useful for game jams and concept work. Instead, I'm going to work on it after the deadline has passed.

Next week, I'll be unveiling a new schedule and discussing my forays into Taskwiki in more detail.

Getting Organized - 3 - Impressions on Taskwiki

It's been a week since I started playing around with taskwiki, and I'm going to share my thoughts on it so far. Two weeks isn't enough to get a truly complete view of the plugin, but I still have a few things that I can discuss.

At this point, I've set up a nice segmented todo list on the front page of my wiki. By carefully assembling some taskwarrior filters, I've created 3 main sections: Today, This Week, and This Month. The sections are pretty self-explanatory. I haven't played around with making tasks for my projects yet, so for now it's mostly a way to track chores and real life commitments. So far, it has been pretty helpful in that regard!

I gave my initial thoughts on taskwiki in my previous post, and now that I've had more time with it I've compiled a more detailed list of thoughts:

The good

•  It takes out a lot of the tedium of using taskwarrior, and it's easier to commit to. Having an interactive interface lets me keep it open all the time, rather than forcing me to remember to pull it up regularly.
• Using taskwarrior's filters with taskwiki makes them much easier to deal with. Without taskwiki, I'd need to type out (or tab-complete) several filters and call taskwarrior with each one. With taskwiki, I can use filters with more of a "set it and forget it" attitude.

The bad

• I ran into an annoying bug today. Taskwiki updates the status of your tasks when you save the page. However, if a task is shown in several spots then these copies can conflict with each other. For instance, you could mark a task as done, then see it "un-mark" itself because another copy wasn't marked. I doubt it'll happen very often, but it's an inconsistency that will surely return to annoy me in the future.
• To add a new task to a list, you can just add a new line at the end. This is good! However, adding a new line at the heading with the filter or in the middle of the list doesn't add a new task. This makes the feature much more vexing than it really ought to be.
• Setting a specific date on a task feels pretty inflexible, because you need to write out the date (e.g. 2017-05-01 rather than 05-01 or May 1). To get around this, I've set up my lists to choose dates for me when I add tasks to them.
• Even with my list in front of me, I still tend to ignore things outside of the "Today" category. If I set a task for something that I need to do this week, I probably won't pay it much attention until the date gets close. This isn't a taskwiki problem, but I definitely need to do something about it.

To sum up the above list, I like the convenience of taskwiki but it has several niggling issues that annoy me. For now, I think I can live with them.

Next week will be something different, but I'll be back with more thoughts once I start making wiki pages for my projects.

Taking a break this week

Just a quick update to say that the next 'Getting Organized' post will be arriving next week. Some may choose to find this delay ironic, but in this case I've realized that the week is going to keep me too busy to make a proper post.

Getting Organized - 2 - Looking at Options

Last week, I wrote about my plan to try and help myself get organized. After that, I spent the week trying out tools and planning.

What's available?

The taskwarrior site has a tools page, where a number of tools and scripts are listed. There weren't many that looked useful, but I was able to find a handful of relevant tools and tried them out.

Tasky

Doesn't work. It's a few years old, so I suppose that's to be expected.

Taskswamp

Taskswamp is a python script that creates a tmux session with predefined taskwarrior filters. Basically, it lets you create a window with several tabs, each displaying different views of your tasks.

Some thoughts

1. Taskswamp doesn't update its view without user intervention. This means that you have to press a button to refresh whenever the window is resized or your tasks change.
2. It also fails to start up properly unless you open another tmux session first. I could use a script to do that automatically, but it's still a little bit of extra effort.
3. Lastly, it puts the new session inside of Xterm. It doesn't offer a choice of terminals, or check environment variables for your default terminal. That's unfortunate, although I could probably live with it.

Tasknc

(note: text redacted)

Tasknc is an interactive curses-based client for taskwarrior. It theoretically supports all of the basic features of taskwarrior, such as creating, editing, and deleting tasks.

Some thoughts

1. Tasknc doesn't seem to be actively developed. This is unfortunate, because it has a few bugs.
2. Unlike Taskswamp, the view will automatically refresh when the window is resized. You still have to refresh it when your tasks change, but that's ok because it supports all the basic editing actions from within its UI.
3. Deleting a task seems to make the application hang indefinitely. In addition, the add task command seems to display the wrong information. Both of these issues seem to have a workaround, but basic features being broken without extra configuration isn't a good sign going forward.

Taskwiki

So taskwiki is actually pretty great! It acts as an extension to the 'vimwiki' vim plugin. Basically, vimwiki lets you make...wait for it...wikis in vim. Taskwiki takes the concept a step further, by adding the ability to just throw a little checklist into any wiki page which automagically becomes a set of tasks managed by taskwarrior. Basically, it gives you a text-based method of managing your tasks.

You might be wondering why I like taskwiki so much, despite the fact that it fulfills none of my stated goals. It took me some thinking to figure out why I was so attracted to it, but I think I've figured out the reason: It gives your tasks a greater context. Sure, you can add tags and projects in taskwarrior, but this lets you organize and annotate those tasks however you want. You can make a new page in your wiki, write down some general description of something you want to do, then add a checklist of actionable goals to it. Those goals can then show up in checklists elsewhere, where you can check on their status or update them, and in the main wiki page you can add notes and other details as you make progress. Personally, I find that very exciting.

Some thoughts

1. Taskwiki is actively developed/maintained. This is good.
2. Resizes nicely, but you have to manually refresh your tasks.
3. It was a huge pain to set up (about an hour of work). This is no longer important, but I figured it was good to mention.

Constructing a plan

I didn't find anything that really fills the niche that I'm looking for. I think I can adopt taskwiki to handle some of my needs, but I'll also need to make something to fill some of the gaps. So, here's the plan:

1. Try to use taskwiki seriously for a while. I want to see how well using a wiki for organization actually works in practice, and there's only one way to do that. Next week, I'm going to write up a more detailed overview of vimwiki and taskwiki.
2. After that, I'm going to start building some scripts to cover the features that I want. While I can't precisely say what I'll need yet, I'm expecting that I'll want some way to be directly notified of upcoming tasks, and I'll probably also want a way to quickly pull up the wiki when I log in.

Ad before you get worried about dfgame, don't! I've been working on it behind the scenes, and you'll hear more about my progress in a few weeks.

Getting Organized - 1 - Selection

One problem that I've been dealing with these past few months is organization. As the past 4 1/2 years of blogging should have made clear, I am not very good at managing my time and priorities. Now that I'm working 40 hours a week, the problem has gotten bad enough to seriously annoy me. So, I've decided to try and solve this problem the only way I know how: With software.

Looking back

I've tried a few pieces of software for keeping track of important dates and tasks. None of them have really stuck so far, so my first instinct was to write my own solution. However, I'm not going to do that. After seriously considering the idea for a minute, I've reached the obvious conclusion that creating a new project to try and improve my time situation is only going to make things worse. Instead, I decided to try and look at the problems with previous approaches and solve them.

Something???

In the months before and just after starting this blog, I was using some kind of todo list software. I remember almost nothing about it, including the name, and I can't find it anymore.

Google Calendar

During my college career, I used Google Calendar to keep track of classes and events. Beyond that, I never really bothered with it. My main issue with Google Calendar is the fact that it's an online service. I prefer to keep most of my applications off the web, mostly because webapps:

1. Take up a disproportionately large amount of system resources to run.
2. Won't work without an internet connection (duh).
3. Take up an extra tab in my web browser.
4. Usually collect personal information to sell/profit from.

 I see the appeal for most "normal people", but I can't stand webapps. This disqualifies Google Calendar right off the bat.

Calcurse

 For a while, I used a terminal application called Calcurse. Calcurse is an interesting program, because it gives you a nice curses-based calendar UI in the terminal. However, I had a couple of big complaints:

1. The way that Calcurse handles todo lists leaves a lot to be desired. Unlike regular appointments, the program doesn't let you add items to your todo list with any sort of time attached. If you want to do something by next week, you need to make an appointment, rendering the todo list useless. Worse still, Calcurse won't try to warn you about the appointment ahead of time besides tossing you a notification a few hours or minutes before.
2. In practice, Calcurse is incredibly aggravating to use. When you start it up, you have to hit enter to pass a message saying that it has loaded up. You have to do the same thing when you exit, but then it also prompts you just to be sure you want to quit after that. So, you have to hit 3 different buttons in turn to exit, for no good reason. It might not seem too bad at first, but it's super annoying and I don't know of any method to disable it. On top of that, it splits everything into 3 different panes, and you have to cycle between them with the tab key. They couldn't give you a "go back" or "go next", or just 3 buttons to select the specific mode that you want. Nope, they decided that you'd have to press tab until you got where you wanted.

 This program is a usability nightmare. I'd like to avoid using it.

Taskwarrior

...This brings me to the last option, going by things that I've used previously. Taskwarrior is a task management program that works really well for keeping todo lists and does a good job of prioritizing tasks.

I really like Taskwarrior, but I can't ever seem to make it stick. The main reason for this is probably because it's a basic command-line tool. There's no interface, only commands. This makes using it pretty inconvenient, as you can't just keep a view open to glance at or see notifications when time-sensitive tasks are coming up. Taskwarrior is more of an interface than a user-friendly application, which makes using it without any extra tools pretty annoying.

Of the options I've looked at, I think Taskwarrior is a pretty clear choice. While I still have to do some work to get it working, most of the heavy lifting will be already done for me. Hopefully, this will keep the time investment for this solution low. Hopefully, I'll be posting updates on this soon after I make more progress. Stay tuned!