Back from Tokamak II
ervin | February 10, 2009 | 23:27This week-end I attended the Tokamak Mark II, so the second Plasma developers sprint. I was a really packed week-end, but that’s really enjoyable to have every body at hands. It’s of course a pleasure to team up again with very good friends like Aaron, Alexis, Rich and the humongous Sebas.
It’s also nice to have everybody on the deck ready for action. And action we had, lots of different topics got covered: from the framework itself, to the appearance of the shell, it’s interaction with the other major part of the desktop (namely kwin), the integration of the features from Qt kinetic, etc.
Personally I tried to focus as much as possible on our service framework, so for that I’m writing a library which will help delegating all the service work to Jolie. It’s not there yet, but we’re definitely seeing progresses. I can currently write a program which loads Jolie’s metaservice, fires up a service description and talks to it. It “just” needs to be wrapped into a nice API now. Jolie is really a pleasant piece of software to work with.
Also on the first day, I talked about my new pet project: Zanshin. A new todo/action management software, I’m using it daily for a couple of weeks already without major issues. Of course it’s still a bit rough, and I have great plans for it in order to help people to integrate it in there workflow. I want something simple and flexible. I’ll probably blog more about that in the coming weeks.
I’ll end this post with a quote I used in my talk about Zanshin:
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. — Shunryu Suzuki
I expect a 10 page essay about this quote on my desk next week. 
I was thinking that a GTD Plasmoid would be a cool way to start hacking with Plasma for me. I’m glad to see that a real kde developer had the same idea (of course if I understand correctly what Zanshin is).
My first feature request: make it a drag&drop target for everything! It would be cool for instance to drag an email and automatically create a todo with the email attached, or drag a piece of text and create a todo with the text as the description, or drag an URL and create a todo with a link, or drag a file and create a todo with the file attached…
In GTD there should be a very easy way to collect “thoughts”, and I think that drag&drop is a very easy and intuitive way to collect things in a central “storage system”.
Thank you very much for your effort!
I’m looking forward to the first release of Zanshin — task management software is something I’m always on the lookout for, because I’ve never found anything that works quite the way I need it to.
Also, as an aikidoka, I can definitely appreciate the name you’ve given it.
@baxeico: The way I understand it, Zanshin implies ultimate focus and attention to a task before, during, and after the performance of that task. It’s often translated to english as “follow through” or “following through.”
The relation of Zanshin with GTD was suggested to me by an aseigo’s tweet on identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/notice/2171626
Maybe we have to wait a future blog post from Kevin to better understand what is it.
You can already have a wonderfull GTD plasmoid using Yokadi the CLI GTD tool and the plasmoid that loop on shell command
See Aurélien post on planet :
http://agateau.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/and-now-for-something-different-introducing-yokadi/
Well, if that’ll be able to store my todos in a webservice or a kolab server, link them with my mail, group my other resources in projects maybe I’ll think of it. The way yokadi is done though I think it’s not going to happen though.
Different user targets I’d say.
@ervin:
wow, zanshin is supposed to do all these neat things? I’m eagerly waiting for a your blog post on the topic. Thank you!
Salut!
Shunryu Suzuki’s quote has something about the vacuous truth in set theory.
I once had dinner with a bunch of logicians. Someone was inquiring the others about how was food. And he said “Ho! Paul has not been served yet. Anyway. Paul finds the food OK. Everything is true of the elements of the empty set.”
We surely knew how to have fun…