Antiprocrastination tools

This online magazine reviewed some antiprocrastination tools, including my own Pomodoro Desktop. I have to say that I didn't know this magazine, and I didn't know some of the tools reviewed. But the review inspired me to add some new features to Pomodoro: I liked very much the ideas behind Self Control.

The main idea is to block ports and addresses using ipfw (which is embedded in OSX) during your focus time, with black and white lists. That means you can't possibly look at your email, go to facebook or stuff like in your pomodoro time. It's technically easy to code - just craft and send some commands to ipfw - but very effective.

I'll probably add these features to my Pomodoro in one of the next releases: I can't see a way to integrate smoothly, because Self Control uses its own timer

Getting rid of Wordpress...

Aha, at last I finally decided to get rid of Wordpress: sql injections were really a plague and I didn't have time to stay up to date (nor it is easy to update automatic installs on servage)

Here it is what I did:

1) I exported my wordpress blog. You have only to login to your WordPress account, navigate to the Dashboard, look for the Export link. Wordpress will produce a WXR file (Wordpress eXtended Rss) which you will be able to save to your local machine.

2) Go to Wordpress2Blogger, browse the saved WXR document and click Convert and save that file to your local machine. This second XML file is a blogspot specific file.

3) Create your blog on blogspot.com and choose the XML export file you just produced in the Import Blog Tool. Alternatively if you already own a blogspot blog, go to the panel, choose the "Settings -> General". On the first row, immediately before the "Title" filed (yes, it's just a little hidden) there are import and export links. Just click on import and you will see immediately all your old posts and comments

4) After creating my blogspot blog, I wanted to integrate in my site, using my domain name and my look and feel: to do that I just configured the great Rapidblog plugin from Loghound software in my Rapidweaver project. You basically only need to give the blogspot username/password to the plugin.

Et voilà, a complete blog migration in less than one pomodoro! Bye bye wordpress.

Pomodoro desktop for Mac

Just announced my Pomodoro desktop client for mac. It is a simple but effective way to manage your (coding) time. I am planning to add a lot of interesting features to it, so stay tuned!

Da Java a Logo...

scherzo, ovviamente.

Però qui potete trovare il materiale del corso di programmazione che ho organizzato per i bambini della scuola elementare Maurizio Poggiali, in via Benedetto Croce. Per rendere il post minimamente più interessante, con antlr sto anche cercando di implementare un interprete migliore di quello scritto "a mano" in kde. Ovviamente tanto non lo finirò mai, ma questa è un'altra storia :)