Posts about software

bitlbee and Usable OTR

October 2nd, 2009

Are you using bitlbee? Are your friends annoying you insisting on asking you nicely to use OTR? Then use this branch: http://khjk.org/bitlbee-otr/

But, what if your friends have a RL aren’t online and you still want to spam send them some nice message? Once OTR established a context, it won’t let go, so you will still send them encrypted messages, but once they come back, they probably won’t be able to read it. Sucks. But! There is hope! Use this small patch: otr.patch

Now bitlbee will only send encrypted messages when the recipient is actually online and otherwise fall back on plaintext. A little bit less secure, a whole lot more convenient. Yay!

ashuku – a personal statistics tool

September 16th, 2009

Statistics. I love statistics. And graphs. Graphs are cool, too.

It’s funny, actually. I really suck at statistics. I have a hard time understanding probabilities and statistics is probably the one mathematical field I understand the least. But I still love it. I track a lot of data and love reading tables. I have several books full of yearly death statistics, broken down by age, gender, cause, region and so on. Some of the greatest stuff I ever read. Crime statistics are really cool as well.

Anyway, it might come as no surprise to you then that I like correlating personal data. If I do this change in my life, how does it affect me? Is their a correlation between sleep time and happiness? What about nutritional supplements? So I wrote a tool to track and analyze just this. [0]

Enter ashuku. I’m lazy, so let’s just quote the readme:

ashuku is a tool to track a multitude of daily statistics, like mood and
health. Its design goals are simplicity and fast usage.
ashuku can draw graphs [citation needed] and analyze data for correlation.
Data is stored in plain text files in YAML. It’s easy to read for both humans
and machines.

ashuku is named after one of the 5 Wisdom Buddhas, 阿閦如来 (ashuku nyorai).
He is immovable and reflects all emotions like a mirror, showing things as they
really are.

ashuku is strongly influenced by todo.txt.

Dependencies
============

* Python 3 (although the code is probably compatible with Python 2.6)
* PyYAML

Here’s a screenshot. It’s fully customizable, so don’t be afraid of the Japanese UI. It’s in English by default and you can change it however you want. :)

a screenshot

a screenshot

I’ve been using it since 9/12. The data before that is from a different tool and partially incomplete, so there.

You can grab it here: http://github.com/muflax/ashuku

[0] Well, the second one, actually. The first one was a Perl script and… you know what they say about Perl code. It’s  all true, unfortunately.