Tackling Set Up Time

A big part of peforming a task is the time it takes to "set up". A painter, for example, must prepare the canvas, mix the paints, position the subject etc.

Sometimes the barrier to completing a task is not the task itself but the set up time required to do the task. Hmmm ... an improved task management system needs to take on this pain. Ideally the task description should minimise the set up time required for a task by including as much "scaffolding" and "materials" as possible. It should also help you clean up afterwards.

Hmmm ... this is definitely one for The Goo.

"Horizon of Care"

We need to log future events into The Goo "When is that conference coming up? When does registration close?"

A future event is a temporal thing and The Goo already has temporal events covered in the Trail. The Trail records the actions you perform on artefacts in your environment as "events" and as time goes by a trail of events forms.

So why don't we add future events into the Trail?

-----|---|--|--|--|--||--|-----|-----> [ The Zone ] ---------------------|------------|---->

This way you can traverse your temporal "Horizon of Care" by moving backwards and forward along the Trail - what you cared about in the past - what you are likely to care about in the future - what you want to care about now.

Polymorphic Queues - Feel the Buzz

We need to try to track the marketing "buzz" around Trexy.com and The Goo came to the rescue.

Thanks to the polymorphic queues of Things in The Goo we could easily add a new queue: Buzz. This means any marketing buzz can be forwarded to The Goo where it is recorded in a queue along with a "care factor".

Getting Sticky

To enable members of the team to email The Goo I needed to create an email filter to parse incoming emails. The email parser is called via .procmailrc and is implemented with the help of the Email::Filter Perl module.

But there's much more to be done. Why not apply an email filter across all emails in the organisation that helps to stick Things together? The idea is for a special email filter that analyses the content of an email and associates it with other Things by embedding links. The recipient of the email can quickly jump to, or perform actions on, these associated Things.

Emailing The Goo

Members of the Trexy team can now directly email The Goo! :-)

This means a really light context switch for those members of the team who spend most of their time working with email - all they need to do is carbon copy The Goo and a ticket/task/Thing is automatically lodged into the CareOMeter.

Action Time

I've just finished implementing a new action handling table for TheGoo at Trexy. It enables me to bind an action to a handler for that action.

For example: [P] -> Profile -> PerlProfiler.pm.

This means typing "goo -p HelloWorld.pm" on the command-line will cause the PerlProfiler.pm to execute on HelloWorld.pm. But it works in the Web environment too:

http://localhost/goo.cgi?action=p&filename=HelloWorld.pm

There is a new internal dispatch mechanism that maps an action to an action handler based on the "type of Thing". All this means that I can start to add functions back into The Goo quickly and the system can expand to handle lots of different Things (e.g., Javascript, HTML, SQL, Python, Ruby, Perl6 etc).