{"id":1479,"date":"2020-09-26T17:12:33","date_gmt":"2020-09-26T17:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=1479"},"modified":"2020-09-26T17:12:33","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T17:12:33","slug":"a-test-of-mind-traffic-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/?p=1479","title":{"rendered":"A Test of Mind Traffic Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I managed to screw up my todo.txt file that I use with Mind Traffic Control.
\nI had to recreate it from some backups that weren’t quite as up-to-date as I needed them to be.
\nAnd I got a lot of duplication in the file. And obviously items that had been done are now back in it. (Remember, I don’t keep “checked off” items)
\nSo how to fix?
\nDiffing MTC is complicated. Because you do a lot of re-ordering of the queue in MTC, two todo.txt files can be almost identical, but the diff of them is huge. And it’s hard to understand how similar they really are.
\nFixing that problem is kind of easy : you sort both copies of the file into alphabetical order, diff them again, and now it’s much easier to see and deal with how much difference there really is.
\nSo I did that. On Linux simply
\n[cce width=80]
\ncat todo.txt | sort\u00a0 > sorted_todo.txt.
\n[\/cce]
\nAnd then
\n[cc width=80]
\nmeld sorted_todo.txt sorted_backup.txt
\n[\/cc]
\nAnd that was fine.
\nDeduping a sorted file is easy. I’m sure there’s a command line tool for it already but I wrote a 4 line Python script.
\nSo now I have as up-to-date a version of the todo.txt as it’s possible to have. And it’s deduped.
\nBUT …
\nit’s now sorted in alphabetical order. And has 1506 items in it.
\nThis is going to be interesting.
\nSo the philosophy of MTC is precisely that the order \/ structure of the overall queue isn’t really that important. It obviously IS important because your “Next Item” is what’s at the front of the queue.
\nBut most of the time you deal with a few items in the front. And then searching \/ pulling \/ pushing “tags” to estimated distances into the future.
\nThat’s worked fine. But I’ve never done a mass (and arbitrary) reordering of the queue before.
\nSo this is going to be a big test. Are the facilities of MTC, plus my own previous tagging discipline and ability to remember what to search for, sufficient to the job of managing a list of 1500 items now that they are out of order?
\nIn some ways, I’m happy to have to face this challenge. It’s going to be a very interesting test. I’m optimistic<\/em> that MTC is up to it. But I’m keeping an open mind. I may find some issues. And have to write some extra functionality to resolve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I managed to screw up my todo.txt file that I use with Mind Traffic Control. I had to recreate it from some backups that weren’t quite as up-to-date as I needed them to be. And I got a lot of duplication in the file. And obviously items that had been done are now back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[175,282,283,460],"class_list":["post-1479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-me","category-tools","tag-getting-things-done","tag-mind-traffic-control","tag-mind-traffic-geometry","tag-todo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdi.thoughtstorms.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}