MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

brainstorming, issue tracking, and problem reporting... with tabulator?

I want to brainstorm about a bunch of issues in preparation for the HTML WG meeting this week. tracker's forms interface won't let me enter an issue until I fill out all the details... well, it doesn't really have that many constraints, except that it notifies the whole WG when an issue is added.

I want something more like the OmniOutliner experience... I want to brainstorm.

But when I'm done, I don't want to tediously copy and paste each field into tracker.

Clearly, I could write some python or XSLT to take OmniOutliner's XML and feed it to tracker afterward, but... can't we do better than that?

What if tabulator's UI were as smooth as OmniOutliner... and what if I could just push one button and get the toothpaste back in the tube, i.e. feed the outline into the tracker's REST interface?

p.s. why am I using emacs to write this? Apple Mail knows IntegrityIsJobOne, but in OS X 10.4, like iCal, it goes off into the weeds eating CPU for inexplicable reasons, and I don't invest debugging effort in stuff that isn't open source.

How do I feed this to breadcrumbs now? Does emacs have a markdown/ReStructuredText mode?
How about AtomPub support? I manually cut and pasted and cleaned up the line breaks. ugh!

I use Thunderbird on my PowerBook, but it's totally confused about offline operation. It goes to save to the drafts folder every now and again, but over IMAP... so if the net is flakey or down, (a) it doesn't actually save, and (b) it interrupts my drafting!!! OK... found the config option to use a local drafts folder under Tools/Account settings. (why not under preferences?) But Thunderbird doesn't do well filling the IMAP cache; I don't know to tell it to go offline until I've left the airport wifi, and at that point, it's too late to grab the mail I want to read. The Apple mailer does much better at using idle time to prefetch.

p.p.s. how do I use hReview and GRDDL to make the data in this gripe available as if it were a bugzilla entry? More on that to follow, I hope...