Tag: Productivity

Does not scale

I’m going through the 2+ years of photos and videos I finally offloaded from my phone and came across this one from May 27 of this year. Not sure why I took the picture. I guess I was demonstrating that our toaster’s production capacity does not scale well and we might experience shortages under load.

Insufficient throughput under heavy toasting load.
Insufficient throughput under heavy toasting load.

More cmd.exe help

So you’re in cmd.exe and you type ‘ls‘ expecting to get a directory listing. Instead cmd.exe gives you the finger. You give cmd.exe the finger back. Just then your boss walks by and sees you flipping off company property. Next thing you’re in her office having a discussion on appropriate workplace behavior. Having had enough of ‘The Man’ you flip off your boss.

Now you’re sitting at the bus stop waiting for the bus that will take about 90 minutes to get you home. Just about 7 minutes faster than if you walked. But it’s cold outside. No job, no car, no prospects. Life sucks. And then you learn that you could have been using DOSKEY to set up persistent aliases in cmd.exe.

Just one simple DOSKEY ls=dir later and it doesn’t matter which platform you’re on. Assuming you already set aliases in .bashrc for all of your bad cmd.exe habits that is.

Chin up, young squire! Now when you’re fired from your next job, at least it won’t be on cmd.exe’s account. You can thank me later.

SVN Deployment

Seems simple in that “WTF is up with me not doing that until now” kind of way but setting up all of your web content in SVN and then using svn export to deploy to your production server just plain rocks.

  1. Version control–which is desirable on its face
  2. The model enforces backing up–your deployment is just a copy of your versioned repository
  3. Instant recovery
  4. Work locally, publish remotely–no zOMGWTFBBQ moments when your internet connection breaks the I/O pipe your text editor is relying on or even dropping your terminal session, whereby you lose your work

There are many things I’ve learned working in CM these last few years, but the value of SVN or version control generally, continues to be the lesson that keeps paying dividends.

If I were still rabbiting away at the computer lab at $SATELLITE_CAMPUS library, I’d be advocating to teach a mini course on version control as a tool for managing all research projects/papers. It is the hammer by which I identify and act upon all nails. 😉

Cleaning up

I’m a habitual non-deleter of mail when it hits my inbox. I mean, sure, I delete the crap and mark the spam pretty regularly but when it is a message that requires action or a response and I don’t have time to do it right now, I’ll let it sit.

And sit it does.

Usually one of three things happen at this point. Most likely I’ll reply / perform the action required to clear this message in the next few days. If it gets beyond this point, though, bad things happen. Most likely it will sit until it becomes so stale it just doesn’t matter any longer and I delete the damned thing and feel tons of guilt. The last thing that happens is that it gets accidentally deleted in one of my bulk clearing operations.

See, for better or worse, my email inbox is my primary collection point. Oh, yeah, we’re talking GTD methodology here. My three or for personal email addresses and the auto-redirect from work all dump in to this bin. Now that I do CM at work I get 20 – 50 automated build status emails per day. My team also has a habit of CC’ing the team list whenever we work through a problem. On the one hand this helps with communication and gets more eyeballs on the problem quickly. On the other it generates tons of email churn when you’re not immediately involved in a particular problem.

But I digress. The point being that I sift several hundred email messages a day which, for most of you, is probably no big deal. Let’s just say I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. So what happens is the inbox fills up with gibberish and eventually I go on a wholesale delete binge. I don’t want this to take all day so it involves some mental triage whereby I estimate the necessity of keeping a message around by looking at the subject, sender, date and what I can dredge up from memory. Needless to say, it is an entirely fallible system.

Add to this mix the tendency of my ISP to choke in mid-fetch and then do a complete dump of everything in mbox the next time my client goes after mail. Nothing like getting your last week’s worth of mail a couple times every day. Each time this happens the messages that require action have to run the triage gauntlet.

All of this to say that I know the solution to the problem. A basic tenet of GTD is process your collection points and move the stuff requiring action into an appropriate bin/list/what-have-you. Leaving your action items to mingle with your inbox keeps you from being able to trust your system and if you can’t trust it, the principle benefit of not having to remember everything on your plate at all times goes out the window.

So I made a point today of getting my GTD tool in order (yay OmniFocus!) and have managed to keep my inbox empty-ish for most of the day. OmniFocus is no longer stale. iCal is up to day and is an accurate reference tool again. In short, life is much better this way. I know in my heart and head that GTD works. It’s just my lizard brain that gets lazy and causes the system to break down.

So we’re not big on lizards any more…

Grrrr

From the “Everyone loves this but you never seemed to get off your ass to try it yourself” files I bring you Growl. In and of itself it’s pretty innocuous—just an operating system alert widget. However, when you plug in all sorts of applications it keeps you from ⌘-Tabbing or space jumping all over the place to get alerts of incoming stuff. Alerts just pop up wherever you happen to be when “things happen.” Currently I’m monitoring:

  1. Mail.app
  2. iTunes
  3. Hardware
  4. CC.NET

In the past half hour I think I’ve increased my productivity twofold just because I’m not jumping to different spaces every time I get email.

Related, I’ve installed CC Menu to monitor all the freaking builds going on at work. This frees up a bit of space in my cramped RDC connection to my worktop as the monitor now runs in my menu bar and I can open the project window and move it off to the side on the secondary monitor. Sure, it might be easier to just work directly on the worktop but I’m just that committed to using my powerbook. Who says mac fans aren’t zealous?