If you use a computer as much as I do there is something very refreshing about deleting old crap and clutter. If you are a programmer and are responsible for thousands of lines of code, there is something great about deleting old, unused code. It makes you feel so much more in control of the environment. Very theraputic.
Today, I am taking nearly a whole day to delete old broken down code. Gotta board up the windows and wall off the slums from the shiny code that actually does good work.
This post is to give a shout of thanks to the guys who figured out why installing XP and Fedora on a single machine sometimes causes the first OS installed to be inexplicably lost somewhere on the disk with no hope of recovery. Well there is hope. If you set up dual boot with XP and Fedora Core 2 or later, and you are sure you lost all of your data from one of your installs, read on for more info.
If you can’t resist the urge to buy shiny new O’Reilly books every time you are within 1 mile of a Barnes & Noble or a Borders, and you are often restraining yourself from purchasing a bunch of new books on amazon (then click on the amazon link and buy lots of stuff so I can get referral fees and feed my own demons!) Okay, that’s not really the point although I wouldn’t mind a few extra bucks toward my Mexico fund. The point is, I have the same problem, I always want to get new books, often the technologies will help me with my work. And the biggest part of the problem is these books are always between 30 and 60 dollars each.
I have thought of it so many times, and dismissed it for various reasons. Too hard, too much cutthroat competition, not enough time, not a viable way to make money, way too many wanna-bes I don’t want to get classified with them. But damnit, there is no other thing I would rather waste some spare time on than writing video games.
If you are like me you’re 6 foot 2 and your name is Kevin.
Also you spend most of your day staring at a monitor of some type. I have some advice, I don’t know how well they will work for you, and I don’t know if there is anything to back up my reasoning behind these actions, but they seem to work for me.
I have found that my eyes are less strained feeling the more I pay attention to this kind of stuff. Maybe you will too.
I noticed a whole bunch of referalls to my site from the Jet’s message board, I thought maybe someone had linked to the whole Ed Hochuli debacle, but I hunted it down and found out that no, someone was stealing my bandwidth to show a picture I have on my site of Chuck Bednarik. Well I don’t approve of that, so I used a friends instructions on how to let the people know what I think of them using mod_rewrite. Thanks Darxus.
Now instead of concrete charlie that persons signature on the message board contains this.
plus the Jets suck. Seriously a first round pick for Doug Jolley, watching your preseason it doesn’t even look like he is starting.
I am trying to Get stuff done and in doing so I have decided to use my gmail account to capture everything. If you search hard enough there is a PDF somewhere that gives you some ideas on implementing a gmail based GTD system. I found that I have been languishing in putting stuff into my system, and decided because it was too hard. I had to open thunderbird and then click compose and type the address and then the thing I want to do. I am sure I could speed this up a bit, but it was painful. So I wrote a quick script using zenity:
#!/bin/bash
TO="xxx@gmail.com"
SUBJECT=`zenity --entry --text="What do you want to get done?" \
--title="GTD\ Entry"`
if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]
then
echo | mail -s "${SUBJECT}" ${TO}
fi
and mapped it up to F12 using a technique from my previous post. And now any time I think of something I want to do I just hit F12, type a quick “next action” and hit enter. Later I can process my gmail inbox. I may also have to find a way to batch this process for when I am going through my physical inbox. But so far so good.
By the way, Buy the book, (or get it in a library or whatever) it’s great, it at least makes you feel like you can do lots of stuff without worrying about it all the time.
If you use Gnome and want to do custom keyboard shortcuts, i.e. write your own script and have it executed when you hit a magic key combination, it is not as easy as going to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” preferences. Apparently you gotta mess around with gconf (The linux registry?!), anyway after a short bit of google hunting I found this mailing list posting: Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Gnome (Solved). Thanks, Philip Chapman.
So I liked the way Tom’s websites have evolved to have a fancy one where he writes long articles and a not so fancy one where he tells the world off through his away message. I don’t know if this is what encouraged Mike to break off and create his separate Deep Thoughts blog, but either way the combined effort has caused me to do something similar.
Of course I tried to make it more complicated, by using my single wordpress install. I have simply created a separate category called Notebooks and changed the index page of my site to only show everything but the Notebooks category. However my RSS feed should pick up all the entries to the Notebooks category, so the three people that faithfully read my RSS feed every 72 days when there is a new post, should have a bit more than they are used to handling. Everyone else (which I think there are only 3 of them also) of course will simply have to go to the Notebooks Category page.
The Iceberg Secret article: Joel on Software – The Iceberg Secret, Revealed also known as Chapter 25 in the Joel on Software book. Has inspired in me a profound revelation, when it comes to developing software.
Once you understand the Iceberg Secret, it’s easy to work with it. Understand that any demos you do in a darkened room with a projector are going to be all about pixels. If you can, build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished.
Outside of the context of my life this may not be huge to you. But if you shared some of the experiences I have over the past 5 years, you would understand how profound this is. Or you might say, yeah, I know that, who doesn’t know that.
But it doesn’t matter, based on the understanding I reached this morning reading Chapter 25, it will forever alter the way I handle the creation of software. Sure there are other great insights provided by Joel, and they may all be even more important, or seem more important. But as for me, as for right now, there is nothing more important to understand.
When it comes to software there is nothing, absolutely nothing more important about it than the user interface.
