Tag: productivity

Analog tax

spending time with my parents affords me an opportunity to see what they use their computer for, and some of it is not pretty: take this whole world of “mail merge”, no matter whether in microsoft office or it’s retarded cousin openoffice, is a world of pain. the user interface is unspeakably bad, quite in tune with a process that is about as fun as a visit to the dentist in the first place. bringing this bloated world onto the web with the recent craze of ajax word processors is fundamentally misguided: why deal with label printing when there is email? similarly, when you are faced with the task to protect 2.5B in revenues per quarter, why screw around with new toolbars when your products don’t help squat to solve the real problem: outdated assumptions about a paper-based world.

trac rocks

spurred on by dani, i gave trac a try for a project i am working on.

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.
It provides an interface to Subversion, an integrated Wiki and convenient report facilities.
Trac allows wiki markup in issue descriptions and commit messages, creating links and seamless references between bugs, tasks, changesets, files and wiki pages. A timeline shows all project events in order, making getting an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy.

i’m in love. trac beats the crap out of bugzilla (no UI to speak of), RT (UI?), jira (likes to crash your servlet engine, not free), collabnet (slooow, not free), sourceforge (very poor integration, 1997-era UI), basecamp (useless for projects with both suits and coders) and a couple others i have tested (and forgotten about over the years). while some of the competition is stronger in certain areas, none are as well-rounded and tightly integrated between bug tracking, wiki and scm, or have such a pleasant UI. trac is the kind of application that makes me want to pick up python for real to play around with it (sorry, but plone never had the same effect for me). trac will go far.

Tool mavens

ever since i started using eclipse, i moved from language to tool maven. with every new eclipse build, i learn new tricks, and eclipse performance improves. one thing i did wrong for nearly 2 years until now was to get the SDK when i really want the platform plus JDT. the difference is nearly 50MB, 50MB that do have to be paged in and out of RAM. in the same vein, i just discovered the handy regexp tester plugin. good thing jonathan edwards is looking out for me 😉

action vs activity

Action is what achieves our goals, moves our business and personal lives forward, produces what we want out of life and actually gets the job done. It is immensely rewarding but is also very likely to be difficult and challenging.
Activity is all the things we fill our lives with in order to avoid taking action. Strangely enough activity often looks better than action to our colleagues or even to ourselves. If you are an executive or run your own business then productive, focused thinking must be one of your action priorities. Unfortunately thinking often appears to be “lazy”, compared to making phone calls, dealing with email, attending meetings and generally rushing around

patience

.. is not a virtue of mine. yet i have been morphed into a homo commutus, and i am spending more time than i ever thought possible in transit. being offline most of the time has been “interesting”. funny how i can focus much better when i am not tied into my social networks though.
there are 2 modes to my work, idea capturing / synthesizing and implementation. the first is very much a p-time activity, the second m-time. now, to adjust.

goofing off meets always on

Since people are connected 24/7, and are expected to be doing work at 22:00, they see no good reason why they can’t play a quick game at 15:00. In fact, many argue, by letting employees work on their own time, they can be even more productive. This view contrasts greatly with the top-down management style that is still in place in many companies.

this is totally me. granted i find these fuzzy lines between work and play sometimes hard to adjust to, but they also give me a level of leeway i did not have before.