Hack the Day

I mentioned it already: I love Firefox’s feature of “Manage Search Engines” (Internet Explorer 7 has copied introduced a similar one as well). Simply love it, and the reason for it is that it saves me lots and lots of time.

One of the “custom” search engines I had installed was called Flickr Tags. Ironically, though, using it was always a burden. Most of the times I didn’t want to simply search Flickr; what I wanted instead was to search Flickr for Creative Commons images(ones I could put on my blog, for instance), sorted by interestingness (to keep the lame ones out). One way to do this would have been to simply search Mycroft Project for a better one. One other way, though, was to just create my own custom search engine, and this proved to be much simpler than expected (the proof is the little plugin over on mycroft.mozdev.org called Flickr Creative Commons Interesting).

For tutorial purposes, I’ll show you how to build, step by step, a Firefox Search Engine for Twitter contacts.

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Rereading a text I wrote last year reminded me something I wanted to articulate for quite a while. The power of meditation; but actually meditation is a word with too many and messy meanings. What I’m talking about is that powerful “take a break” moment that precedes most great breakthroughs.

In my freshman year of college(Computer Science) I was just discovering the Internet and the vast information one could get from it. Those were the days of MsDOS, Windows 95 and Windows 98, and my geek hobby back then was to subscribe to e-zines of the underground computer virus geeks. I never learned to build a computer virus(it’s bad, evil and it turns you into a criminal) but, being young and restless, I enjoyed reading how one could conceive such software that resembled most to real life-forms - the smallest and code efficient possible, which could replicate, mutate and propagate around. Nothing much stuck with me from that wild age except for a broader understanding of computers, operating systems and assembly language and, completely unrelated, the tale of one of those virus developers.

The guy was stuck at some point trying to understand how to work around the limitations(security) of Windows 98; he had tried all ideas that came to mind, and was starting to get desperate and frustrated. Yet, at one moment, he decided to just lay back. Closed the monitor, closed his eyes. Tried to think of nothing. Quarter of hour later he was coding furiously and excited. His (memory quote) computer coding Zen had struck again.

Without naming it, I’ve been using this method since highschool; now, in my computer programmer existence, I use it more than ever. Whenever I’m facing a bug I can’t understand, whenever something eludes me no matter how hard I try or how much documentation I read, I will stop.

I breathe, I take a walk around the office, get some water from the watercooler. Chat with friends. When coming back to my computer, 10 minutes later, I close my eyes and try to think of nothing. Call it Zen meditation if you prefer; call it  yourKitKat moment.

I prefer to call it Seiza - the seated 1 minute meditation before martial arts training. Letting my mind free of all thoughts is just what we perceive on the outside; on the inside, our subconscious keeps working, freed from the outside stimuli and conscious noise.

More often than once, stepping back is all it takes to solve even the biggest problem.

[photo courtesy of Flickr]

HackTheDay got listed in the nice list of “The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs” on CollegeDegree, side by side with world-renowned blogs such as 43 Folders, Lifehack.org, Lifehacker.com, Zen Habits and 95 more. Pretty nice for a blog I neglected quite a lot in the last months.

It’s this kind of small things that make one’s day better and motivate him to get going.

Quickly, tell me the web browser you use most frequently.

What? Do I hear anything other than Firefox? You’re most certainly way behind on our Productivity 101 lesson.

Quickly, tell me what’s your most frequent way to google or search stuff online.

If you tell me you click on Firefox’s address bar, type www.google.com then Enter, then you’re definitely not making good use of your time and fingers. There’s a better, faster, easier way to google from Firefox - the quicksearch field on the right-top corner. Just type Ctrl+K (or, on Mac, Cmd+K) and you’ve changed focus to the quicksearch field. Type what u want to search for, Enter, and Google opens up with the results.

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On the 1st of January I had a skiing accident resulting in the injury my right arm - actually my right shoulder. After about two weeks of waiting for the pain to go away, I got the guts and visited a doctor who didn’t think twice before putting my entire right arm into a tight bandage and forbidding me to use my right arm for the upcoming 10 days.

Easier said then done - after all, I’m a work-from-home software developer, right-handed on top of that. Medical leave being out of the question, how am I supposed to get my job done by typing with only my left hand?

Luckily, I managed to work something out, and here’s a couple of the tricks I did for it, just in case they might help other imprudent skiers out there:

1. System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Keyboard -> Sticky Keys - this is the single greatest mobility impaired aid on the Mac: all special keys become sticky and appear on the screen as you type them, thus allowing you to single-handedly type complex, 2, 3 or more “simultaneous” keys combinations. Option+Backspace, Fn+Backspace, Cmd+Option+Escape and many more contorted keys combinations become now available to anyone
2. Quicksilver - I never really understood the full impact Quicksilver has on my productivity until now - launching an application without a mouse becomes really a life saver when you can only type with your left hand…
3. Textmate - luckily for me, I’m a Ruby(on Rails) programmer using Textmate on a daily basis. Although no longer being able to use the complex keyboard shortcuts that trigger all kinds of snippet generations, I was still able to remain productive using its built-in code completion and the tab-triggered snippets.
4. Terminal - a ROR programmer can’t get any kind of work done without the command line - be it just to change the working dir to the project’s one, or to start a server or.. many more. But typing in Terminal becomes an annoying pain when you need to run the same commands on and on. So I edited the .bash_profile and added a couple of alias for the most common commands I use on a daily basis. The .bash_profile is to be created(if not already existent) in the User’s home directory (just run cd ~ in Terminal and you’re there); here’s a couple of the aliases I defined for my daily use:
   
alias pr='cd ~/Work/MyProject/'
alias prr='cd ~/Work/Projects/MySecondProject/'
alias matem='mate .'
alias ss='./script/server'


There are more to say about tricks that made my programmer life better these last days, but I’ll take a little break for now; hopefully I’ll get back some day with more cool Tricks for the Mobility Impaired Programmers

(image by The Pack)

First of all, Happy New Year!

Second of all, I’ve been a lying bastard in 2007 and have blogged extremely little over here, leaving all you faithful readers just hanging and desperately waiting for more insightful, funny, informative or simply original articles.

Third of all, given that this is the best time for New Year resolutions, here’s my question/story for all of you:

How much money would you want in order to NEVER WORK AGAIN?

Let’s pretend I’m a rich bastard that can give you a fixed amount of money, with only one condition: you MUST NEVER work again. Not even for charity, not even for your own freelance gig, not even to help your spouse around the house or to take gardening as a hobby. Would you agree to such a deal? If so, what would your price be?

If you’d never agree to this(as I, for instance), please think a bit about your reasons. I know mine, and I’ll disclose them although I might influence your silent answer:

I like too much doing stuff. I take the most excitement in actually doing something useful, and the feeling of meeting my job deadlines is too good to give up. This is also the reason most successful people have always a hard time quiting their jobs: work is fun and without it we’d be bored to death.

Think about it.

I spent the day before yesterday cleaning up my MacBook hard drive and reinstalling anew my Tiger operating system.
Sure, OSX is a very powerful system, but even it gets cluttered after months of intense usage and hundreds of apps installed. So.. nothing like a fresh new install to get rid of all unwanted apps, documents, archives or garbage.

So, if you are a new Apple owner, here’s my list of 9 tips for you to do on a fresh OSX install:

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You know how I’ve only blogged one or two posts for the last couple of months? I blame it on Timothy Ferris! Yeah, that’s right, he’s the only responsible for my slacking off blogging lately. So if you’re discontent with Hack The Day’s summer/autumn vacation, stop sending me hate mail - Timothy Ferris is the one to blame.

Who is Tim? You haven’t heard of him? What kind of world do you live in? He’s the one who took over the blogging world and the publishing world alike, by writing a best seller book about business and lifestyle - The 4-Hour Workweek(I’ll call it 4HWW from now on). The book which inspired me to make a series of life changes, all successful so far. Letting go of blogging for a while is just only one of the many.

But I’ll take it slowly:
I heard about the book from the author’s blog, where I read some articles detailing the main ideas of it: outsource as much as you can, de-clutter as much as you can; never buy what you can borrow, never waste time when someone else can do it for you.

This was the first task I let others do on my behalf : on my personal (Romanian language) blog, I wrote a post asking my readers to help me to:
Get a free pdf version of the 4HWW book and get a free ebook version of Harry Potter 7 (ok, this one is unrelated to the article, but still a good example). Less than 6 hours afterwards, a reader sent me the Harry Potter book; another 18 hours and I got the 4HWW book as well. So.. the experiment was already becoming successful: don’t waste time looking for stuff: first ask for it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m eternally grateful to my reader friend who sent the books. Something that would have taken me many hours with an uncertain outcome took him, I’m sure, less than a couple of minutes. He has my thanks, and I gained hours of productivity.

Also inspired by Tim was my second successful example of blog outsourcing: I was looking to buy a pair of Crocs shoes, and since I couldn’t seem to find them anywhere in town I again resorted to my reader’s help. In less than a day I received several tips, locations, best prices, as well as offers to have them bought and brought from Italy. What had taken me several days of unsuccessful research was solved by my readers for me. I am, again, more than grateful to them for their help, and to Tim for giving me the idea of outsourcing everything out of my area of expertise.

This was only the beginning, and many more followed: from asking readers tips about the ski resort I should spend my winter holidays, to asking friends and family for help in fields they are better skilled than me, to start using expert websites instead of Google to find the best information in the fields I’m interested in.

But outsourcing deals, tips, research and projects is not what 4HWW is about. After having read the book(I’m still looking for a paper-based version to buy, but couldn’t find any so far, and Amazon shipping is still too expensive in my country), I decided to go on and experiment with the second main idea of the book - de-cluttering your life. But since this article has already gotten too long, and the following risks to take a bit of time to write, I’ll just stop here for now, promising to continue next week. In the meantime, please take a while thinking what time-wasting chores you could ask others(more skilled than you) to do.

August is a slow month for everyone. I wasn’t lucky enough to have week-long holidays like most of you, but I felt it too: August is a slow month - one doesn’t really feel like working, nor do anything else than the bare necessities. August being such a slow month(did I say that already? ), the main consequence was that I didn’t feel like blogging - you faithful Hack the Day readers noticed it. What’s more interesting though is that I didn’t feel like reading blogs neither, and here’s the proof:

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A man goes to the doctor saying “Doc, I have a problem: I can’t make any decision. I’m always in doubt. Or… hmm.. am I?”

I’m a smart guy. Really. I graduated from top European universities, with impressive academic results, etc. The problem with smart guys is that they have too many choices. Knowing you performed pretty well in the college classes makes you confident you’ll do the same in real life. After all, there were so many courses I was clueless about, but aced them after just a couple of days of study, that any random field can become familiar after a thorough 2-3 days study.

But like any teenager growing up, once I graduated from college I was met with a handful of choices: start a career in software development, follow a PhD in one of the many Computer Science-related fields, or even start my own business. The problem with smart guys is that they get too confident. Any field seems accessible. Yes, unfortunately almost any field IS accessible. So the problem is… which path should YOU take? Most life choices are therefore reduced to decision problems: should I take this path or that other one? Read the rest of this entry »