Mind Tools

Link

Since 1999, Mind Tools has helped improve and advance the careers of more than 8,500,000 visitors. Isn’t it time you discovered the secrets to their success?

Mind Tools outlines important life and career skills in easy to understand language. These are supported by simple examples and exercises that expand and reinforce your understanding. Backed by Mind Tools, discover the essential skills and techniques that help you excel in your career - whatever your profession.
   
Learn personal effectiveness, goal setting, and stress management. Further, discover techniques that improve creativity, assist problem solving, organize time and deadlines, and improve your memory.

Mind Tools outlines more than 100 of the most important thinking skills in nine essential areas. These skill areas are:

    * Time Management
    * Stress Management
    * Memory Improvement
    * Information Skills
    * Practical Creativity

    * Problem Solving
    * Decision Making
    * Project Planning & Management
    * Communication Skills

CSS Beauty | CSS Design Showcase

Link

Cssbeauty.com is a project focused on providing its audience with a database of well designed css based websites from around the world. It's purpose is to showcase designers' work and to act as a small portal to the css design community.

If you are "in need of inspiration", you have come to the right place.

 

World66.com

Link

 
World66 offers travel information on over 10,000 destinations. 50,000 articles written and updated by travelers like you!

Take World66 guides with you when you travel. Put them in your handheld so that you have the info where you need it.

World66 is open content - you can edit the information yourself. That bar in Timbouctou where the locals hang out is missing? Add it!

Remote Desktop Bandwidth Usage

Joel on Software - Discussion

Hi all,

I'm planning to use Remote Desktop (integrated in the Windows XP box at work) to access my Box at home (also Windows XP).

Only one question remains: Does anybody know what kind of bandwidth a Remote Desktop connection uses? I don't want to fire it up and find that it slows down everybody's connection, and have the IT department hunt me down and hang me.

We have a 10Mbit connection to the internet.
Normally Not Anon
Thursday, October 21, 2004
------------------------------------------

We have a 2MB connection here. I use RD often and it doesn't seem to affect the connection at all. You should be fine.
NickH
Thursday, October 21, 2004
------------------------------------------

I ve got a 64k ISDN line and no problem. Works great.

I've even used it with 3 connections at once. It worked but wasn't the best.

Liam
Liam Send private email
Thursday, October 21, 2004
------------------------------------------

The thing about remote desktop is that it is actually sending GDI commands across the network, not full bitmaps. So it should have a very minimal impact on overall network performance (provided you aren't trying to do something silly like play Doom3 on the remote computer which I'm not even sure would work).
0xCC Send private email
Thursday, October 21, 2004

------------------------------------------

Happy about Work - Survey

Joel on Software - Happy about Work

As a developer, whe you are happier?
1. When new work is given to you.
2. When your work is completed.
3. When your work is partially completed.
4. When there is no more work. (doesn't mean no job).
5. When you come back to work from vacation
6. When you 'have' to go to vacation from work.
7. When you start day at work
8. When you finish the day without getting job done.
9. When you 'have' to to home because your work is done.
10. When you have to go home because it is time to go home.
11. When you have something to think about work.
12. When you don't have anything to think about work.

Copy files between thumb-drives without a laptop

Boing Boing reports

The FlashpontX is a $99, 512MB USB thumb-drive, with a twist. It has a female USB jack, and if you plug any other USB drive into it, any files in your "share" directory on the thumb-drive will be automatically copied over to the other key. So you can copy all your files even if you don't have a laptop handy. I've got my current 256MB thumb-drive strung on the wrist-strap of my phone, so it's always with me -- it'd be great to be able to just load up a share-point wiht a ton of stuff like the Wired CD, my latest novel, and so on, and hand it out to friends when we get togehter for coffee for fast drive-to-drive copying. Link (via Engadget)

Ganesha Symbolism

ThatsKannada.com has this

Shoe Lacing Methods

Ian's Shoelace Site

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare

Business 2.0

Google Desktop Proxy

Project Computing presents

Please be aware that a tool like this combined with the search precision of Google Desktop makes it very easy for the contents of your PC and your browsing history,emails and chat to be seen by systems and eventually persons unknown.

Do not use this tool on a system containing data that you don't want to share with the world.

Cornell Note Taking System for Seminars and Conferences

Link

Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

Link

Foxylicious - Firefox and del.icio.us bookmark integration

Dietrich Ayala presents

Foxylicious is a Mozilla Firefox extension that integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser bookmarks.

The first time you use it, it will import all your del.icio.us bookmarks, and separate them by tag into bookmark folders. Subsequent imports will add any new del.icio.us bookmarks you've created since the initial import.

Also, if you are doing Firefox extension development with del.icio.us or with bookmarks, the Foxylicious source contains reusable components for working with these things.

Many thanks to Torisugari's work in the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension, which helped navigate the nightmare-inducing bookmarks code in Firefox, and forms the basis of the Foxylicious bookmark management code.

GForge 4.0 is finally released

Link

 

The major changes include:

Role-based access controls: Done
cvs-GForge integration (plugin): Done
SCM Refactoring: Done
"Unlimited Fields" in tracker: Done
Reporting: Done
WebDAV: Done
Subversion: Done
Forum<->email gateway: Done
Tracker <-> Email gateway: You can respond to bugs and other tracker items via email, similar to the forum gateway mentioned above.Online Training: Done
Web Services: Done

Bredemeyer's site

Link

Software architecture is getting a lot of attention. Is it just the silver bullet du jour? We think not. It surely is critical to today's business success, yet it requires technical, business and organizational talents and skills that warrant their own path of career development, education, and research.

This site organizes a variety of resources to help software architects deepen and expand their understanding of software architecture and the role of the architect.

Murphy's Law Calculator

Link

Mathematicians have now come up with a rule for predicting the law of “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong". They say the formula allows people to calculate the chances of Murphy’s law (or Sod’s law as it is also know) - and to even try and beat the bad luck.

	Low			Medium			High
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Urgency
Importance
Complexity
How skilled I am at this task
Frequency of doing this task

Free online photography course

Link

Welcome to Jodies Coston's Free Online Photography Course sponsored by the morguefile.com and its contributors. This course is free and open to the public.

Each lesson will be posted weekly and your instructor Jodie will be online for a set period of time each week posting comments and feedback in the classroom forums. We will try to answer as many qestions as we can time permitting.

Enjoy, tell your friends and have fun. - Kevin and Michael Connors.

5-Megapixel Cameraphone; 10-Megapixel Next?

Link

High-level Best Practices in SCM

Link

When deploying new SCM (software configuration management) tools, implementers sometimes focus on perfecting fine-grained activities, while unwittingly carrying forward poor, large-scale practices from their previous jobs or previous tools. The result is a well-executed blunder. This paper promotes some high-level best practices that reflect the authors' experiences in deploying SCM. 
 

Workspaces, where developers build, test, and debug.	Don't share workspaces. Don't work outside of managed workspaces. Don't use jello views. Stay in sync with the codeline. Check in often.
Codelines, the canonical sets of source files.	Give each codeline a policy. Give each codeline an owner. Have a mainline.
Branches, variants of the codeline.	Branch only when necessary. Don't copy when you mean to branch. Branch on incompatible policy. Branch late. Branch, instead of freeze.
Change propagation, getting changes from one codeline to another.	Make original changes in the branch that has evolved the least since branching. Propagate early and often. Get the right person to do the merge.
Builds, turning source files into products.	Source + tools = product. Check in all original source. Segregate built objects from original source. Use common build tools. Build often. Keep build logs and build output.
Process, the rules for all of the above.	Track change packages. Track change package propagations. Distinguish change requests from change packages. Give everything an owner. Use living documents.

 

 

A Tao of Regular Expressions

Link

A regular expression is a formula for matching strings that follow some pattern. Many people are afraid to use them because they can look confusing and complicated. Unfortunately, nothing in this write up can change that. However, I have found that with a bit of practice, it's pretty easy to write these complicated expressions. Plus, once you get the hang of them, you can reduce hours of laborious and error-prone text editing down to minutes or seconds. Regular expressions are supported by many text editors, class libraries such as Rogue Wave's Tools.h++, scripting tools such as awk, grep, sed, and increasingly in interactive development environments such as Microsoft's Visual C++.

How to Study?

Check Here

 Everyone has a different "learning style". (A good introduction to the topic of learning styles is Claxton & Murrell 1987. For more on different learning styles, see Keirsey Temperament and Character Web Site, William Perry's Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development, Holland 1966, Kolb 1984, Sternberg 1999.) Consequently, everyone has a different "studying style". But the way that you are studying right now might not be the best for you. How would you know? Easy: If your grades aren't what you'd like them to be, then you probably need to change how you study!

I am going to give you some suggestions on how to study efficiently. They worked for me when I was in high school, college, and graduate school. Not only that, but they worked equally well for me in humanities courses (like philosophy and literature) and in science courses (like math and computer science). But, given that everyone's learning style is different, some of my suggestions may not work for you, at least not without some individual modifications. Nevertheless, I urge you to try them. Most successful students use them (or some slight variation of them).

Our dream house

Our dream house here

FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 1 with Bloglines Integration

Nick Bradbury

I'm pleased to announce the release of FeedDemon 1.5 BETA 1. In case you haven't already read about this in Scoble's blog, the big news is that this beta release includes integration with Bloglines. Here's some background on how this came to be:

Automated, Hands-Free Backups

MarkTAW.com

We're all lazy, but we all want to be sure that our important documents are safe from damage. Here are a few solutions to that problem.

 SyncBack (Free)

 12Ghosts Backup ($30)

 Centered Systems Second Copy ($30)

 Karen's Replicator (Free)

 Unison (Free)

What hours do you work?

Joel on Software discussion

I'm in around 8 and out around 6.

9-4:30 at most

Usually 8 to 4.

4! I can't imagine what color boss's face would turn if I left at 4pm.  I gotta walk...........

from 12:00 or 1:00 pm to 3:00 am.
and it slips later and later each day..

...

 

GMail Drive shell extension

viksoe.dk - GMail Drive shell extension

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

Travel Channel :: World's Best :: Best Bathrooms

Travel Channel :: World's Best :: Best Bathrooms

Snap - search engine from ideaLabs

Snap BETA

This unique new search engine makes it easier than ever to find information on the Web — and get the results you really want.

* Up until now, web searching has been largely a matter of "hunt and peck" and "hit or miss.":

You'd type in a query, hit ENTER, and then pore through a sea of results — some good, most of them useless. Not any more. Snap sorts, filters, and presents results in unique ways, so you get to the results you need — faster.

* Instead of just relying on computer algorithms to rank search results, Snap also uses click-stream information from a network of one million Internet users.

By recording and processing which Web sites these users spend time on, and which sites they quickly leave, Snap improves the likelihood that the search results you get will be the results you’re really looking for.

* Snap lets you sort and filter as you type your search query.

Just as fast as you type, it brings specific word matches to the top and eliminates results that do not match — until you find exactly what you're looking for.

* Snap makes it easier than ever to shop online.

It offers the only product search tool that allows you to filter and sort through product information seamlessly — based on the specific features and criteria that are important to you. And once you zoom in on the product you want to buy, you have instant access to a wide variety of merchants selling that particular product.

* Snap gives you all the data you need to make informed decisions.

When you're making purchasing decisions online, trust is paramount. The last thing you want is your search engine to try and steer you toward a particular product. Snap offers complete transparency — there's nothing "up our sleeves." You get all the information you need to make your own purchasing decisions, including what other buyers are doing, how much they're paying, their purchasing trends over time, and lots of other useful data. So you're in control of the buying process.

Snap is brought to you by Idealab, a creator and operator of technology companies.

Laszlo is now Open Source

Laszlo Systems, Inc.

YAML^(tm) (rhymes with "camel") is a straightforward machine parsable data serialization format designed for human readability and interaction with scripting languages such as Perl and Python. YAML is optimized for data serialization, configuration settings, log files, Internet messaging and filtering. YAML^(tm) is a balance of the following design goals:

• YAML documents are very readable by humans.
• YAML interacts well with scripting languages.
• YAML uses host languages' native data structures.
• YAML has a consistent information model.
• YAML enables stream-based processing.
• YAML is expressive and extensible.
• YAML is easy to implement.

--- !clarkevans.com/^invoice
invoice: 34843
date   : 2001-01-23
bill-to: &id001
    given  : Chris
    family : Dumars
    address:
        lines: |
            458 Walkman Dr.
            Suite #292
        city    : Royal Oak
        state   : MI
        postal  : 48046
ship-to: *id001
product:
    - sku         : BL394D
      quantity    : 4
      description : Basketball
      price       : 450.00
    - sku         : BL4438H
      quantity    : 1
      description : Super Hoop
      price       : 2392.00
tax  : 251.42
total: 4443.52
comments: >
    Late afternoon is best.
    Backup contact is Nancy
    Billsmer @ 338-4338.

24 relevant interview questions

Here is a Reprint from FOCUS Magazine -- January 5, 1983

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What do you know about our organization?
3. Why do you want to work for us?
4. What can you do for us that someone else can't?
5. What do you find most attractive about this position? What seems least attractive about it?
6. Why should we hire you?
7. What do you look for in a job?
8. Please give me your defintion of [the position for which you are being interviewed].
9. How long would it take you to make a meaningful contribution to our firm?
10. How long would you stay with us?
11. Your resume suggests that you may be over-qualified or too experienced for this position. What's Your opinion?
12. What is your management style?
13. Are you a good manager? Can you give me some examples? Do you feel that you have top managerial potential?
14. What do you look for when You hire people?
15. Have you ever had to fire people? What were the reasons, and how did you handle the situation?
16. What do you think is the most difficult thing about being a manager or executive?
17. What important trends do you see in our industry?
18. Why are you leaving (did you leave) your present (last) job?
19. How do you feel about leaving all your benefits to find a new job?
20. In your current (last) position, what features do (did) you like the most? The least?
21. What do you think of your boss?
22. Why aren't you earning more at your age?
23. What do you feel this position should pay?
24. What are your long-range goals?
25. How successful do you you've been so far?