Hi All,
This week I made my first screencast. It's about my new Drupal module called Timetracker. I have never ever thought how hard to make a video introduction. As my colleagues said, I speak in Hunglish, some kind of mixing with English and Hungarian. I sware I'm working on to imporve it. But you know. I'm not a rocket scientist. Anyway. That video took me 2 days and a lot of struggling. The module the video about is a tool for tracking your personal activities in the Drupal sphere. You can find several similar pages on the net, like www.bubbletimer.com. Actually it's a pretty useful application.
My module is still under developing, although it's working fine. But it has some performance and usability issue I want to make better. I sent my application for a CVS account to drupal.org, I hope they'll answer me soon.
So, here is the brief introduction about Timetracker:
I used Camtasia Studio to record that stuff and to be honest, I amazed how cool is this tool. Unfortunately the free version is time limited but I suggest everybody to try it if thinking about screencasting.
Cheers,
Saturday, 21 February 2009
Sunday, 15 February 2009
10 practice how to improve your productivity
I keep myself as a workaholic guy. In the last few years I strove to be more and more productive. There are a couple of practices which save time for you a day. I want to share some of them with you. (DANGER! If you do exactly what is written, you can easily become to antisocial.:)
1 - do your household works rarely
When you washing dishes or clean your room there is a huge overhead to prepare for the process and after that it takes time to work again. If you buy 7 dinner sets or 40 pair of socks your costs are cleared in a few weeks. Do you know the activity scattering theory? If you have N jobs and the i. job takes Ti time than:
T1 + T2 + ... + TN = SUM(Ti)i=1..N * SQRT(N) * 1.2
So it takes more than the total time because you can't change tasks in a moment.
win ~ 3.5 hours a week
2 - walk fast
Be quick whatever you have to do if its not your work. Walk fast to your work and home. An average human walks with 3-5 km/h. When you fast you reach even 10-13 km/h. Anyway, you don't have do window shopping or sightseeing. Products are expensive and the city is boring.
win ~ 2 hours a week
3 - use a mindmap
Thinking on things you don't remember eats time. Nobody can hold everything in his or her head. With a mindmap you can maintain all the things you are going to do. There are bunch of free mindmap applications on the internet. Freemind, MindMeister, MindOMO... If you don't know the GTD methodology, I suggest you to read about it.
win ~ 2.5 hours a week
4 - create the best desktop environment
You can save a lot of time with a well configured desktop. There are some of the best practices:
5 - listen power metal a lot
If you are listening dynamic music (power metal, speed metal) you feel yourself to be forced to work faster. And it gives you energy as well.
win ~ 1 hour a week
6 - you have to deal with tiredness
Mature human needs about 6 hours of sleeping a day. But even if you sleep 6 hours, you could be tired. I know coffee is popular, but fruits and vegetables are important as well. And also you can organize your works. For example if you are tired, let's do some boring administration stuff. And thus you can do the hard work when you can concentrate.
win ~ 2 hours a week
7 - buy books instead of reading PDFs (but keep those too)
Books are cheap if you think how they can help your job. And you can read faster real pages than the screen. You can add comments and highlight parts easily as well. But PDF documents are really useful when you want to search on a certain keywords.
win ~ 1.5 hours a week
8 - don't have lunch at home
Making your own food takes a lot of time. Buying ingredients. Preparing. Cooking. Eating. Cleaning. And in this case you have to find out what do you want to eat. And to get healthy ingredients cost a lot. Restaurants are cheaper and more efficient.
win ~ 3 hours a week
9 - buy more RAM and use faster internet connection
Everybody hates waiting for programs to start or give feedbacks. Even if it takes a few minutes it happens a hundred or thousand times a day during your work, so let's multiply it: few seconds x 1000 = few 1000 seconds ~ 1 hour . Don't forget a major rule! If you can get things faster, you get things faster, thus you do get more of them. More = better.
win ~ 1 hour a week
10 - never try to guess how many tips you've got before you write a 'TOP X' article
I wasted about an hour with thinking about the 10th practice. But I haven't got any other really efficient idea. Don't waste your own time with useless things.
win ~ 1 hour
Total - you win ~20.5 hours a week! Not bad. If you get 40$ for an hour it is 820$ a week. So a new MacBook is 1299$ and you can buy one in 12 days:) OMG that's beautiful:)
Be agile, be enthusiastic, be efficient. That's it. Thanks for reading it.
Cheers,
1 - do your household works rarely
When you washing dishes or clean your room there is a huge overhead to prepare for the process and after that it takes time to work again. If you buy 7 dinner sets or 40 pair of socks your costs are cleared in a few weeks. Do you know the activity scattering theory? If you have N jobs and the i. job takes Ti time than:
T1 + T2 + ... + TN = SUM(Ti)i=1..N * SQRT(N) * 1.2
So it takes more than the total time because you can't change tasks in a moment.
win ~ 3.5 hours a week
2 - walk fast
Be quick whatever you have to do if its not your work. Walk fast to your work and home. An average human walks with 3-5 km/h. When you fast you reach even 10-13 km/h. Anyway, you don't have do window shopping or sightseeing. Products are expensive and the city is boring.
win ~ 2 hours a week
3 - use a mindmap
Thinking on things you don't remember eats time. Nobody can hold everything in his or her head. With a mindmap you can maintain all the things you are going to do. There are bunch of free mindmap applications on the internet. Freemind, MindMeister, MindOMO... If you don't know the GTD methodology, I suggest you to read about it.
win ~ 2.5 hours a week
4 - create the best desktop environment
You can save a lot of time with a well configured desktop. There are some of the best practices:
- fast dial icons everywhere (frequently visited bookmarks, most used program icons...)
- scripts for frequent processes (remote connection, generate things, version tracking practices...)
- use online tools: email, rss reader, mindmap, storage, server works (thus you can work everywhere)
- make a unix setup script with your custom configuration files, commands and installation profiles (reduce os installation time)
- use 2 monitors instead of 1 large
5 - listen power metal a lot
If you are listening dynamic music (power metal, speed metal) you feel yourself to be forced to work faster. And it gives you energy as well.
win ~ 1 hour a week
6 - you have to deal with tiredness
Mature human needs about 6 hours of sleeping a day. But even if you sleep 6 hours, you could be tired. I know coffee is popular, but fruits and vegetables are important as well. And also you can organize your works. For example if you are tired, let's do some boring administration stuff. And thus you can do the hard work when you can concentrate.
win ~ 2 hours a week
7 - buy books instead of reading PDFs (but keep those too)
Books are cheap if you think how they can help your job. And you can read faster real pages than the screen. You can add comments and highlight parts easily as well. But PDF documents are really useful when you want to search on a certain keywords.
win ~ 1.5 hours a week
8 - don't have lunch at home
Making your own food takes a lot of time. Buying ingredients. Preparing. Cooking. Eating. Cleaning. And in this case you have to find out what do you want to eat. And to get healthy ingredients cost a lot. Restaurants are cheaper and more efficient.
win ~ 3 hours a week
9 - buy more RAM and use faster internet connection
Everybody hates waiting for programs to start or give feedbacks. Even if it takes a few minutes it happens a hundred or thousand times a day during your work, so let's multiply it: few seconds x 1000 = few 1000 seconds ~ 1 hour . Don't forget a major rule! If you can get things faster, you get things faster, thus you do get more of them. More = better.
win ~ 1 hour a week
10 - never try to guess how many tips you've got before you write a 'TOP X' article
I wasted about an hour with thinking about the 10th practice. But I haven't got any other really efficient idea. Don't waste your own time with useless things.
win ~ 1 hour
Total - you win ~20.5 hours a week! Not bad. If you get 40$ for an hour it is 820$ a week. So a new MacBook is 1299$ and you can buy one in 12 days:) OMG that's beautiful:)
Be agile, be enthusiastic, be efficient. That's it. Thanks for reading it.
Cheers,
Friday, 13 February 2009
I'm back to sum up the last three weeks
Hi,
Long time no see. First, I'm happy that now I'm working on Pronovix. My new colleagues are awesome. They are really lifehackers:) This company works with Drupal and made several cool stuffs. Until a month ago I'd never participated in any Drupal project. When I began learning from Pro Drupal Development I felt myself strong and energetic and agile. But when I got my first mission, it changed a little bit:) Thinking in a Drupal way is REALLY hard at the first time. You know. Everybody can make a full fledged Ajax site with a strong PHP back-end. But when your hands are tight, it could be a huge pain. And the point. In English. Yeah. That's cool. But I love challenges. Learning is fun. Drupal fun. English fun. Working fun. Thats I guess equal to FUN^4. Not bad.
The other interesting happenings was the installing war. God knows how many times I sad malicious words. Anyway. Its all because my old Asus laptop. There are 4 types of Linux distributions:
1 - not well supported, pain (60%)
2 - deprecated kernel, softwares (10%)
3 - cant detect properly my SiS videocard (10%)
4 - cant detect my Broadcom wifi card (20%)
I know. Every geek is saying that you can always configure your unix based distro. Yes. But I can't. My favorite screenplay:
1 - I need network access
2 - To enable the network I had to fire up my wifi
3 - To fire up my wifi i had to download the firmwares and stuffs from the network
Yes, thats recursive. Maybe some parts of my brain still on running. That cause me a big headache. But I couldn't have a rest because on windows the web development really slow. I tried the follow distros:
Ubuntu (4 version), Mint, SuSE, Debian, Arch, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, PcBSD.
But 2 days ago miracle happened. Just browsed www.distrowatch.com and stumbled upon of Mepis Linux. I've never heard about it. But found quite a lot update, so thought it worth a try. And then ... First it asked me what resolution I want during installation. WOW! Kick ass. Next, it discovered my wifi card and made enable networking. Crazy. Then it can connected to the Debian Lenny repository, so really up to date. Thanks God it uses KDE 3.5.10. Only one defect it has, cant render monochrome fonts. But the default way isn't so bad. I can handle it.
So, I suggest you trying it. At least once. Oh, I forgot the candy:) My webcam is working under Mepis. (Even XP is incapable to do this.) Run and download - http://www.mepis.org/
Last I want to share with you, I found a very delicious gummy candy:) And If I mentioned delicious, I registered on http://delicious.com/. I don't know why I did't take that before. To be honest, I feel shame. You know my bookmarking site idea in my former post. You can follow me there: http://delicious.com/itarato
And one thing at the end. I watched anime. This is a huge step to me. And I get used to drinking coffee in the weekends. Maybe once I'll become to a real geek:)
So. I'm hungry thus this post is over. I hope I could give you at least a small information (use Mepis).
Tomorrow I plan writing a blogpost about 'Top 10 thing which makes you more productive'. Because I'm always striving to be the most productive I can. Now is really bad.
And I wrote a small article about unit/functional testing (Selenium, PHPUnit...), but I need a little time to correct it. Maybe on Sunday.
Cheers,
Long time no see. First, I'm happy that now I'm working on Pronovix. My new colleagues are awesome. They are really lifehackers:) This company works with Drupal and made several cool stuffs. Until a month ago I'd never participated in any Drupal project. When I began learning from Pro Drupal Development I felt myself strong and energetic and agile. But when I got my first mission, it changed a little bit:) Thinking in a Drupal way is REALLY hard at the first time. You know. Everybody can make a full fledged Ajax site with a strong PHP back-end. But when your hands are tight, it could be a huge pain. And the point. In English. Yeah. That's cool. But I love challenges. Learning is fun. Drupal fun. English fun. Working fun. Thats I guess equal to FUN^4. Not bad.
The other interesting happenings was the installing war. God knows how many times I sad malicious words. Anyway. Its all because my old Asus laptop. There are 4 types of Linux distributions:
1 - not well supported, pain (60%)
2 - deprecated kernel, softwares (10%)
3 - cant detect properly my SiS videocard (10%)
4 - cant detect my Broadcom wifi card (20%)
I know. Every geek is saying that you can always configure your unix based distro. Yes. But I can't. My favorite screenplay:
1 - I need network access
2 - To enable the network I had to fire up my wifi
3 - To fire up my wifi i had to download the firmwares and stuffs from the network
Yes, thats recursive. Maybe some parts of my brain still on running. That cause me a big headache. But I couldn't have a rest because on windows the web development really slow. I tried the follow distros:
Ubuntu (4 version), Mint, SuSE, Debian, Arch, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, PcBSD.
But 2 days ago miracle happened. Just browsed www.distrowatch.com and stumbled upon of Mepis Linux. I've never heard about it. But found quite a lot update, so thought it worth a try. And then ... First it asked me what resolution I want during installation. WOW! Kick ass. Next, it discovered my wifi card and made enable networking. Crazy. Then it can connected to the Debian Lenny repository, so really up to date. Thanks God it uses KDE 3.5.10. Only one defect it has, cant render monochrome fonts. But the default way isn't so bad. I can handle it.
So, I suggest you trying it. At least once. Oh, I forgot the candy:) My webcam is working under Mepis. (Even XP is incapable to do this.) Run and download - http://www.mepis.org/
Last I want to share with you, I found a very delicious gummy candy:) And If I mentioned delicious, I registered on http://delicious.com/. I don't know why I did't take that before. To be honest, I feel shame. You know my bookmarking site idea in my former post. You can follow me there: http://delicious.com/itarato
And one thing at the end. I watched anime. This is a huge step to me. And I get used to drinking coffee in the weekends. Maybe once I'll become to a real geek:)
So. I'm hungry thus this post is over. I hope I could give you at least a small information (use Mepis).
Tomorrow I plan writing a blogpost about 'Top 10 thing which makes you more productive'. Because I'm always striving to be the most productive I can. Now is really bad.
And I wrote a small article about unit/functional testing (Selenium, PHPUnit...), but I need a little time to correct it. Maybe on Sunday.
Cheers,
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