Another employee, a programmer, thought his online chats were eating into his work time. So he tested the theory: He looked at how long he spent chatting during certain periods, then looked at how much code he wrote during those times. But in fact, the more he talked, the more code he wrote. Gabbing online with colleagues and customers helped his work.
LFTP is a nifty tool that is kind of like rsync, but uses ftp instead. I use it to automatically sync files from my seedbox to my home server with this script. It runs every 5 minutes in a cron job.
https://gist.github.com/2306690
When I first open sourced my Assembla Timer app, Assembla reached out and contacted me about it and wanted to write a blog post about it:
Assembla Timer is a handy third-party Mac application that tracks time spent on tasks. You can time your work on a digital stop watch and then post the time to an Assembla project, or directly to a specific ticket.Until recently, Assembla Timer was $0.99 in Apple’s App Store, but the app’s creator,Adam Bronte, has decided to make it free and open source. The source code for the app is availablehereand a compiled version ready for install is availablehere.I installed the application, and the setup was a breeze. You simply enter your Assembla username and password, then click the ‘Start’ button to begin counting off time. You can stop and start as many times as you like – the app keeps a cumulative sum. When you’re done working, type in a description of the work completed and select an Assembla project workspace. You can also associate the time with a specific ticket. When you click ‘Save’ your information is stored in your Assembla project.Those familiar with Assembla’s time tracking capabilities know that there is a field on every ticket for “Worked Hours,” and a “Time Expenditure” tab on each ticket shows the total hours worked for a task. Assembla’s optional Time tool shows time worked across all tasks. The Time tool provides filterable reporting and is exportable for accounting and billing purposes. The Assembla Timer app makes it easier to feed accurate timing information into these reports.Assembla Timer is simple to use and allows you to focus on your work while a lightweight desktop application takes care of recording and posting your time to Assembla.
I’m glad the app may get some use out of it now. I’d like to thank Adam Feber for reaching out and writing the blog post.
Angry Birds was Rovio’s52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recentlysaidthat they had “catastrophically small numbers” in their first year after launch, and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game.
Whether is a successful business, website, app, etc, more than likely, it’s not their first rodeo. Just keep on truckin.
Since I made Daily Hacker News a while ago, I rarely actually visit the front page. I’m either reading the comments or clicking directly through to the article. I all the top Hack News stories in a consolidated email delivered to me. It’s been a serious productivity booster. I’m no longer constantly checking back for new stories, comments, etc. I only check it once at the end of the day.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
If happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there
When I first set out on getting a 3rd screen for my early 2011 gen Macbook Pro, I was looking at the Apple Thunderbolt Displays. Sexy monitor, thunderbolt support, and on par in terms of price of other 27” monitors with the same resolution. I came very close to getting one until I found out you can’t plug another monitor into it. You can only plug another Thunderbolt Display to have a 2nd external monitor.
Thats where the eVGA Plus+ 19 comes in. This nifty device is basically a little display adapter that goes through USB. In theory, you can have as many of these devices as you have USB ports.
I chose the eVGA flavor of this device for a few reasons:
After plugging the device and installing drivers, I now have a 3rd monitor for my MBP!
If you do end up getting one of these, it’s good to keep in mind that this is going over USB, don’t expect to do any gaming or what not. Just moving windows around on the monitor is a little laggy, but it plays video fine.
There are also other solutions like the Matrox DualHead2Go
I’ve decided to open source my Assembla Time tracking tool for OSX. This originally was a paid app in the Mac app store but a couple months ago I removed it. I just don’t have time to maintain it anymore and that’s why I decided to open source it. Hopefully others find it useful.
Mac OSX Mountain Lion was just announced today, among the new features is iMessage for the Mac, aka “Messages”. Messages is still in beta and you can download it from the apple website. With Lion, and now Mountain Lion, Apple seems to be bridging the gap between iOS and OSX more and more and iMessage on OSX has to be my favorite part of that so far. No longer will I have to stop doing what I’m doing on the computer to reply to a message. All messages that get sent or received from either device all sync as well.
It does seem a little buggy though. There was one message that Messages didn’t receive at all, and it seems pretty slow. I get iMessages on my phone way before I see them on the computer.
Mountain Lion isn’t set to come out until this summer though, hopefully these kind of issues get sorted out.
Office gear
