A practical framework for managers to divide their 40-hour work week into five equal 20% allocations, balancing operational work, strategic thinking, relationship building, and personal development.
An update to my 2021 post on getting the most out of your Slack application in the least amount of time.
A productivity lightning talk on getting the most out of Slack.
I've finally found a solution to the vacuum created when my favorite RSS reader got the axe (RIP Google Reader). I loved being able to quickly browse through the headlines of my favorite blogs and news sites. For the past couple of years I've been depending mainly on Twitter our Medium notifications when someone posts something new but unless I'm actively looking I'll miss most things. Recently I discovered that Slack has an integration that allows you to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed URL and receive updates in a Slack channel.
I'm always looking for better ways to find the disk hogs... there are a ton of one liners and tools but this is the first time I've heard of "ducks". Thanks A.P!
Where has the space gone?
Although time consuming, the following procedure can be used to track down where your space has been used.
cd /
du -s *
(Some folks like to use "du -cks *", which is easy to remember as "ducks".)
Online infrastructure for your small business doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. By leveraging many of the free and inexpensive products offered by Google, you can create a website, a domain-branded e-mail system, and a document collaboration platform, all unified under one master login and password.
Once all of the virtual wires are connected, these services are extremely user-friendly, allowing anyone with a bit of web savvy to become the “system administrator” for their office.
If you are developing an application for Linux desktop and would like to automatically find out more information about system, use the following commands in shell scripts to gather information about system. Recently I was involved in project where I need to collect information about running GUI, browser and other information such as disk space, running kernel etc.
Linux command to gathers up information about a Linux system.
| Test Early » Hudson - Tips and Tricks | Hudson is an open source CI server that is by far the easiest one to configure. Second to ease of use is Hudson’s impressive plug-in framework, which makes it easy to add features. For instance, Hudson has a plug-in for tracking FindBugs issues, PMD issues, and CheckStyle issues over time as well as code coverage. It also trends test results from JUnit, as well as build results and corresponding execution times. In spite of all these cool features, we had to find ways to get around some common issues we faced at work using Hudson.
| Zero to Continuous Integration with Windmill | Adam Christian | Following ‘automation’ and ‘continuous integration’ in the micro blogging world I have seen a major influx in people being super interested in functionally automating their web apps. I have seen a slew of things about Grid, and Selenium, and people hacking on Watir so I decided to show you from the ground up how incredibly easy it is to get automated test running setup using Windmill and Hudson. I am not going to walk you through every detail, this is much more high level but I do plan to start a ‘continuous integration’ page on getwindmill.com in the near future for those kinds of details.
| Mac Automation: Quickly add to-dos/events to iCal- The Unofficial Apple Weblog TUAW | How many times have you been watching TV and wanted to quickly add a to-do or event maybe both to iCal? In this Mac Automation post, Im going to show you how to create both a to-do and an iCal event from within Automator. You will be able to add new items to iCal without ever having to open it. Lets begin.
A basic tutorial about the Linux commands ssh and scp. It features explanation about the syntax, the possibilities and the differences between the two. It also features some tips and tricks that'll come in handy when working with these programs.
| Songbirdnest.com | Songbird Media Player | Play music. Play the Web. Powered by Mozilla
Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.
Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.
This tutorial is meant for increasing the performance of Windows XP, either it can be a fresh installed windows or an old windows. Actually these r some tips/tricks, which I always apply whenever I do a fresh installation of windows. So here I’m sharing many of those tips-n-tricks:
UPDATE: This story was reported as stolen from this source: askvg.com** I just grabbed it from digg. It's a very helpful article and I would like to give credit where credit is due.**
| Ubuntu Linux view the status of my network Interfaces/card | Q. How do I view the status of my network Interface card under Ubuntu Linux ? How do I make sure connectivity exists?
A. You can verify connectivity or status of your network Interfaces/card using standard Linux command. Open your terminal and use following commands:
| Ifconfig command use to view status of network Interfaces card or use to configure a network interface itself. | Task: View network interface card
| Linux / UNIX: Python programming tutorial for system administrators | Generally I use Perl and Shell script for automation or to make system administration easier for me. Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language that combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, Amiga, Palm Handhelds, and Nokia mobile phones.
You can easily adopt Python to manage UNIX and Linux systems while incorporating concepts of good program design. Python is an easy-to-learn, open source scripting language that lets system administrators do their job more quickly. It can also make tasks more fun:
| Zenoss Blog » Open Source Software Configuration Management | If you are already familiar with open source monitoring, you might also be interested in open source software configuration management. Software Configuration Management (SCM) attempts to identify the configuration of software at discrete points in time and to systematically control changes to the configuration for the purpose of maintaining software integrity, traceability, and accountability throughout the software life cycle.
For example, say you have a cluster of Apache servers and you want to update them all with an additional mime-type, or add a virtual host to each. Rather than manually updating each configuration file on each server you could use a tool that process all the changes simultaneously. Or a tool that pools all the configuration variables into an easily readable form driven interface. The other benefit for some of these tools is the ability to have a changelog so that if your roll out a new configuration and it doesn’t work you can revert to the last good configuration easily.
| Learning and Mastering the Linux VI / VIM editor | VIM is my preferred text editor for configuring system and writing code at a shell prompt. However many new Linux user finds it difficult to cope with vim. This tutorial provides a good introduction:
The VI editor is a screen-based editor used by many Unix users. The VI editor has powerful features to aid programmers, but many beginning users avoid using VI because the different features overwhelm them. This tutorial is written to help beginning users get accustomed to using the VI editor, but also contains sections relevant to regular users of VI as well. Examples are provided, and the best way to learn is to try these examples, and think of your own examples as well… There’s no better way than to experience things yourself.
| Let’s not and say we did [dive into mark] | # Introduction to tabbed browsing | # Opening links in a new tab | # Bookmarking a group of tabs | # Using a group of tabs as the home page | # Rearranging tabs | # Introduction to live bookmarks | # Introduction to spell checking | # Introduction to search engines | # Adding a search engine | # Removing a search engine | # Installing an add-on | # Changing add-on options | # Enabling and disabling add-ons | # Uninstalling add-ons | # Installing a new theme | # Switching between installed themes | # Uninstalling a theme | # Adding a Print button to the toolbar | # Rearranging buttons on the toolbar | # Removing buttons from the toolbar | # Changing the size of toolbar buttons
This is a simple backup solution for people who run their own web server and MySQL server on a dedicated box or VPS. Most dedicated hosting provider provides the backup service using NAS or FTP servers. These service providers will hook you to their redundant centralized storage array over private VLAN.
I've done a lot of telecommuting in my life. My first real writing gig came when I was 16 as a freelancer for a computer magazine whose offices were 3,000 miles from my house, and since then I've worked for a number of blogs, web startups, and computer game companies in an online, virtual office environment. During that time I've found that the key to a successful distributed team is communication. The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.
| Introducing the Hipster PDA | 43 Folders | The Hipster PDA Parietal Disgorgement Aid is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s make one together.
Ctrl + A Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + E Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + L Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command
Ctrl + U Clears the line before the cursor position.
If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.
Ctrl + H Same as backspace
<http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/over-160-free-personal-information-managers.html>`__
The best type of software for productivity is personal information manager (PIM). They are softwares which help you oraganising your personal information, such as contacts, calendars, emails, notes etc. To give you choices, find out what are available on the Internet and fits you, Listible has a huge list (over 160) of PIMs. There are Windows & Mac based software; web based, and all of them are free:
AFP548 - Document Management in the Fresh Air
Installing Alfresco to create workflows and manage your documents
Alfresco is a fun open source project that I've been playing around with lately. It's similar to EMC's Documentum, which if you've never played with allows you to create workflows for documents. It's billed as a "content management solution" but that term is very overloaded with all the web CMS systems out there. For those of you still confused, it allows you to manage all of your documents, such as MS Word files and such, and create workflows with them.
Top 10 Things You Don't Want to Forget before You Begin the Build!
The following article is featured in the ExtremeTech book "Build The Ultimate Custom PC." This article details simple, yet sometimes forgetable, steps a builder must take before building a custom PC.
There's no worse time to realize you've forgotten something than when you need it in order to be able to proceed with the job. Things seem to be coming together well and you feel you're on a roll, and then you find you need something small but important, and the job is delayed until you can get it. Not having everything ready can cause big delays. At minimum, it's a delay until you can take a trip to the local computer store; at most, it's a wait of a few days while you have to wait for it to be delivered. A wait of a few hours is disruptive enough, but a wait of a few days can really put your PC project off course.
| 43 Folders | Writing sensible email messages | Before you type anything into a new message, have explicit answers for two questions:
| Why am I writing this? | What exactly do I want the result of this message to be? | If you can't succinctly state these answers, you might want to hold off on sending your message until you can.
| Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X from Greg Miller of googleblog.blogspot.com. | Here is a little tool for you Mac based Gmail users.
The app is small and nonintrusive, but hopefully still has all the features a Mac user would want. With it you can:
| - view messages without opening a browser | - open Gmail in your browser without forcing you to log in again | - make Gmail your default email program | - even more...
| FileForum | Spybot Search and Destroy | Spybot Search and Destroy searches your hard drive for so-called spy- or adbots; that is, little modules that are responsible for the ads many programs display. Many of these modules also transmit information, including your surfing behavior on the Internet. If it finds such modules, it can remove them. In most cases the host still runs fine after removing the spyware/adware.
Another feature is the removal of usage tracks, which makes it more complicated for unknown spybots to transmit useful data. The list of last visited websites, opened files, started programs, cookies, all that and more can be cleaned. Supported are the three major browsers Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Opera.
| From slashdot.org | jgaynor writes "Citing user requests to coalesce it's disparate services, Google today released its new personalized homepage service. It allows you to arrange your Gmail, Google News, Google Maps driving directions, weather and a few select news services (including Slashdot) on a single page. Future plans include Universal RSS support. Clearly a shot at existing services like My Yahoo."