I found a great extract page from book the pragmatic programmer. There is a great long list of tips to make you better at what you do!

I bet you have to type the same thing over and over in electronic communication day on day.

Be it signing emails, typing your address or even whole email replies texter is really floating my boat at the moment.

It allows you to abbreviate things into a few keystrokes. So for example in any text entry interface I can type gladdr then enter and it replaces this will my full address.

Add this to the keyboard shortcuts that gmail provides and you are on fire with blazing productivity.

Another cool thing I read in the great prag book Everyday Scripting with Ruby is to devote time everyday to making yourself more efficient. Attempting to remove all the repetitive tasks as much a possible from your everyday “workflow� is doing wonders for what I can accomplish on a day to day basis.

I’ll post a review of Everyday Scripting with Ruby when I’ve finished it.

In my experience, to serve rails applications reliably you need to be running them with a static instance. (a process which runs all the time). Commonly this is one or more mongrel or fastcgi processes.

The problem is that this uses quite a bit of server resource so not many account can exist in a shared hosting environment.

On top of this, its recommended to be on a shared server with limited accounts or even better a Xen based VPS such as railsmachine

The problem with these solutions is that they are quite expensive for the cheap ass developer (me!). Shelling out something in the region of £30 per month to host 2-3 rails applications is quite a lot of money when its likely that they wont be making any.

I may have to bite the bullet and start paying for a VPS but in the meantime does anyone have any recommendations for cheap, reliable rails hosting which is going to give me a few static instances?

All you need is a nice graphic and some tesco tshirt transfer paper. I opted for a white tshirt from h&m retailing at 2.99. It was slightly better quality than the asda equivalent for 99p.

I found a simple banksy stencil on flickr and cleaned it up a bit in photoshop to make it monochrome.

Then got the iron out and ironed it on. The life of these tshirts are usually like 6 months.

So next time you need a new tshirt make your own design rather than getting one everyone else has!

If you are a fan of holding a lot of stuff under version control and are having problems connecting to your repository when you are behind a corporate network, hospital network etc; try the following.

Apparently firewalls block DAV requests over HTTP so if you cant connect to the repository set it up over HTTPS and you should have no further problems.

This was a head scratcher for me when I was setting up Helen’s repository for her thesis.

Just posting this in case it it useful to you.