Productivity in General

Recently I have been increasing interested in productivity. Currently I spent a large proportion of the working day in front of a computer. The challenge has been to maximise the amount I get done but minimise the amount of time required to do this.

Enter Pomodoro

From http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

The basic unit of work in the Pomodoro Technique can be split in five simple steps:

• Choose a task to be accomplished
• Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
• Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
• Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
• Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

The beauty of this is the simplicity of this compared to other productivity system. (GTD)

The key to success here is not getting distracted whilst working on the Pomodoro and respecting breaks, even if you are in ‘the zone’.

I currently use this timer for OSX.

For Linux and Windows fans there is this great air app that works as a pomodoro timer.

Small Improvements to Existing Habits

I have also found that making small incremental improvements to daily habits quite beneficial. The time savings on a daily basis are relatively small but these small savings really add up over time.

Examples

• Learning to properly touch type.
• Memorizing / printing out bus timetables for hassle free public transport.
• Finding annoying things which take time in your daily workflow and improving these processes. (eg. improving bash aliases to make your project workflow more powerful.)

Accessing bank statements programmatically is a difficult problem. Finance tracking websites like mint involve typing in username / passwords for some US banks and most UK banks dont allow automatic export of statements at all.

UK building society Nationwide recently dropped structured formats from their online statements, offering only PDF! It is shocking that a bank would drop structured data output in favour of PDF in 2010.

Banks should implement OAuth to allow applications restricted access to their bank accounts. From here they should provide an API for accessing your statements in a structured format (json / xml). This in turn would drive innovation of mobile and web financial applications and this will drive more customers to the banks that provide these digital services.

This excerpt from oauth.net describes concept of limited access using OAuth,

Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything.

Everyday new website offer services which tie together functionality from other sites. A photo lab printing your online photos, a social network using your address book to look for friends, and APIs to build your own desktop application version of a popular site. These are all great services – what is not so great about some of the implementations available today is their request for your username and password to the other site. When you agree to share your secret credentials, not only you expose your password to someone else (yes, that same password you also use for online banking), you also give them full access to do as they wish. They can do anything they wanted – even change your password and lock you out.

This is what OAuth does, it allows the you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User). While OpenID is all about using a single identity to sign into many sites, OAuth is about giving access to your stuff without sharing your identity at all (or its secret parts).

As you authenticate with the bank during the OAuth process it allows existing login credentials to be used, so the addition of oauth to the internet banking suite would be an enhancement rather than a rewrite; Allowing the banks to use there existing internet banking login functionality.

This would bring banks and banking data up to speed with the current developments in technology. There looks to be an interesting development in the US which separates the internet offering from the web technology. Bank Simple could pave the way for a new direction in how we bank.

Traditional banks need to embrace this or risk getting left behind by a new generation of tech savvy online operations.

To make this play with SVN 1.5 or greater you have to use a wrapper to call the tool. There is an existing toolset written in shell script but they do not seem to work for me (1.6.9).

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
  # A ruby wrapper
 
  unless ARGV.length == 5
    puts "Incorrect number of arguments"
    exit
  end
 
  left = ARGV[3]
  right = ARGV[4]
 
  `opendiff #{left} #{right} -merge #{right}`
  exit(0)

Slap this script somewhere and make it executable. Edit your .bash_profile to include the following:

  export SVN_MERGE='/path/to/svn_diff_wrapper.rb'

So when you get presented with the merge options press l and it should load filemerge for merging power.

Performance tools are a great help for testing your web application deployment setup. They not only let you judge how the performance of the application is but also catch errors. Nobody wants a web application which starts to spit out errors when put under load or worse, randomly!

HTTPERF is a gift from HP which is my favourite tool at the moment.

An example httperf usage is:

  httperf --num-conns=800 --rate=80 --timeout=5 --server=google.com --port=80 --uri=/

This hits the google homepage with 80 requests per second for 800 requests in total. This test will run for circa 10 seconds.

Results are as follows:

Total: connections 800 requests 800 replies 800 test-duration 10.252 s

Connection rate: 78.0 conn/s (12.8 ms/conn, <=25 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 140.1 avg 237.1 max 771.7 median 240.5 stddev 40.5
Connection time [ms]: connect 111.2
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000

Request rate: 78.0 req/s (12.8 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 63.0

Reply rate [replies/s]: min 76.2 avg 77.9 max 79.6 stddev 2.4 (2 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 125.9 transfer 0.0
Reply size [B]: header 280.0 content 219.0 footer 0.0 (total 499.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=0 3xx=800 4xx=0 5xx=0

CPU time [s]: user 0.51 system 9.64 (user 5.0% system 94.1% total 99.0%)
Net I/O: 42.8 KB/s (0.4*10^6 bps)

Errors: total 0 client-timo 0 socket-timo 0 connrefused 0 connreset 0
Errors: fd-unavail 0 addrunavail 0 ftab-full 0 other 0

This line below is important:

Reply rate [replies/s]: min 76.2 avg 77.9 max 79.6 stddev 2.4 (2 samples)

It tells us that the avg requests per second is 77.9. There is a low standard deviation, which is good. If you have a high stddev you should be worried. Lastly, it has calculated this using 2 samples. You can increase the number of samples by increasing the num-conns, which will give you a more reliable dataset.

Watch out for the errors:

Errors: total 0 client-timo 0 socket-timo 0 connrefused 0 connreset 0
Errors: fd-unavail 0 addrunavail 0 ftab-full 0 other 0

Looking good, google is performing well on the error front. Obviously google.com handles more than 80 req/s! Now go away and performance test some of your sites!

There is some valuable further watching to be had. Episodes 15 and 16 mention httperf.

I am going to improve my knowledge / learn afresh the following 5 languages in the next few months.

• javascript
• curl
• c
• erlang
• c#

Javascript is used more and more nowadays, with powerful frameworks such as jquery and prototype and improved browser support. Internet users expect a rich internet experience nowadays and often this is made possible by a sprinkling of javascript. Whilst I have a fairly strong javascript knowledge, I would not consider myself to be accomplished. I will try and write a useful jquery plugin to further my knowledge.

Curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks. Command-line network tools interest me (wget is ace) so I want to learn curl as I don’t currently use it at all.

c is a low level compiled programming language. I used it for graphics programming at university but haven’t touched it since. I want to refesh my memory, maybe I will try writing a some c code which interfaces with a ruby script or something along these lines.

erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. The sequential subset of Erlang is a functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. For concurrency it follows the Actor model. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. The first version was developed by Joe Armstrong in 1986. It supports hot swapping so code can be changed without stopping a system. Erlang was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson, but was released as open source in 1998. (wikipedia)
Concurrency is deemed to become more important in the future, due to the current trend in processor design. Hence, I am interested to both write some concurrent code but also bend my mind around functional programming once and for all.

c# is deemed the java killer for the “I have a good job with a big company crew.”. I know an increasing number of developers that work in the .net platform. Rather than be ignorant and shout about how good the ruby platform is, I need to sample the delights of .net and specifically c# for myself. I will not however, call Scott Hanselman god.

Will keep you all updated on how I fare in these language related adventures.

Dont you hate running out of stuff?

• Sitting on the toilet, dropping the kids off at the pool; the penny drops. No toilet paper!
• Wake up starving, put your favourite cereal (cheerios) in a bowl. No milk!
• Excited about another breakfast of champions, doh!

Im fed up of running out of things so have been developing a healthy? obsession with buying stuff in bulk. Its a good feeling when you know that you have enough supplies to eat beans on toast for another 10 days straight.

I recently redeveloped the orienteering news website nopesport This was done with the artistic touch of nonimage as it was back in 2003 when nopesport was an “overnight” success having been cooked up when both nonimage an I were out of work after university.

I have been working professionally as a web programmer of 4-5 years now, and not enough of this expertise had been used in the previous php based incarnation.

Workflow

A big part of developing a web application remotely is workflow. There are various tools that help oil the wheels in a distributed team.

• Project Management

You need to be able to discuss and document the situation with project management software. We used basecamp for this.

• Source Control

After graduating from svn school, like most rails heads I have moved to the distributed version control system git. Android is now using git as well along with a few other high profile projects. Its the best thing that I have learnt in 2008 re technology.

• Simple “One-click” Deployment

Capistrano and source control allow super slick deployments. After you have set it up, bring on the automation.

• Designer integration with source control

Having a designer that can code CSS, is a major asset. Having a designer that can code CSS and be integrated into the development workflow is a super special major asset.

• Bug documentation and fixing process

Having a standard way for bug reporting, and a slick fast process of fixing them is top class.

Design

I dont speak for nonimage here.. maybe he will do a guest post on the subject!! hint hint

We are sick to the stomach with shiny web 2.0 designs. They are out of date in my book and it is sad the number of designers who are still just graduating from the web 1.0 style of designing only to find themselves still behind after they update their skills.

We decided that typography was important (like a lot of designers and developers 2007-2008) and we wanted a dirty grunge design.

We had some conversations with the other guys who run the site day to day and do a sterling job. They added their input along the way. Generally though, we were essentially our own client which is a great situation to be in.

Technical tip.

Little example config for SSL on a server running mod_rails (passenger).

  <VirtualHost 222.111.143.223:443>
    ServerName www.website.co.uk
    DocumentRoot /var/www/apps/website/current/public
    RailsEnv production
    SSLEngine On
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/certs/website.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/certs/website.key
    SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
  </VirtualHost>

The following dog

About 7.5 hours cycling in torrential rain. Very different from the day before. It was raining hard when i woke. I hid in the hotel like someone sheltering from a bombing raid. I shouldnt have bothered.

Off i went out of thonon then 15 mins later realised I forgot my helmet. Take 2.

Up the first ascent of the day the col de …….. it was raining as hard as it can. Soaked to the skin by the top despite goretex then a bit cold in the wind. On the descent the rain was too much for the cyclecomputer and its died on me… no clock again.

Specialized sucks.

In the valley I was cold so barged into a restaurant and got changed into dryness. Two croisants as prep for the col de la columbiere at 1610 metres.

Easily the hardest ascent I have ever done on a bike. The torrential rain storms did not help. Made it to the top pretty tired and wet again but managed to blitz some of the supported buffties on the way up. (where you pay to have them carry your bag)

Then had coffee and crepes at the summit restaurant along with the rest of my food; Then a long descent in the rain..

I thought that it was all downhill to la clusaz but it turned out it way on the way up the next col!! Got to la clusaz and finished my water then found out that the youth hostel was even further up the next col.

Got there at 1910 hours, a pretty tough day; Food was ace although hostel was devoid of life; Went to bed exhausted; to the sounds of intensly violent thunderstorms.

Git is hard; but powerful. A wee bit of command porn for you for contributing with open source projects.

When sitting in a branch you have been working on for a new feature / bugfix which was created with the command:

git checkout -b cool_patch

To create a patch for the master branch which is a remote tracking branch for a read only git repo. Typically, this is an open source project which you cant push to therefore you need to patch.

  git format-patch master --stdout > ~/patches/patchname.diff

Now you can create a ticket on the open source project with your patch.

-||-

To load a patch, its good to do it in a new branch.

So a workflow to applying a patch is as follows

  git branch master
  git checkout -b new_patch
  cat ~/patches/patchname.diff | git am

You can then check you are happy and when you are. You can merge back into master by committing the branch changes then switching back to the master branch and merging your

  git add .
  git commit -a -v 
  git branch master
  git merge new_patch

Please correct me on any glaring errors you see. Im pretty much making it up as I go along.

Apologies for the swear at the end. I am not normally like that.

Web Designers should do their own CSS

Ive recently got me a samson audio microphone complete with pop filter for recording screencasts for oentries. As a side note screencasting for the mac is pretty good for explaining how to make screencasts on the cheap.

After making your screencast, they are a considerable size. Theres no point hammering your wee vps or shared server delivering this content. Its a better plan to rely on Amazon S3 to do this for you.

A quick easy way to do this is to get the s3fox firefox extension to upload your media files. Its pretty good but still a bit flaky.

• Create a new bucket (you need to do this through command line api)
• Go into S3 Fox open the bucket and upload your files.
• Right click on the files and set them to be publicly viewable.
• They are now available on http://s3.amazonaws.com/[bucket_name]/

Now your app webserver can sleep happy and spend its time dealing with app requests.