• 6 a point well made about values vs reality.
• 10 to 18 interesting core values: especially Curiosity!
• 26 and 27 are eye opening and challenging.
• 33 and 34 going against the flow.
• 41 to 59  ’freedom vs process’ friction.
• 86 to 91 focus on performance and agility.
• 106 higher salary vs bonuses and stock options.
• 111 not a common corporate line.
• 120 to 125 why culture means so much…

They sound like a pretty interesting company to work for!

Consider yourself warned if you are using an RSS reader!

Update: I didn’t move the RSS feeds in the end.

Despite being almost an hour long this is a very insightful video that I’d recommend any Software Engineer watches. I find it fascinating that so many programmers want to erase their perceived (or actual) mistakes in source control systems. I guess everyone secretly wants to be the perfect super programmer. However I typically learn more from my failures than my successes: perhaps it is natural to be more introspective about failure than success?

If you find the title or video too pretentious then the question and answers session (around 42:40) is still quite interesting as the presenters get grilled by the audience.

I did this in preparation for getting my act and starting writing again, hopefully new posts should start appearing this week.

The simplest solution to this is to manually position and size the windows of your applications so you can view two or more at once.  Arranging application windows manually quickly becomes tedious, due to the many events that can occur in a modern operating system which cause your application windows to be moved around, re-sized or moved to another monitor.

The solution to this problem is using Window Management utilities which allow you to easily re-size and move application windows around, typically using key combinations.  These utilities exist for most operating systems for Mac OS X the window management utility is called SizeUp, the equivalent utility for the PC is called WinSplit Revolution.  I use both of these applications daily, WinSplit is freeware but SizeUp costs a minimum of $4.99 and its worth every cent.  Each utility has some unique features: WinSplit allows you to chain several window configurations on a single key combination and SizeUp allows you to set up a key combination for moving windows between monitors.

I would struggle to maximise my use of one or more large monitors without a Window Management utility.  Hopefully one day this functionality will be built into operating systems as large monitors become more common.  Until then Window Managment utilties are going to be an essential tool that ever serious power user needs.

An example of a hard to start habit for me is writing blog posts: it took a force of will to start me writing initially and it requires constant energy to keep me writing new posts.  Interruptions over even a week to my writing can be enough to disrupt my writing habit sufficiently to halt it.  At which point Inertia comes into play with devastating effect, to make the restarting of the habit hard.  It seems that a lot of virtuous habits like regular exercise and eating healthily also fall into this category.

A habit that is easy to start and yet easily becomes all consuming for me is playing computer games, usually this doesn’t get too out of hand as most games have a finite length and amount of content which limits the duration of the disruption.  Yet some games, especially MMOs like World of Warcraft (WoW) have a seemingly endless stream of content which means that it is possible to spend an almost infinite amount of time playing the game and still not complete it.

These ‘time sink’ games can be a real challenge to getting anything else done, my usual solution to this situation is to stop playing the game by unsubscribing…

I finally got my Orc Shaman ‘Urki‘ in World of Warcraft to level eighty!  I only started levelling him in January so I’ve been pretty slow (restrained) but now I can finally start playing in the arena (PvP).

I also managed to get the artisan riding skill so I can use epic flying mounts.  Having an epic speed flying mount (this is my current) makes a huge difference to travel times, which I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

Three Column layout
I have been finding that a two column layout does not have sufficient space for all the widgets I would like to have, without having to resort to a really long second column.  So after a bit of thinking and some research I converted my current theme into a three column layout.

I found the following two posts very helpful when converting my theme into a three column layout: Adding Extra Sidebar to your WordPress Theme and How to Create Multiple Dynamic Sidebars for WordPress Widgets.  I also found the CSS Edit application by MacRabbit to be an essential tool for easy CSS tweaking, its so good I actually bought a licence.

Most Popular Posts Widget
It is important to be able to point visitors to the most popular content to keep them interested.  The ‘Most discussed posts’ widget provides a customisable list of the most commented on posts on your blog.  There are other widgets that can list the most popular posts by visits (page views) but they require extra database activity to record the visits which I’d rather not have to use on my hosting plan.

Google Reader Widget
This widget interacts with Google’s Reader service to provide a list of your recently shared items in Google Reader.  This is a great widget for sharing the posts or articles you have found most interesting with your readers, you can even add comments to each item.  This won’t completely replace my Friday linkage posts as there are sites I find without going through an RSS feed but it is something I have wanted on my blog from its conception.

Twitter for WordPress Widget
I have been using this Widget to display my latest tweets for a while now.  However due to not having enough space in the second column I’ve never been able to have more than my last tweet visible.  Now I am using a three column layout I can now have my last few tweets displayed which I think makes them a bit more coherent.

RSS Icon Widget
An RSS feed link and icon is something I have been wanting to add to my template for a while, this handy little widget lets me do just that without any template voodoo.  Although it would be nice if it could also give and icon and link for the comments feed too.

The main thing I have left to deal with is some further minor tweaking of the theme and to replace the current banner with something a less geometric and a bit more fluid and interesting.  For the new image I had been thinking of something to do with ink in water but so far I’ve not found the sort of horizontal image I’d like.

Launch Bar (Mac OS X)

One thing I noticed when I switched from using Windows PCs at home to using Macs was that there did not seem to be an obvious equivalent to using the run command (Windows Key + R) to open directories, URLs and launching programs.  The built in Spotlight application can launch applications in a manner similar to run but not open applications or URLs.  Launch Bar is a Mac only application that addresses this and adds extra features like a calculator, targeted Google searches (maps, general, groups etc) to allow you to access any file or application on your Mac or URL on the web quickly and easily.  I highly recommended this application: I now wish there was a Launch Bar equivalent for Windows!

Remember the Milk (Web)

I admit I was very skeptical about a web based To-Do list application but I kept hearing people raving about Remember the Milk so I eventually decided to try it out myself.  Despite using GMail for almost a year I really was not expecting the responsive and feature-rich user interface this site provides.  There are so many little details that make this one of the most progressive To-Do list applications I have used in years e.g. entering dates is super simple: want tomorrow then enter ‘tomorrow’, want this Friday enter ‘friday’, want the 27 of February enter ‘feb 27′.   It puts grown up To-Do list applications like Microsoft Outlook to shame!

Twitter (Web)

Twitter can best be described as a micro blogging system where all blog entries (called tweets) are one hundred and forty characters or less in size.  Users can follow each other which is similar to subscribing to a blogs RSS feed.  This produces a constant stream of tweets which you can either view through your customised twitter home page or through a client like twhirl (below).  Twitter is very useful for exchanging micro updates over the course of the day with your friends and people you respect or find interesting, especially for details that you would not bother with a blog post about.  Although be careful who you follow or you may get more information about what they are currently doing than you would prefer.

Twhirl (Windows & Mac OS X)

Twhirl is a client application for twitter that runs on the adobe Air platform (essentially Flash for the desktop).  I had been using twitter via the default web user interface until last week when I switched to twhirl.  I had heard of twhirl before then but had been put off it as it used Adobe Air and I’ve been burned in the past by Adobe faulty auto update software before which had put me off free Adobe software.  Twhirl has been a very pleasant surprise in terms of quality and ease of use: I especially like the option to fade out the UI if it goes out of focus (e.g. you switch to another application).  It even has built in tools to shorten URLs, which is very useful due to twitters message length constraints.

Have you discovered any great software recently?