Dev::Blog

I’m probably late to the party, but I’ve just discovered Google Browser Sync. It claims to synchronize all your Firefox browser settings across multiple computers. I work on about 4 different computers on a regular basis (including one Virtual PC), so this seemed like a cool idea. Just like the move to IMAP for my mail, this moves towards a more location-independent means of using a computer.

I’ve got it running for two of my work computers, and so far it looks pretty decent. I don’t know if I’ll extend it to my home machines though. At first I was worried about sharing memorized passwords (I only have that running on one computer, since it’s not appropriate for a work machine I don’t 100% control, and I don’t want it on a laptop, especially after my dad had his stolen this summer and I saw some of the consequences of that decision), but it look like you can disable sharing at that level. More important is the fact that while I might not mind having my work bookmarks on my home computers, I don’t know if I’d like my home ones available at work - I’m not that worried about what people might think, but I worry that I’d find them too available and distracting. I suppose I could create another Google ID to keep the two profiles separate, but I’m trying to reduce my identity footprint.

Since I’ve just started testing it, I’m not going to worry about long term plans. Give it a try if you’re interested - I’d love to hear from you about your experiences.

Technorati Tags: Google, Firefox, Google Browser Sync

I’ve been using Google Reader pretty successfully for the past while now, but up until a few days ago I was just putting my “daily” feeds into it, because, well, mostly because I didn’t know that I could put things into folders.  My PC newsreader app is organized into 5 or so folders, roughly sorted by theme - there’s the “daily” one for feeds that I like to review each day, a “dev” one, a “biz” one, a “veg” one, etc.  Once I knew I could have folders in Google Reader (so the whole “river of news” thing would still follow a theme), I moved my dev folder over, and then things got even better.

You can assign a feed to more than one folder.

Oh sweet malloc(), how nice that is.  I haven’t actually done it yet (the above screenshot is just for demonstration purposes), but I feel better knowing that I could, at any time, read a development blog every day if I so chose to do so.

Thanks, Google!  Now, about sorting news by date with the newest at the bottom…

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Reader, RSS

Dreamhost has this nifty feature called one click installs that let you set up a number of common web apps like WordPress, phpBB, Gallery, etc with minimal fuss - it’ll even set up a separate MySql DB for you, all from one form. It’s a great time saver, especially if you just want to experiment.

This works out great for me, since I’m starting to use WordPress as my default scratchpad. It’s not the most efficient way to do things, with a new app for each idea I have, but it works great with desktop clients like ecto.

Today’s brainstorm - I need to track my time on projects and have some kind of record of my accomplishments from day to day. I created a new WP blog just for that (password protected, natch). Now everytime I do a task, I just fire off a quick blog entry with the task in the subject and the time it took in the body.

Ecto too much work for quick jottings? There’s even a Dashboard widget! That doesn’t deal with categories though, and it’d be nice to be able to split up my tasks for easy reporting. (Though I could create a new blog per client… Naw.) We’ll see what sticks.

So there you go - quick and dirty time tracking, in less time than it took for me to write this entry about it!

Technorati Tags: GTD, WordPress

You know those times when you’ve been fighting a bug for an hour or two, and nothing’s working, which means it’s got to be in the “stupid error” category, but you just can’t figure out what you did wrong while drinking that pint of gin, and then you finally find the problem, or at least you think you have, and you’re waiting for the test to run to know for sure, and you don’t know if you want that to be the problem or not, because it’d be nice to be done with it, but at the same time you don’t want the last two hours to have been wasted because you had, say, a stray control that wasn’t inheriting the right parent?

[Inhale]

That’s where I live.

There oughtta be a name for that place. It sure ain’t Funkytown.

Dave Eggers (and interviewer) on procrastination and productivity:

OK, I’m starting to recognize that I’ve got a few too many things on the go (or at least, the things I’m doing are a little too intense), but that’s pretty much how my head works. I imagine it’s a common pattern.