Adding Google Suggest to firefox has saved me time by helping me quickly find more relevant results by asking the right questions. Suggest gives me the the related words most commonly searched for with the keywords I have already entered. This helps greatly because the human brain is much better at recognition than it is recall. eg. It’s quicker for me to pick the right words related to what I want than for me to remember or guess what other people are using.
Step 1 - get the plugin.
Straight from google!
Step 2 - increase your search box width.
Nice if you like to see more than 2 words at a time.
Google Suggest Firefox (2 steps)
rss2email
I found a great little Python script that subscribes to your favorite rss feeds and sends them to you via email. I have it running on a server at home, subscribed to a short list of ‘important’ blogs.
It was originally for Linux but ported to windows. So far its working well.
rss2email for windows
There are instructions on the site below the 3 py downloads. Before you start it up be sure to edit the rss2email.py file and change the SMTP_SERVER and related variables.
Eclipse IDE
I recommend using Eclipse for most Java projects. It’s well supported, has powerful refactoring features and can be installed for free. If you are using Eclipse your projects will probably also require the use of Ant, JUnit and some form of version control. To start from scratch it might take a day or more to get all these parts installed and working right.
Last month I put together some instructions to help anyone who needs to get started quickly. Since then I have had nearly 1000 visitors but very few comments. Please help me out by visiting the site and let me know how I can improve it.
- Is it easy to read? Font size, Color choice
- Are the instructions clear?
- Are there other important technologies that should be added?
SpamBayes
Making efficient use of your time, especially in the mornings, will make a big difference when it comes to productivity. E-Mail can, and often does, take up much more time than it deserves. Making the situation worse, most of us are getting more spam than ham in our boxes.
Spam assassin is used by many corporations to help limit this problem but I have never been overly impressed with this solution. The assassin seems to regularly have more false positives and negatives than I would like to see. One good solution I have found is to install SpamBayes into my outlook client. Yes, this solution only works if you are using Microsoft outlook but as a consultant you do not always get to choose. You work with what you are given.
It will take a few hundred E-Mail messages before SpamBayes becomes proficient at recognizing and moving your spam but it’s well worth the time to train it. Once I had it running it was almost easy to forget that spam even existed, needless to say, (but I will anyway) It was very effective.
Vector Linux
Vector Linux 5.1 Standard Edition is out.
click here
Vector Linux is based on the Slackware distro but much easier to install and use. Not only that but its optimized so you can reuse some of your old slower hardware. I have been very happy with the 5.0 release and look forward to trying out this new 5.1 release.