I always looked at “Inbox Zero” approach with a mixed feeling: I find it extremely useful to think about action-based email handling but was never sold on the importance of getting your inbox to zero.
Or perhaps I’ve never been able to apply that strategy completely. With the years, and more so after starting to use gmail in late 2004, I’ve been using my inbox as a flow-based interface to the river of conversations coming to me.
My inbox today
I regularly check for new emails, looking at just the first page of the inbox (sometimes just the first 10 emails), if something needs my immediate attention I read it and act on it (replying or applying the TODO label). Colored labels applyed by filters help me focus my attention on any serious item (e.g. the exceptions raised from my rails apps are marked in dark red ).
I have also the habit of subscribing to many mailing lists (at least one for each of the tools I use regularly), and usually make sure those emails are properly labeled and go also on the inbox (unless the ML is really heavy or if it’s something I don’t care currently).
For the rest I just had to stop worrying about losing some important message and the river-of-emails kind of managed itself, if there’s some important topic I miss (to act upon) it will just re-pop itself on the top: the people will resend the email, the mailing list thread will receive more messages, … (If it doesn’t re-gain the top spot it was probably not that important).
I specially like default format for the message list which got rid of the three pane layout and automatically organized email threads by reverse chronological order while showing not only the subject but also the first few words of the body (moreover it doesn’t sweat if you throw 10’s of thousands of emails). This is just one example of the reasons making gmail just about perfect for doing email my way (or perhaps it’s just a case of a tool that shapes the habit of its user :-) )
P.S. This is something that I wanted to put down for a while, but just got around after reading this article, which worked as a ping popping up on top of my river-of-news reader :)
I just added a way to autmatically add url shortening to each post. It uses the bit.ly service and their nice widget which opens a small box into the page with the shortened url ready to be posted on twitter or other services, and shows a nice set of metadata for the post itself. Here is how it looks like:
Bit.ly metadata for a post
To add it I modified the template adding this:
at the bottom of each post single-page template (single.php) and at the bottom of each post in the main index template (index.php)
Here is a small script I’m using to backup files to S3. Actually it implements all the basic operations you need for S3 (bucket creation, listing, file upload and download).
It’s rather trivial but I was able to keep it so simple, thanks to it’s use of the Boto python library to do all of the AWS heavywork. Anyhow I think it may be useful.
A few examples:
Here is the code:
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s the first day of the year and I’m going to do try (perhaphs for the last time) to resurrect this blog, or better I’ll try to start writing for real; let’s see if I’ll be able to do it at least weekly (I was going to say daily, but that would have been a wishful thinking…).
In the meantime I’ve started to use a bit twitter ( @lmea )and that seems to offer a lot less friction to express quick ideas leaving the blog for longer and hopefully deeper topics.
Last week I was at the Web2.0 Expo in Berlin, It’s been quite interesting and I’ve been able to do a talk about OAuth.
I struggled more than a bit to get my presentation on slideshare, probably there was something bad with the fonts or the images used, I succeeded only doing a print from windows to a PDF printer of the PDF exported from Keynote…. and still i have the slides with the images that were printed with the wrong orientation. So here it is the original PDF for you to download:
“Integrating Services with OAuth”
P.S. It seems that I’m blogging more or less yearly :)
It’s been a wonderful event, well organized and with a good mood among all the partecipants. I enjoyed the presentation and gave a humble talk on capistrano.
Here are the slides: RailsToItaly Presentation
Update: here are the Capistrano examples I showed at the end of the talk. A notice to the downloader: they are a port to capistrano 2 of one of my production setups that’s still running on capistrano 1 (i.e. I have used them to show a complex setup but not actually tested them, you are warned!)
This is so amusing: buttons is a blind camera, or better a camera that doesn’t make photos but rather that shows you the photos that other people have taken in the very same moment.
It pushes to the limit the act of taking photos to remeber moments, it just records the time and day, and connects your memory of that moment with what someone else (somewhere else) were experiencing.
technorati tags:art, memory, photography
My article Tips for Optimizing Rails on Oracle has been published on the Oracle Technology Network site! I can’t say how much i liked working on this.
I tried to synthesize in one place all that needs to be known to make the best from the two technologies and explained all of the tips in oracle-specific terms.
Rails on Oracle comes out as a good performer, but my only regret is that i did not have time to investigate (and maybe contribute back to the community) on adding proper bind variables support to ActiveRecord, which would have been the definitive optimization, but I see that the subject is being actively discussed on the core developers ML, so we may get there soon ;)
On the side, for those interested, I made “a Rails “version” of the HR schema that has been modified to directly comply with the common Rail conventions”
I hope that what i wrote there makes sense and I’d love to hear what you think!
technorati tags:oracle, xe, ruby, rubyonrails, database
I feel that yesterday was a BIG day for Rails. To say it with the words of ThoughtWorker Jon Tirsen:
We had a problem…and the solution is JRuby.
ThoughtWorks will adopt jruby as the deploy platform for their Mingle enterprise project management platform.
The problem was that most of their clients have well established IT infrastructures which cannot be changed so easily to accommodate a new stack. But Mingle is built with Rails, allowing them a huge productivity.
The dichotomy between the scarce client willingness to add new (different, unknown) blocks to their infrastructure and the power of the new tools (specially the ease of development) is something that anyone doing contract-development work faces.
Sometimes the clients don’t give a damn about the technology used, other times they can be pushed to change but most of the time we are required to used the already established technologies (at a higher cost).
Being able to run on a JVM, will remove many obstacles to the enterprise adoption of Ruby and Rails, and having a ThoughWorks backing this solution in production will raise the awareness that this is a feasible.
technorati tags:rails, thoughtworks, jruby, mingle
I got a nice easter present yesterday: The Typer got reviewed on the Rails App Week by Darren at The Web2.0 Show
They nailed it right: it’s simple by purpose, and i’d dare to say that it has been a big experiment for me in building a clean and simple interface that makes sense for the application.
Posts about thetyper have been very few in the last months, but this is not because the application itself was abandoned, but rather because the typer achieved its goals, and was good enough for my own use.
Some of the techniques i learned while developing it have been useful for me and will spark in various projects that I’m doing as a freelance. Moreover I’m planning some improvements to the interface which will go towards further reducing modality of the interface and improving keyboard commands.
I hope that more people will use it and find it useful, and I’ll be listening to their suggestions to improve it (if you wish you can contact me at luca (at) thetyper.com ).
technorati tags:thetyper, rails, theweb20show
